May Meetup: Engaging the User First

We're very excited to share that Tampa Bay's very own Sarrah Vesselov is our speaker this month.

Sarrah Vesselov is a UX professional, speaker, and author with over 10 years of experience in design, development, and management. As the UX Manager for GitLab, she led her department in setting the vision and direction of user experience, established an open source design system, and scaled the department from six to fourteen in a little over a year. She has experience teaching and mentoring on the subjects of design and development at the college level. Sarrah speaks at conferences around the world on the topics of user experience and front-end development. Her co-authored book on design systems will be published by Apress in 2019: http://www.buildingdesignsystems.design/

We talk about user first design and user research, but what does that mean? In Sarrah's talk she will cover maintaining simple and intuitive navigation for products as they scale is a constant challenge. As features are added and the product becomes more complex, ensuring easy access to these features also increases in complexity. How do you show users what they need to see when they need to see it? How do you give access to 'x' number of features without overwhelming the user? Even more challenging, how do you make changes to an existing product without alienating your user base?

This talk looked at how GitLab's navigation needed to evolve to keep pace. We covered the trials, tribulations, and pitfalls of completely redesigning a product's navigation in an open source environment. We'll examined how, through the creation of personas, prototypes, and rounds of user testing, we were able to redesign and reintroduce an entirely new way to navigate Gitlab.

Agenda
6-6:30 Meet & Greet, first time attendee orientation.

6:30-7:15 Sarrah Vesselov Guest Speaker

7:15-7:30 Teach Something/Learn Something - Members sharing something they've learned

7:30-7:45 Project Updates

7:45-8:00 Announcements & Open Discussion

About Code for Tampa Bay
Code for Tampa Bay Brigade is an affiliate of Code for America, and part of an international network of people committed to using their voices and hands, in collaboration with local governments, to make their cities better. Code for Tampa Bay Brigade helps build participatory power in their cities by holding regular civic hack nights and events, advocating for open data, and deploying apps. Brigades celebrate and share their successes with the Brigade network to further the global civic innovation movement. Visit CodeforTampaBay.org for more information.

Code for Tampa Bay Brigade abides by Code for America’s Code of Conduct, which expects that Code for America network activities, events, and digital forums adhere to standards of ethics and conduct which can be read in their entirety here: http://codefortampabay.org/about/