UXLx Talks

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.

New technologies, whether they are fancy, high-concept gestural interfaces or something as behind-the-scenes as a new algorithm, require some extra care when they're first being utilized in a new product. This care extends not only in the design process, but also to its introduction and explanation to users. This talk will cover, via case studies from Kicker Studio, what pitfalls to look out for, as well as what opportunities exist in introducing a new technology. We'll discuss how to design so that Raymond Loewy's MAYA (Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable) principle is put to its best use.

In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into “design lenses”. A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design.

In this talk, Bill will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lenses inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.

User experience practice focuses on interactive screen-based experiences, typically the Web and increasingly mobile. However, the bulk of our customers' lives are away from these screens. As businesses try to embrace the totality of a customer's experience, crossing channels and coordinating touchpoints, they run up against the limits of their organizational structures and processes. In this talk, Peter will reveal the symptoms of a broken organization, and offer measures you can take to make your business truly customer-centered.

What can UX designers learn from the world's greatest experiment in behavior change?

Over the last ten years, UX designers have increasingly embraced the notion that we are in the “behavior change business”. This shift in emphasis, while not universal, is a reflection of a few historic forces, the first being the shift in design away from a focus on the artifacts that we produce towards the broader shifts and changes that those artifacts inspire in the world. The second being the infusion of digital intelligence into so many physical experience and hence the increased ability to shape design systems to be responsive to behavior, even on an individual level. 
These efforts have been spectacularly successful in some areas, such as the invention of the facebook like button. But the effects have also been quite problematic. Despite these outcomes (or perhaps, because of them) we continue to believe in the potential for design to play a more positive role in addressing some of the most pressing and fundamental challenges facing society – like climate change or obesity. 
Over the last two months we have seen a global shift in behavior that would have seemed previously seemed unthinkable. So, what can UX designers learn from the greatest experiment in behavior change in our lifetimes? In this talk, Robert Fabricant will provide a historical perspective as well as highlighting practical examples from the pandemic response.

Now that our organizations believe that UX writing matters, there’s too much work to do! Use the Eisenhower Matrix to sort common UX content tasks by importance and urgency, and allow the business to recognize the pain that happens when there aren’t enough content people. 
Good news: Our organizations have started to realize the powerful impact UX writers can make to meet our organizations’ goals! The bad news, unfortunately, is that there aren’t enough of us. UX writers are asked to fix existing experiences, design new features, write emergency error messages, consult on brand frameworks, unveil their content strategy, and protect the organization from liability -- all before lunch, some days. In this presentation, Torrey Podmajersky will lead you through the prioritization matrix she introduces in her book Strategic Writing for UX (O’Reilly, 2019).

Over the long-term, conversation-driven products are on a trajectory to be more disruptive than mobile products, in ways both good and perhaps not so good. Conversation is a key marker of how we identify humanness, and technology is beginning to be capable of mimicking it. 
For our part as designers, how do the product approaches need to evolve and guide the innovations we need? Phillip will break down the anatomies of conversational products and interfaces - outlining the design opportunities we have and how to aim for success that includes both people and business.

Discovery is one of the most critical points at the beginning of any project especially when the stakeholders and the project team don’t know each other. Discovery not only yields the information that will inform the rest of a project, it’s a time to start building relationships and trust among team members. We relied on exercises that invited collaboration using low-tech, face to face methods. Discovery could include meals or drinks together later. The success of discovery was due in-part to the human interactions that take place in person.
For me, everything changed in a day. On the first day my company made the decision to have everyone work from home, I was told that we had a new client; a big one. I was also told we would have to run a discovery session within days and it would be entirely remote. I was panicked. My experience relied on proximity! It relied on the intangibles of reading people and being able to pivot if an unforeseen dynamic presented itself. How the hell do you do discovery remotely?! That was only the first question.

Research is the most important part of Human-centered Design, it's also the most difficult part. What makes it difficult, is also what makes it valuable; we're dumb humans, and we make decisions for very weird reasons, and we have no idea why we make very weird decisions. Figuring out these odd and mysterious motivations is what makes experience design work or not work.
In this talk, we'll look at many examples of teasing out weird motivations, look at specific tools to help us, and go through a step-by-step process to conduct research that actually explains why people do things. We'll also talk about why surveys don't work, why focus groups don't work, why analytics don't work, and why basing your product/service on a different product/service doesn't work, and why.

You're growing a design team and facing challenges of scale and focus. You're not alone.
For many design leaders, the shift from craft to team is fraught with mistakes and challenges. Learn from Martina's experience growing a design practice from the first hire in Europe to leading a global design practice of over 100.