UXLx Talks

Science is a dialogue with nature. In the United States as well as in much of Europe, science has lost value in the public mind in recent years. Climate change denial is a leading force in this shift. In past years I have been extremely hopeful that humanity would engage in slowing or stopping climate change.
But many of our efforts have been thwarted, not only by the growth of nationalism, but also by the relentless erosion of our relationship with nature.
Our situation now requires deeper engagement by activists, progressives, scientists and designers. This talk will begin with a review historical highlights of “end of the world” moments and how humanity has addressed them. Then we will turn our attention to today’s “end of the world” problems and explore strategies for designing interventions. How might we as designers and engineers impact human attitudes and actions in this chaotic and threatening time?

Design is increasingly gaining influence in the companies we work in and the world at large, which means our actions as designers have an increasing influence on shaping the world around us. All of our individual choices, collectively form our manufactured world. Do you know where the choices you are making are leading, not just on the scale of your project, but on a larger scale? Are you making choices that matter or choices that lead to desirable outcomes? Are you designing mindfully for our larger collective futures or are you just “checking a box” or blindly chasing the latest design craze or “silver bullet” process? The success of good design isn’t new and relies on a core set of first principles that if followed lead to better outcomes, but it is up to all of us to make it happen. Join Erik as he discusses these first principles of good design as we collectively shape our future.

“Thud” is the sound a bowling ball makes when dropped onto damp earth. But it’s also the sound that most of our software makes when it hits the market. We’re great at celebrating our wild successes, and finding people to blame for catastrophic failures. This talk is about how we spend most of our work trying to figure out which we have on our hands: a success or a failure. Jeff will share stories of how we use discovery work to identify when we’ve got a “thud” on our hands. And, how the hardest thing to do is recognize and let go of our thuds.

Technology is inundating us with access to more information than ever before. We face decision fatigue on a daily basis and we have to consider, how is all this information benefiting our lives. 
To deal with this overwhelm, we see a lot of products giving users more control. Users are given all the information and can filter and sort it to suit them best. However, this creates a lot of work for users. To minimize this burden on users, we’re seeing more products try and anticipate what users want to see and sometimes automatically make decisions on their behalf. 
Anticipation and automation are becoming critical components of creating a great user experience. When used correctly they can help people find what they’re looking for and accomplish tasks with ease. However, there are draw backs to anticipation and automation — draw backs that impact not only how people gauge your product experience, but also, the quality of their lives and those around them.

Experience designers, product makers and marketers could be blamed for being master manipulators. After all, the digital products they create are so much part of our lives they often end up going to bed with us at night and are the first things we wake up with. In this talk, we'll explore how your biology predicts which products will be successful at engaging us and why we should avoid the dark arts of making our work addictive. By the end of the talk you'll know how and why your physiology interacts with digital products and what how you can use this in positive ways to improve your UX and design work.

Every designer has had to justify their designs to a non-designer, yet most lack the ability to convince people they’re right. The ability to effectively articulate your decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person usually wins.
In this session, you’ll learn practical tips for talking about your designs to executives, managers, developers, and other designers with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

As designers, we optimize for the happy path. The applicant gets the job. The girl gets the boy.  The service works flawlessly. But of course in many product experiences, the typical path is not necessarily a happy one: bad things happen. We are left-swiped. We fail to get off the couch. We send cover letters and applications into the silent void. These moments can leave us with unhappy users who may choose not to stick around for more frustration and rejection.

As product leaders, Facebook's Katy Mogal and dscout’s Michael Winnick both influence product experiences that risk leaving users feeling rejected or demotivated ­— even when the overall intent of the service or product is to deliver positive outcomes. As researchers, they decided to work together to see what might be done to create a better, bad experience. They will share a set of principles and stories drawn from their own experiences, primary research conducted on this topic, and interviews with designers in relevant fields from dating to venture capital.  They'll uncover the reality of less-than-ideal product experiences, and identify ways to make them less painful and more useful.

The concept of jobs to be done provides a lens for understanding value creation. It’s straightforward principle: people “hire” products to fulfill a need. 

For instance, you might hire a new suit to make you look good at a job interview. Or, you hire Facebook to stay in touch with friends. You could also hire a chocolate bar to relieve stress. 

Viewing customers in this way – as goal-driven actors in a given context – shifts focus from the psycho-demographic aspects to needs and motivations. Although the theory of JTBD is rich and has a long history, practical approaches to applying the approach are largely missing. 

In this presentation, I will highlight concrete ways to apply the jobs to be done in your work. This will not only help you design better solutions, but also enable you to contribute to broader strategic conversations.

Among the first principles of UX design, the most sacred tenet can be stated as follows: you are not your user. 

User-centricity is a fat thumb on the scale of “doing it right” in our field. To such an extent, that other measures of value and virtue are either subordinated, or precluded from consideration altogether.  

