The Cape Town UX Craft is a group on the popular service, Meetup. They held their second meetup on the 23rd of July at Ogilvy’s office in Cape Town.
As per the description on their group’s page:
The aims of UX Craft Cape Town is to raise more awareness around what UX really is and how it can be integrated in any business, today. We want to create more involved communities, inspiring each other and building skills together, learn from leaders overseas as well as locally.
— Cape Town UX Craft
Two speakers presented talks on the evening:
- Phil Barrett from Flow Interactive presented: Digital design for behaviour change
- Dr Marco Pretorius from the Western Cape Government presented: Institutionalise User Experience in your Organisation – A User Research Focus
Many of the attendees knew of Phil or had even heard him give a presentation before, so the level of expectation was there. His talk was insightful and thought provoking. It made me realise that what we do in terms of design and development is kind of meaningless without considering people’s behavior and state of mind.
I hadn’t heard of Dr Marco Pretorius prior to the Meetup, so I was looking forward to see how user experience fitted in to the government. With the amazing work that has been done on GOV.uk I was naturally a little sceptical as to what the Western Cape government was up to on this subject.
But during his talk, I was blown away by the progress they are making. He spoke about the challenges they faced in making UX part of the organisation from the ground up, presented his UX Methodology and also shared findings from the user research for the Cape Access programme. It was a great opportunity to see the benefits of the Internet and associated technologies and services are being made available to the wider community in South Africa.
If you’d like to view their presentations, and I highly recommend you do, both of them are available on SlideShare:
There is also a UX South Africa conference taking place at Cape Town Stadium on the 3rd and 4th of October, 2014.