UXLx Talks

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

In this talk, Rachel will provide:

If you want a team to see the world through users' eyes, there's nothing quite as powerful as involving them in ethnographic field studies. However, teams can still struggle with translating their field experience into product features and design decisions. Journey maps help teams structure and share field data, identify opportunities, and determine what kinds of tools and information to offer and when. 

The talk is illustrated with field data and a map of the patient journey through serious illness, based on recent work with PatientsLikeMe.com.

Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.

In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.

After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.

The difference between a happy user and a confused one is small…many times our success using software hinges on the smallest of interactions. In this talk Joshua Porter will discuss microcopy, or the tiny bits of copy that helps users in times of need. Examples include reminding people to use the right email address, informing them that their credit card is not needed, or that they don't have to create an account to continue. In many ways an interface is made up of many of these bits of copy…here's how to write it well and make users confident they're on the right track.

Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

Peter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb, one of the most popular visuals in our discipline, encourages us to go beyond usability by creating products and services that are also useful, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.

Now, for the first time, Peter explains why we must go further by creating "architectures of understanding" -- and why designing for insight and inspiration is in the best interests of our firms, our users, and ourselves.

Complexity is not only good, it is essential. Our lives are complex as are the activities we do. Our tools must match the activities. People think they want simplicity, but they are wrong, as evidenced by the fact that when offered the choice between a very simple product and one with more features, they opt for the feature-laden one. We don't want simplicity: we want understanding. Complex things can be made understandable: that is the role of good design. One solution is modularity, which is why we have so many different kitchen utensils. Which is why owing a portable computer, a desktop computer, a smart phone, and a pad computer -- all of them -- makes sense for some people. Each is used for a different reason, in a different setting for different purposes.

Managing complexity is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools.

Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Clay Shirky coined the phrase "cognitive surplus" to describe humanity's untapped mental energy, energy being put to spectacular and beneficial use in collaborate efforts like Wikipedia. User experience designers are rapidly learning how to tap into this surplus through social and psychological insights into human behavior, inviting users to channel their intellectual energies into technologically-mediated interactions that people find emotionally rewarding and deeply compelling.

But where is the line between compelling interaction and compulsive behavior? With so much enthusiasm about "gamification", game mechanics, and behavior change, and with millions of people tagging other people's content and checking in every time they move around, designers of interactive systems should be asking themselves: what kinds of compelling and powerful interactive experiences actually enrich our lives... and what experiences simply drain our time and energy while providing nothing of value in return? How can we be sure we are using these psychologically engaging new interaction design patterns to make people's lives better?

We'll look at some real-world "anti-patterns" of interaction design, where human behavior is, to put it bluntly, being exploited. But we'll also look at how well-intentioned interactions might inadvertently dehumanize users by failing to address their deeper personal needs. Finally, we'll try to define some guiding principles around how to create engrossing, even addictive products and experiences that nonetheless empower and enrich the people who use them.

Get ready to rumble with this mobile battle royale: native app vs mobile web. Your referee Josh Clark pits the polish of native apps versus the accessibility of the web to help you choose the right platform for your app and audience. It's a decision that hinges not only on tech specs or audience reach, but also on subtle cultural differences, user needs, and audience personalities. (Hold onto your seats, folks, the winner of this prize fight may surprise you.)

The way we talk about our content has significant impact on the way we treat it within our organizations… and, therefore, the quality of the content we produce. 

How can we make the shift from treating content as a commodity to valuing it as a business asset? With a little storytelling and the help of a few powerful metaphors, you can begin to turn the tides.