The Danish physicist Nils Bohr is reported to have said that while the opposite of a fact is plainly falsehood, the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. In this talk, based on research he conducted in Japan, England and the United States, Dan Klyn will make the case – based in the work of Christopher Alexander –  for an opposite truth: wherein the human self of the maker provides the primary basis for all deciding in the process of making.

Have you ever dreamed of being a superhero and having superpowers? When Jody was a kid, she wanted the Jedi mind trick. And then to be like Jean Grey from the X-men. Where she would spend hours upon hours just focusing on objects, trying to move them with her mind. With many of the newest technologies just like VR we’re able to do that. In her talk Jody shares mind blowing insights of what the future holds for us. What is your superpower?

Five years ago, I sold my suburban home in Silicon Valley and moved to an old farm deep in agricultural country. Everything was new to me, but I was most surprised to discover how the new lessons of farming paralleled the important lessons of interaction design. This talk will give you some useful insight into your work by reflecting on the farmer’s job.

In this talk we’ll look what algorithms are good for, and where they fall down. It’ll discuss what it means to design a service using algorithms and the skills you’ll need to develop and adapt if you’re to thrive in the next era of experience design.

Over the past few years there’s been a push in the product development world to “make products that people love”. A great User Experience is now essential to creating a successful product. While many companies focus on having the best design and the greatest experience, they are still missing the most important step in product development - learning about their customers.

With Agile and Lean gaining popularity in more companies, we talk about techniques to get things out to users faster. At the core of this has been the Minimum Viable Product. Unfortunately, many people still do not understand the MVP. Some see it as a way to release a product faster. Others are scared of it, viewing it as a way to put broken code on your site and ruin products.

The sole purpose of Minimum Viable Product is to learn about your customers. This step that has been so overlooked and yet it is the most essential part to creating a product your customers will love. The more information you can uncover through experimentation, the more certainty there is about building the right thing. In this talk, Melissa will go over how to design the most effective product experimentations and Minimum Viable Products. She’ll explain how to get the rest of the organization on board with this method of testing, and how to incorporate it into overall Product Strategy.

In this presentation we explore some of the fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the internet at the hands of consumers in emerging economies. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities, and challenges, we will face when growing a truly global web.

As designers, we are lucky enough to get to interact with many different types of people during the course of our work. We observe people using technology and proposed design solutions. While working on our projects, we collaborate directly with our team, clients, and stakeholders to bring a solution to life. All of this interaction exposes us to lots of body language. The language of the body offers up many hints and insights into what people are thinking and feeling. It's been said that our bodies tell us what is really on our minds, and it’s important to know not only what others might be telling you but what you could be telling them.

It's important for designers to have a fundamental understanding of body language and what are key signs to look for when interacting with users or project teams. There are key patterns that, when observed correctly, can tell you if someone is supportive of your idea, hiding their true feelings, or simply sitting back and daydreaming the meeting away.

In this presentation, Geoloqi co-founder Amber Case will take you on a journey through the history of calm technology, wearable computing, and how developers and designers can make apps “ambient” and inspire delight instead of constant interaction.

This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing starting from the 1970’s-2010’s and how mobile interfaces should take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way.

By understanding what principles are and where they come from we can move beyond the lists of best practices and heuristics we’re all familiar with and create unique, consistent experiences.

Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, applications, our bank, our doctor, our government, anyone, we form expectations and understandings of what someone or something will do based on our previous experiences and their past behaviors. When something happens that doesn’t fit with those expectations–that seems out of character–we’re caught off guard. What do we do next? What should we expect now?

Principles act as rules that guide how we think and act. Formed by our motivations, values and beliefs, we use them as “lenses” through which we examine information in order to make decisions on what to do. And because of their persistent influence on our behavior, they influence other’s views and expectations of us. Using these same kinds of constructs throughout the design process we can design interactions and consistent behaviors that set and live up to expectations for our audiences.

Abi Jones compares human-to-human and human-computer conversation and interaction, introducing you to the conversational machines in your life and those to come. Learn what makes for great human-computer speech interaction from the first turn to the last, how computers interpret speech, and why it’s more enjoyable and addictive to talk to a 1960s chatbot than most intelligent assistants available today.

Christopher Noessel joins us to ask the question, "How do you think new things?" Seemingly simple, the answer takes us through domains as disparate as divination and entertainment, but lands us squarely in the creative process. From techniques like poetics to force-fit grids to Oulipan writing to Design as Semiosis, all share a common deep structure that he's named "Semantic Noodling" and the systems that use it "Meaning Machines."

