UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Speaker: Oliver ReichensteinLearning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse — once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can‘t expect to sell what you can’t explain.This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.“See with one eye, feel with the other.”― Paul Klee

Speaker: Aarron WalterBig data is helping many industries discover new insights creating smarter companies, and now it’s empowering UX practitioners to see patterns in mountains of data. Customer feedback, trends in support issues, analytics, usability test notes, customer interview transcripts, tweets, blog comments and more can be connected and searched to find serious flaws in designs or inform the next design.Research has always been a core part of the UX workflow, but after a study ends, the wisdom gained often slips into a quiet corner of a computer to gather dust and never be seen again. By centralizing all research data and streaming new sources into the pool, designers can learn more about their audience and make smarter decisions than ever before. Informed design is successful design, and big data is making UX smarter than ever before.

What is it that delights users? And how can you measure the return on investment of creating interfaces that make users smile? I’ve interviewed experts and users and come up with some surprising findings that will help you plan and design better user experiences and focus your attention where its really needed.

Speaker: Karen McGrane You don’t get to decide which device people use to access your content: they do. By 2015, more people will access the internet via mobile devices than on traditional computers. In the US today, nearly one-third of people who browse the internet on their mobile phone say that’s the only way they go online—in many countries, those numbers are even higher. It’s time to stop avoiding the issue by saying “no one will ever want to do that on mobile.” Chances are, someone already wants to. In this session, Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever your customer wants to consume it — and what the risks when you don’t make content accessible to mobile users. Already convinced it’s important? She’ll also explain how to get started with your mobile content strategy, defining what you want to publish, what the relationship should be between your mobile and desktop site, and how your editorial workflow and content management tools need to evolve.

Speaker: Kelly GotoAddiction or devotion? The complexity of our relationships between connected experiences, devices and people is increasing. Design ethnographer Kelly Goto presents underlying emotional indicators that reveal surprising attachments to brands, products, services and devices. Gain insight into the future of UX and understand the importance of designing user experiences that map to people‛s real needs and desires — the unconscious side of the user experience.

Speaker: Dan SafferThe difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn on mute on your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments–which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored–can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. This talk provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products: as a series of microinteractions that are essential to bringing personality and delight to applications and devices. We’ll delve into the structure of microinteractions—Triggers, Rules, Feedback, and Loops—and talk about why you should: Bring The Data Forward, Don’t Start From Zero, Use What is Often Overlooked, and Play The Long Game.

Speaker: Claire Rowland“Siri, did I leave the oven on?”The idea of the connected home has been around for 40 years or more, but has never taken off as a mass market proposition. But this is changing. Mainstream retailers are starting to bringing out connected home hardware and services to help consumers understand and control their energy use and heating, secure their homes, know who’s in and out, be alerted to any emergencies and generally feel reassured that everything’s OK at home. It will soon be normal to turn lights and appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set your burglar alarm over the web.UX is key to turning this interesting niche technology into a mass market success. But the home is a challenging environment: it’s often a shared space inhabited by different people with different needs and goals, and it’s our refuge from the world: the last place any of us want to feel overwhelmed by technology.In this talk, I’ll cover:what connected home technologies can do, and why this space holds so many opportunitieswhy no-one has got connected home design right (yet), and how experience design is key to creating commercially successful services in this areaa few practical UX guidelines learned from connected home design that can be applied to any complex multi-device system

Speaker: Jon KolkoOur material is less then 25 years old. HTML was invented in 1990, and most of us have enjoyed building with it since. Many of us actually helped invent it, or parts of it: the HTML specification, advancements in client-side scripting, new device platforms, new possibilities. We have an intimacy with the material, in the same way that a potter knows her clay. This technology – this powerful force, this beautiful material – can be aimed and directed. But where shall we direct it, and to what end? In this talk, Jon Kolko introduces design-led Social Entrepreneurship as the profession for directing and humanizing technology. You’ll learn about what it means to be an entrepreneur, and you’ll hear some examples of failure and success. Ultimately, you’ll learn how, and why, to aim technology at problems worth solving.

