Rebooting a Classic
The year was 2014. The location, Lehi Utah. The local design community was boring to say the least. Enter a middle aged UX designer who really had an itch to “pay-it-forward” for all the people that had helped him become a better designer one small bit sized twitter post or DM at a time. (that’s me if you haven’t guessed).
After attending a Lunch JS meetup and having a great time despite not knowing about anything, anyone was talking about, I thought “wow, developer meetups are great, why?” Well, turns out it’s because they are practical and focussed on teaching not presenting. So, with the help of my fellow designer Derek Cramer I started Lunch UX.
We had a good run and went from like 13 attendees to 100+ before I was asking to join another meetup group, PDA (product design association).
In The Beginning
I wanted to start a designer meetup that was not about the person speaking, but about the topic. I wanted the people speaking to be real designers in our community that were working on real problems, those problems being the topics. I really just wanted attendees to learn something practical that they could go back to work with that afternoon or the next day and apply.
Not knowing anything about running a meetup or getting someone to buy lunch for a small group of people I used my friends and myself to get things going. I used Meetup.com to manage the events and their platform was really great not only for managing the events but also allowed people to find us pretty quickly. While the first few events were mostly friends and co-workers, by the 4th or 5th event we really started to pickup steam and had about 50 people in attendance. Mostly due to Instructure buying us free lunch.
A Lot Great Feedback and Memories
As more people attended I was getting cornered after the event by people who wanted to express how much fun they were having at the events and telling me stories about how they applied something at work that they had learned in a past event. It was working!
It was fantastic to hear that people were getting more than just full belly’s, especially because we had some pretty interesting presentations. Since I wanted to have real people present, that meant that we would have real people present some very unpolished and unpracticed presentations. But this lead to some really fun awkward moments and interesting shared experiences that bonded the group together.
One of the classic memories I have was the time Mark McClellan thought is would be fun to throw his sweet-ass t-shirts (that I wear on a daily basis) into a crowd of 100+ people. It started out well, but quickly turned into a poor woman in the front row getting plastered in the face by a rolled up Pulp Fiction themed t-shirt.
With plenty of awkward memories, Danaan Clarke joining the crew to help pay for meetup dues, and adding “dutch lunch” — an informal small meetup in between larger events — the events became almost too big to organize.
Here’s the archived list of the original meetups: LunchUX Event History
A New Hope
After hosting the largest Lunch UX, mostly due to the amazing Emmy Southworth, I got an offer from the crew over at the PDA organization to join them. They had been in business for a few years hosting events as the local iDXA chapter before stepping away from that and rebranding. There events were generally held after or before work and I saw them more focussed on higher level topics and presentations from more polished presenters. Basically, the opposite of what we were trying to do, but they had some good experience organizing and running events and two of the organizers Wade Shearer and Andy Branch were stepping down to start the Front Conference so it felt like a good blending of groups.
The advantage for us was exposure and help organizing events, the advantage for PDA was the larger event attendance. It was a great marriage and I loved working with Ben Peck to merge the two groups together and create some really great events for our local community.
After dissolving the original Lunch UX meetup page and moving everything over to PDA, the community grew rapidly. Too quickly if you asked me. We now had a website, a meetup page, a slack community, and two or more events a month. I really started to struggle with the direction of the larger group and started to feel like the original goal of Lunch UX was being lost, really just impart to the sheer size and activity of the community. It became harder to find those real people who wanted to present to such a larger group and catering to a large diverse audience only highlighted the original problems I was having before joining forces — broad, non-practical topics.
I left PDA only 6 months after merging the groups to focus on new career opportunities.
The Feedback Never Stopped
Shortly after leaving PDA, they rebranded the group to Product Hive (one of my favorite re-brands of all time) and kept growing and growing. Since then Ben Peck and crew have done some really great things for the local design community in Utah by creating a mentorship program, connecting out of work designers directly with hiring managers, and hosting some really amazing events with some really fantastic presenters from around the country.
Despite all of these great things, I would still get Slack messages and texts from people old Lunch UXer’s about bringing the original Lunch UX back. But getting the band back together always felt overwhelming. I couple years later, I received a Slack comment that struck a cord with me and I couldn’t get it out of my mind for weeks until Andy Page and Danaan Clarke suggested it was time to reboot Lunch UX — it seemed like the right time.
Knowing what worked and what failed from the original group, we have tweaked a few things but the overall goal of using real designers to teach other real designers something small and practical is still at play. After teaching the first reboot event the positive feedback has already started to roll in.
“I loved this format of design practice and learning from one another. In short: today was awesome. The design community needs more..” — Jacob Yates
Okay, okay, I’ll stop yackin’, but I’m really excited for the future of Lunch UX and its place in our little local design community. I hope that we can find that same old magic in meetups to come and that people will continue to learn new things and have some awkward fun along the way.
