Last night was Brum IxDA so here's a quick breakdown of proceedings. After a satisfying repast at the Sacks of Potatoes pub in Aston, we headed to our super secret location for the meeting - suffice to say we had a grand piano at our disposal. No one played it. 

The idea of a show'n'tell meetup was that anyone could bring and talk about a project they'd worked on, in the broad area of user experience or interaction design. Each presentation and discussion lasted about 15-20 minutes.

Paper View 

The first was a presentation of a paper prototyping project, where prototyping had been used as a solution to rework an existing lone system. It had allowed the design team to work up very quick iterations of a working design during a week out of the usual workplace, very workshop-y by the looks of it. One of the most interesting things for me at least, was that this work was undertaken before many of the conventions we see in Gmail and more recent 'web 2.0' applications arrived, and yet there were elements of some of those conventions present in the prototypes. 

Second up was not so much a presentation, as me loading up a DVD ROM which I'd created in 2003ish and seeing what we thought of it. I hadn't ben able to get it running properly recently so it was good news that it actually worked, with all the video, images, etc loading. It was a typical Flash design job of the time, involving some, but not too much 'animation', and delivery of lots of text in Flash, when it might not have been the best solution... easy to say that now I suppose. All I know is that when I made this for the client, working in isolation as a freelancer, it appeared to be the most logical approach. In terms of interface, the guinea pig I asked to use the DVD ROM seemed to manage okay, although it took a while for everyone to appreciate exactly how it worked e.g. what I had designed as a 'you are here' marker on the menu was initially assumed to be a piece of broken, degraded graphic. Oh well. 

The next presentation looked at something we're typically seeing a lot of at the moment - a system or graphic to make sense of data. The designer here had started with an excel table of data and was required to present not just a more visually appealing way of 'seeing' it, but a useful way of using the data as well. A poster was initially designed to explain the concept, and then an interactive also demonstrated, potentially to be built as a Flash application I believe. Using tick boxes, the solution filtered down the data to produce a final set of outputs that would be useful and of interest to the user.  

The final presentation was a description of a prototyping method for iPhone that allowed a paper prototype to easily be drawn up, scanned and built, for presentation full screen on the iPhone. Where the designer had seen similar ideas implemented, he was able to add 'buttons' to his paper prototyping, simulating (or getting closer at least) iPhone navigation. For me, the most important part of all this was the speed it could be implemented and tried out with users.