The South African User Experience Forum

The South African User Experience Forum ("SA UX Forum") is a community of practice in the field of user experience design.

I went to a SA UX Forum event last night at 24.com, organised by Phil Barrett  of Flow Interactive and hosted by 20Four Labs, with wine from Stormhoek. About 50 people attended, mostly designers and architects, and a handful of developers like myself.

Phil Barrett spoke about innovation and sketching (especially how sketched interfaces can be iterated and refactored with the users' participation, infinitely faster than software iterations), Kath Roderick from Microsoft gave a demo of Sketchflow (part of Expression Blend), and Dennis Williams from DNA|Creative spoke about the basics of how to sketch - including what pens to use (about 5 different pens) and "how to draw stuff" for people who can't draw. They also demo'd Balsamiq Mockups a lo-fi sketching software for Adobe Air.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though by "interface" I usually think of an Application Progamming Interface. If you're interested, they announce events via a Google Group and Facebook.  Here's a list of their previous meet-ups and other user experience resources