Speaker: Bill BuxtonIn 1991 Mark Weiser published what is now a classic paper, The Computer for the 21st Century. In it, he laid the foundation for what has become known as Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp. Ironically, by having the word "Computer" in the singular, the title of his paper is at odds with the content, since the whole point is that we will not have just one or two computers; rather we will have hundreds, and deal with hundreds or thousands of others as we go about our day-to-day lives. Furthermore, despite such large numbers, our interactions with these devices will be largely transparent to us due to their seamless integration into our environment.This is a vision that I played a part in shaping, and one that I still believe in. But by the same token, we are now into the second decade of the 21st century, and such transparency and seamlessness is largely still wanting. The 5-10 minutes wasted at the start of almost every meeting while we struggle to hook our laptops up to the projector is just one example.In this talk, I want to speak to this problem and how we might adjust our thinking and priorities in order to address it, and thereby accelerate the realization of Weiser's vision.I will argue that a key part of this requires our focusing as much on machine-machine as we do on human-machine interaction. Stated a different way, I believe that social computing is at the core, but social computing amongst the society of appliances and services – perhaps even more than the society of people. (Obviously the two societies are interwoven.)In sociological terms, this brings us to ask questions such as, "What are the social mores within the society of such devices?" How to they gracefully approach each other and connect, or take their leave and disconnect? How to they behave alone vs together? The point to emphasize here is that besides aggregation and disaggregation, it might be even more about the transitions between one and the other.As with the society of people, appropriate behavior is largely driven by context: social, cultural, physical, intentional, etc. This helps tie in notions such as foreground/background interaction, sensor networks, ambient intelligence, etc.In general, this talk is as much (or ore) about asking questions as it is about answering them. It's real intent is to say that we need to go beyond our current focus on individual devices or services, and look at things from an ecological perspective. The accumulated complexity of a large number of easy to use elegant devices still surpasses the user's threshold of frustration. Our current path of focusing on individual gadgets, apps and services, just transfers where the complexity lies, and increases it, rather than reduces it overall.My hope is to frame and stimulate a conversation around a different path – one where more of the right technology reduces overall complexity while geometrically increasing the value to the community of users.

Presenting UXLx 2014

Speaker: Gerry McGovernWhy the tiny tasks in the Long Tail get in the way of the top tasks of the Long Neck—and what to do about it. All websites are made up of a series of customer tasks. Some—the top tasks—are much more important than others—the tiny tasks. Unfortunately, many organizations spend more of their time on the tiny tasks than on the top tasks. This talk will give you a way to prove that the top tasks are where the majority of the focus and attention should be.

Speaker: Jeff GothelfDesigners have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their vision for products and experiences. As technology has evolved to offer more complex and intricate interactions, the deliverables we've been creating have followed suit. Ultimately though, these deliverables have come to serve as bottlenecks to the creation process and as the beginning of the negotiation process with our team mates -- a starting point for conversation on what could get built and launched.Lean UX aims to open up the user experience design process with a collaborative approach that involves the entire team. It's a hypothesis-based design approach that tests design ideas early and often and, along the way, builds a shared understanding with our team mates that eliminates the dependencies on heavy documentation and challenging communications. Lean UX is a solution for the challenge of Agile and UX integration while it also works effectively in traditional waterfall and other hybrid environments.

Speaker: Rachel HinmanMobile 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:Insight into how designers and UX professionals can navigate the unfamiliar and fast-changing mobile landscape with grace and solid thinking.In-depth information on advanced mobile design topics UX professionals will spend the next 10+ years pioneeringTools and frameworks necessary to begin tackling mobile UX problems in this rapidly changing design space

Speaker: Jesse James GarrettWhether you design websites or shopping malls, hospitals or mobile phones, you're designing for people, and people want to be engaged by the products and services in their lives. But human engagement comes in many different forms, and traditional design practices don't say much about creating engagement. As design evolves toward delivering integrated experiences across media, designers need ways to understand modes of engagement and mechanisms for creating it. In this presentation, Jesse James Garrett looks at ways the designers of all kinds of products and services can maximize the human engagement of their work.

Speaker: Kim GoodwinIf 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 withPatientsLikeMe.com.