Flow on the road

Past Events and Activities

UX Brighton - Information visualisation mini event - Jan Srutek
10 August 2010

Information Visualisation (InfoVis) is a domain that has gained a lot of attention recently. The mass media seem to have fallen in love with information design too – feeding us with an infographic a day. But despite the great potential for representing data visually, a lot of the potential is currently being wasted. Just because something is graphically depicted does not mean it is useful and usable. The challenge is to design InfoVis tools and infographics that will allow its users to actually gain valuable insights from the data. The talk will present some of the advantages of visual communication, along with the challenges for design and evaluation of InfoVis tools.

Note: This event is already sold out.

UX Brighton (opens in a new window)

Flow Interactive are proud sponsors of IWIPS 2010 Conference - Growing Global Design Communities
7 to 10 July 2010.

IWIPS 2010, is a unique global design forum, which will be held in London, England hosted by Thames Valley University, from the 7 – 10 July 2010 for its 9th international conference. The conference is a mix of invited keynote speakers, research papers, panel discussions, student posters, , breakout sessions, tutorials, and social events to facilitate international networks and information exchange. This year’s conference theme is focused on the issues of Growing Global Design Communities. These communities offer the possibilities for technology to transcend cultural boundaries and meet the challenges presented when developing products for a global marketplace.

IWIPS 2010 brings together researchers and practitioners to generate and exchange interesting and useful insights on embracing intercultural awareness and internationalisation best practices in technology development. The conference programme is posted and registration is now open on their website

IWIPS 2010 (opens in a new window)

London Bikeathon, London
Sunday 27 June 2010

Flow are riding in the London Bikeathon to raise money for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research. Our team is Steve and Andrea Abbis, James D'Espaigne, Chloe and Paul Heath, Elley Jones, Yestin Jones, Olivia Potter, Emily Thomas, John Waterworth and David Whittle. We plan to ride the 26 mile route from Chelsea to Richmond and back.

Please donate as much you can to this fantastic charity by clicking on one of the big 'Donate now' buttons on our fund raising page.

Virgin Money Giving (our fund raising page ) (opens in a new window)

Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (opens in a new window)

London Bikeathon (opens in a new window)

User Experience Conference, Prague
22 and 23 June 2010.

Flow is the program partner and sponsor of the first Czech User Experience conference held in Prague on 22.- 23. June 2010.

On the first conference day, Flow’s Director of User Experience Elisa del Galdo will be presenting a talk titled ‘UX Beyond Usability – What’s Currently In’. Elisa will give an overview of the current trends in the user experience industry, exploring some of the frameworks and methodologies that attracted a lot of attention recently. The topics covered will be design for persuasion & emotional design, international and remote research, standards, and the usage of eye-tracking and EEG in research.

The second day will be filled with workshops for webdesigners and UX practitioners. Elisa del Galdo and Jan Srutek will be running a practical design workshop ‘The Magic of Design’. Elisa and Jan will explore how to balance business objectives, design strategy, user requirements, and design guidelines to create successful designs. Participants will learn how to create, critique, and iterate the designs collaboratively and how to justify the designs to their customers.

User Experience conference Prague 2010 (opens in a new window)

Implications of Research on User Experience Design. Reading University, Informatics Research Centre
11 June 2010.

Flow’s Director of User Experience Elisa del Galdo will be running the seminar at Reading University.

Practitioners in the field of user experience design come from a variety of disciplines; ergonomics, computing science, psychology, interaction design, human-computer interaction, industrial engineering, just to name a few. Due to the variability in education, it is likely that a large proportion of today’s practitioners are not familiar with relevant foundational research and what implications it has for design. It is more likely that practitioners are aware of more mainstream ‘research’ that is more easily digestible, so even more recent empirical research may not be applied to their work. This talk briefly discusses a selection of foundational and recent research studies and their implications for design, with the objective of demonstrating the importance of research to the user experience practitioner.

Embracing Cultural Diversity, UPA 2010: Munich, Germany - Elisa del Galdo
24 to 28 May 2010

Research in Practice - 2010. Evening Tutorial for General Practitioners

Usability Professionals Association Annual Conference 2010 (opens in a new window)

Mobile Phone Design: Inclusive design for everyday users of everyday mobiles – Chandra Harrison
22nd April 2010

The event will offer an opportunity to define what is meant by inclusive mobile phone design; explore what is currently being done; what could be done in the future to improve inclusive design; how guidelines can be made more useful as well as how to improve access to assistive technology.

UPA: Mobile Phone Design (opens in a new window)

GesText: Accelerometer-Based Gestural Text-Entry Systems, CHI 2010: USA - Elley Jones
15th April 2010

Papers and notes session entitled ‘Everyday Gestures’

Elley Jones is talking at CHI (the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) in Atlanta, USA. She will be offering insights into how to design systems for entering text using gestures. The idea is that wrist-based gestures can be detected by accelerometers (such as in the Nintendo Wii remote) to enter text onto a virtual keyboard. Elley and the team ran a number of different investigations using the Wii remote. They trialled two different wrist movements and keyboard designs to discover the optimal configuration for both data entry and comfort.

CHI 2010 (opens in a new window)

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2010, London - John Waterworth
31 March to 1 April 2010

"Architecting Systems that Users Love to Use"

Enterprise Architects are designers of socio-technical systems. These systems are a complex and ever-changing mix of people (colleagues, customers, suppliers and partners) and technology (hardware, software, networks, devices) performing some activity (with goals, processes, rules and regulations). Descriptions of the Enterprise Architect role tend to focus on the technology and activity aspects of these systems. The people aspect too, often comes in a poor third. Putting equal focus on people — on user experience — can improve business response times and reliability, and foster goodwill among colleagues, customers, suppliers and business partners.

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2010 (opens in a new window)

UX Bookclub London - Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience.
16 March 2010

We will be hosting the UX Book Club London, where we will discuss the book "Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience", by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which happen to be the book after which the company was named.

The global UX Book Club movement seeks to enhance the abilities and knowledge of user experience professionals, while building a passionate local community.

UX Book Club London (opens in a new window)

Westminster University Visiting Lecture - Chandra Harrison
8 March 2010

Business Information Management and Operations Department

Westminster University Visiting Lecture (opens in a new window)

BCS/UPA UX Competency Workshop - Chandra Harrison
25 February 2010

On 25 February 2010 the British Computing Society and the UPA are running a UX Competency Workshop and UX Employment Fair in London. The workshop is to address the lack of well defined career structures in usability and gaps in the existing competency frameworks – particularly in terms of defining what is ability/competency in UX.

BCS/UPA UX Competency Workshop (opens in a new window)