Musings on Meetups
- Carrie
- Aug 2, 2018
- 2 min read
The UX community in Sydney is vibrant and active.
Evidence? You could easily spend several nights a week at UX-related Meetups if you chose to and hardly ever eat at home.
Meetups are a great way to connect with others in UX, hear from experts on a huge range of topics, and enjoy pizza and beer.
One of the fun parts of my job as an Instructional Associate at General Assembly is that I get to introduce UX Design immersive students to the world of Meetups. For new entrants they're a great opportunity to meet established UXers, hear what it's like to work in the industry in the wild and learn from experience professionals. Formats vary.
Three Meetups I’ve been to in the past month include:
iXDA Sydney – this is one of the best attended Meetups and it's run by the local Sydney chapter of the iXDA (Interaction Design Association). Meetups are held every 2 months in the CBD. After several years being hosted at the Commonwealth Bank, this month they move to Westpac. There are 2 speakers each meeting. Meetups are video-recorded, like this one on onboarding by Google's Krystal Higgins. iXDA also runs a mentoring program and workshops on topics like sketching and conversational UI.
Enterprise UX - Sydney – this Meetup is held at Tank Stream Labs, a busy home of tech startups. Organised by Blue Egg founder and General Assembly lecturer Adam Faulkner, EUX Meetup topics vary including a report from Adam on highlights from the UX London conference. Typically over 100 people attend.
Mixed Reality Fundamentals – This Meetup is held monthly at Microsoft’s flagship store in Sydney. This week we were treated to a demo of Hololens technology and a talk by David Lam, a fellow GA Instructional Associate, about UX and Mixed Realities. AR/VR/Mixed Reality is a new world for UX and is beginning to find some useful applications in health, art and other areas.
Those who want to get more involved can volunteer at Meetups. Hope to see you over pizza at a Meetup soon!
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