Jo Minney
Digital Experience Lead | House Digital & Devhouse Australia
Perth, Australia
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Jo Minney is a small business founder and technical communicator based (for now) in Perth, Western Australia. She is passionate about user experience, data-driven decision making, cats and travel – not necessarily in that order. She’s also an avid maker, from 3D printing to sewing to woodworking, and loves combining technology and creativity to make cool stuff and encouraging others to do the same.
By day, you’ll find Jo working with charities and NGOs helping them to create bespoke digital platforms through her microagency. You might also find her donating her time via the Mission Digital program to help tackle social issues (such as gender inequality, domestic violence and global poverty) through the use of technology, or freelancing as a Nielsen Norman certified user experience research consultant.
Jo has provided advice and training to hundreds of Aussie small business owners on all things digital, with a special focus on website creation and management through federally funded workshops and programs. She is also an ambassador, sponsor and lead mentor for She Codes Australia, a social enterprise that aims to make tech jobs more accessible for women, and a past winner of the Women in Tech WA Shining Star award for Advocacy, Community and Volunteering. An accomplished international conference speaker, Jo can regularly be found with a microphone in hand speaking about user experience, accessibility, imposter syndrome, closing the gender gap and pockets.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Usability Testing is easier than you think
As developers, it’s easy to assume that customers will use technology the way we expect them to. They don’t, ever.
What if we had a magical way to find out what crazy things customers would try to do with our product… before we built it? Or before we launched it and put it in front of customers?
Anyone can learn to conduct qualitative usability testing, and you can make massive improvements to your products quickly and cheaply - if you test it right. To be clear - ‘user testing’ and ‘usability testing’ don’t mean the same thing.
In this talk, I’ll share the secrets that UX researchers use to take websites or software projects from good, to great - including how to do it, when to do it, and what tools you can use.
Join me and learn about the most cost effective UX research method at your disposal, and learn how to leverage it to build stuff better.
From Mess to Success: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Information Architecture
Every intranet, application or website contains information. That Information is the reason that these solutions exist, so it’s a pity that how it is organised is often an afterthought.
To be clear, information architecture is *not* the same as navigation design! User interfaces (the stuff people see and touch) are just the tip of a very important user experience iceberg. Good information organisation starts with a well-designed, future-proof database and high quality user research.
Join me to discover the essential tools and techniques that even beginners (whether designer, developer, UX professional or project manager) can use to turn your next project from mess, to success.
How to get past Hello World
Have you ever needed ‘Hello World’ in real life? Me neither.
Over 15 years ago, I wrote my first line of code. Since then, I’ve coded for some of the world’s largest mining companies, AND taught others the joy of coding. HTML, CSS, and SQL have always been fun puzzles for me, but object-oriented programming languages like PHP, Python, and JavaScript seemed like insurmountable hurdles where I struggled to move past the fundamentals to actually make something useful. I convinced myself that I just ‘wasn’t made to be a programmer’ and resigned myself to being a weird combination of front-end-ish-with-database-knowledge, never achieving the elusive title of Full Stack Developer.
But then, two things happened: I started working on TALL (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel + Livewire) stack projects, and I got a Copilot subscription. Suddenly, the complex tasks that used to be handballed to someone else in the team seemed within reach, and I was up and running on one of the world’s fastest growing development frameworks.
Whether you or someone you know are stuck on the basics, or you are just curious to see how easy it is to spin up a brand new Laravel application from scratch (and how to use copilot so it doesn’t suck) - join me as I demonstrate how I went from ‘Hello World’ to full-stack programming in less than a year!
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