UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Mike Atherton

This is not your usual UX talk. It’s a little about information architecture, a bit about content strategy, but mostly it’s about how we can use information floating around the web to build content-rich products, and how we should try harder to weave our work into the fabric of the network.

Linked Open Data lets us expose, share, and connect knowledge. A single, extensible network of information stretching across an increasingly semantic web, making our products more findable, and our content more reusable. It’s happening now. Used by the BBC to build their Music pages, the New York Times to build topic pages, and by Google and Facebook to build their knowledge graphs.

Where once we linked up pages, now we need to link up the underlying information and tell connected stories with the whole web.

Marissa Phillips

About a year ago, most people didn’t know that Facebook had a separate app for messaging, and Messenger didn’t offer much that you couldn’t already get from the Facebook app. Since then, Messenger was completely redesigned, and it’s now used by millions of people. Learn how the team approached the task of redefining Messenger and struggled with separating it from Facebook.

• See how the voice of a sub-brand emerged.

• Get tips for writing content that’s really mobile-first.

• Hear some approaches for delivering bad news to your audience.

Abby Covert

What does a restaurant menu, a business to business sales process and an eCommerce website have in common? All of these things involve structuring information for an audience to understand. And while the audience and context may change, the practice of seeing our way through the associated complexities and iterations does not.

Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable.

No matter what your job or mission in life: if you are working with other people you are dealing with information architecture. Whether it is determining the labels for your products and services or creating navigational systems to help users move through a complex ecosystem of marketing channels, everybody architects information. In this short talk, Abby Covert will teach us some basic lessons on how to think about the structures and language choices that we make everyday.

Brad Frost

Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so it's essential to break UIs into their atomic elements in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs. This session will introduce atomic design, a methodology for creating robust interface design systems. We’ll cover how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization and clients up for success.

Speaker:Margot BloomsteinOnline experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll examine examples of content strategy in action that demonstrates how to identify and control the pace of user experience, adding value for both our users and the businesses that engage them.

Umesh Pandya

"Investigate what it would be like for a young vision impaired person,

to travel London’s transport network in the near future.”

In this lightning talk, Umesh Pandya will share the story behind Wayfindr and how ustwo and the Royal London Society for Blind People designed and validated a system that helps vision impaired people move through the London Underground Network independently. Umesh will talk about the tools, techniques, methodologies they used over the course of this investigation – from concept through to a live pilot over the span of 6 months.

Speaker: Nicole FentonWords shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to each other. In this session, Nicole will talk about writing—an often invisible partner and material in the design process. You’ll learn how to communicate behind the scenes to define what you’re making, prototype quickly, gather consensus, build clarity, and ship meaningful products.

Speaker: Stephen Hay

There's a fine line between persuasion and deception. On the web, that line is frequently crossed. Sometimes purposefully, sometimes unwittingly. The best way to avoid falling prey to those attempting to deceive (or accidentally becoming the deceiver) is to be able to recognize the techniques yourself. Find out how people deceive through design, why these practices eventually fail, and how you can make your work persuasive without being deceptive.

Speaker: Josh Seiden

Imagine you have a limited budget, a disruptive idea for a social-networking product, and a short timeline to get your vision built and launched. How do you know if your idea will work, without burning through all your time and money? In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into a recent project to see how we went from idea to successful launch in just under 4 months—on time and on budget—by using a “learning from live systems” approach.

Product teams often use prototyping to explore new products, but in social-networking systems, prototyping will only get you so far. In other words: some kinds of innovations just need to be launched to test. Come hear the story and learn when this Lean Startup-inspired approach makes sense, and hear a detailed case study on how our small team of designers, developers and product managers did it—carefully launching and developing our client’s business in a way that minimized spend and risk, and maximized the chances that this new venture will succeed.

Speaker:Lisa WelchmanIf this is the information age, what special role do information and user experience architects and play? The rise of industrial aged forced changes in supply chain management for physical goods. What changes do we need to make in the information supply chain in order to make sure information gets to the right, person, in the right place, on the right, device, and at the right time. And, what ethical concerns and considerations does that bring to the table, and whose job is it to resolves those concerns?