From a fledging roundtable group of people interested in this thing called 'user experience' to a sold-out award show celebrating some of the biggest brands in Canada, the Vancouver User Experience group has grown up over the past twelve years. We're excited to announce OpenRoad will be co-hosting the Vancouver User Experience (VanUX) Awards for a second year in a row. You're invited to join us on November 25, to celebrate the most joyful, innovative, and elegant user experiences created right here in our own city.
Taking a trip back in time, Gord, Darren, and a handful of other UX practitioners originally formed VanUE in 2003. At that time, they understood the value of UX, but felt there was no real community or space for them as practitioners to hone their craft, or even talk about challenges they were working on. If you remember UX in 2003, Mike Kuniavsky had just released the industry changing book 'Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research'. While design and programming were well-developed industries, the idea of actually talking to users about what they needed was still foreign to most of our clients. Phones were still just phones, and websites were far less interactive than they are today. People were also still debating the acronym... should it be UE or UX? (We seem to have chosen the wrong one for VanUE...whoops.)
Fast forward to today, where our community is 1,700 members strong, we host well-attended monthly meetup events, and we now have one of the biggest technology-centric award shows in the city. We're very proud to be co-founding members of this community. While the industry has matured and grown, one thing hasn't changed—our belief that great websites and applications that deliver business value are always, always, always grounded in great user experiences. We encourage you to get involved in the VanUX Awards by coming out to the event, submitting an award entry, or considering partnership opportunities. Learn more about the Vancouver User Experience Awards, and how you can get involved.