New this Year: Official CanUX Sketchnotes

We’re thrilled to announce our official visual scribe, MJ Broadbent

Let’s face it, one of the most difficult parts about being at a conference is deciding whether to just sit back and take it all in, or try to get every.single.thing.down. so you can remember it when you get back to work on Monday. (This is especially important when your boss is expecting some sort of synopsis of what you learned in exchange for buying your ticket.) This year, CanUX is hoping to make that decision a little easier for you by providing gorgeous visual notes by none other than sketchnoter extraordinaire MJ Broadbent. If you follow her on Twitter you might have seen some of her gorgeous notes from other experience design events like Enterprise UX or UX Week. This year, we’re bringing MJ in to give CanUX her sketchnote treatment. And we’re making her stunning handiwork available to all of you.

Following the conference, we’ll be posting all of her CanUX sketchnotes on our program page. So if you feel like sitting back and enjoying the show, just know that MJ is beavering away in the audience, stealth-noting (she’s pretty quiet so you might not even notice she’s there) on your behalf.

 Bio: MJ Broadbent

MJ has been creating elegant solutions to complex information design problems for over 20 years. In her current role as Senior Director – User Experience at GE Digital, the world’s premier digital industrial company, MJ leads a team who collaborate across GE’s industrial business units to design solutions that connect minds and machines through Predix, GE’s Industrial Internet data and analytics platform.

MJ got her start working in digital design as an information architect in 1996. By 2000 she was named the first Director of IA at Icon Nicholson, a pioneering Silicon Alley digital agency. Over the past twenty years, MJ’s design leadership and practical expertise has benefited organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, College Board, Johnson & Johnson, The McGraw-Hill Companies (including Standard & Poor’s), Pfizer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sony Electronics, and the United Nations, among many others.

MJ holds numerous professional affiliations, with IxDA chief among them. She led the IxDA NYC local group (2008-2010), co-chaired Interaction11, served on the Board of Directors as Treasurer (2011-2014), and co-chaired the Interaction Awards (2015-16). An evangelist for drawing, sketching, and the power of visual communication, MJ coaches people to reclaim their innate drawing skills through instructional workshops of her own design. She is a well-known for her sketchnotes and people often tell her she has incredibly neat handwriting.

For more info, you can follow MJ on on Twitter @mjbroadbent and check out her sketchnoting work on Flickr.

*Image credit: MJ Broadbent