Despite the prevalent mythology of the lone creative genius, many of the most innovative contributions spring from the creative chemistry of a group and the blending of everyone’s ideas and concepts. How can we best leverage this collective wisdom to generate creative synergy and co-create? Let’s look at the process of recognizing and removing our personal creative blocks, connecting and communicating with others, combining ideas using play, and constructing a collaborative environment to discover effective methods for tapping into a group’s creative brilliance. Through these steps, you’ll learn to capitalize on the super- linearity of creativity to embrace and leverage diversity to create better together.

What if this thing was magic? The web is touching everyday objects now, and designing for the internet of things means blessing everyday objects, places, even people with extraordinary abilities—requiring designers, too, to break with the ordinary. Designing for this new medium is less a challenge of technology than imagination. Sharing a rich trove of examples, designer and author Josh Clark explores the new experiences that are possible when ANYTHING can be an interface.

The digital manipulation of physical objects (and vice versa) effectively turns all of us into wizards. Sling content between devices, bring objects to life from a distance, weave "spells" by combining speech and gesture. But magic doesn't have to be otherworldly; the UX of connected devices should build on the natural physical interactions we have everyday with the world around us. This new UX must bend technology to the way we live our lives, not the reverse. Explore the values and design principles that amplify our humanity, not just our superpowers.

Do your users fail to engage with your app, or don't follow through on their goals? Steve Wendel, the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and author of Designing for Behavior Change, will present the three main strategies you can use to support behavior change: building habits, informing choices, or cleverly restructuring problems to help people take action. You’ll learn how to make your products make more effective — for you business, and your users.

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.

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.

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.

Words 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.

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.

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.

If 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?

We are in an age where poor user experiences become the focus of nationwide attention. One doesn’t need to look beyond recent catastrophes, such as Apple’s iOS6 Maps, Healthcare.gov, and the demise of Blackberry’s smartphone to see the necessity of getting the experience right.
Yet, what do we know about ensuring our next design isn’t going down the same road as those that have failed before us? We need to understand how design integrates with our organization’s strategy, to ensure we’re supporting and enhancing it, not taking away from it.
In what may possibly be his most entertaining presentation ever, Jared will show you how to integrate user experience strategy with your business’s objectives. He’ll explore the world of business models, demonstrating the role a UX strategy plays in providing significant value to the organization’s bottom line.
You’ll learn:

• How an expanded notion of content is critical to understanding the value of user experience
• Where to tailor your design strategy to the five priorities every senior executive cares about
• Which of the emerging business model variations for content might be the right direction for your business

The questions we ask ourselves at the idea generation stage of design play a critical role in the nature of the ideas generated. Bold questions beget bold ideas; and incrementalism begins in the same way.
r\nIn this talk we will look at how problem framing and reframing can impact the ideas teams generate, and how problem statements can be 'tuned' to better deliver feasible concepts within your organisation. We'll look at some recent examples from our work at Meld Studios as well as some well-known case studies from around the world.

Online 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.

Many governments are dealing with today\'s challenges using tools from the last century. UX design (and designers) can help meet those challenges and make a difference in our communities, in our nations, and in the daily lives of regular people.The public sector needs better design, from making forms, processes, and official websites easier to use to helping decision-makers understand and collaborate better when creating policy.
Design can help create better experiences for citizens, more effective service delivery for government, and create better outcomes and more efficient use of scarce resources.
This talk will share the need and opportunity for UX designers to help create better citizen experiences, offer some principles and examples, and invite the audience to discuss how citizen experience fits in the European context.

The most significant things are often hidden in plain sight. In the world of design and technology, it's the button. Let's take a 100 year tour of the history of the button to see how it's changed how we think, understand and interact with the world. Products, movies, advertisements and more will reveal how we evolved from a mechanical to a digital world.

The web world thinks of game design as the next silver bullet, and companies are slapping badges and progress bars over every annoying thing they wish users to do. But as users tire of everything looking like a game, “gamification” is starting to get discarded as just another fad.. Games have been core to human experience since ancient times, and the game industry now makes more than the movies industry.  If we want to create amazing experiences for our users, there is plenty to learn beyond the tricks of Gamification.  I’ve studied game design from the people who actually make games, such as Dan Cook (Triple Town), Mark Skaggs (Farmville), Amy Jo Kim (Rockband) and Erin Hoffman (Sims Edu) and it has transformed my design practice. Let me share what I have learned.  Come and hear how mastery, mysteries and meaningful choices can make your site a pleasure for your users.
Take Aways
* When to use game mechanics, and when they’ll backfire
* How to make your personas more powerful with play-style
* Replace tutorials with more integrated and pleasurable teaching. 
* Understand key game mechanics, how they work and how to use them
* Learn how to use the power of games appropriately to drive engagement and retention.
* Practical approaches you can use back in the office monday morning.

Windows 8. Chromebook Pixel. Ubuntu Phone. These devices shatter another consensual hallucination that we web developers have bought into: mobile = touch and desktop = keyboard and mouse.
We have tablets with keyboards; laptops that become tablets; laptops with touch screens; phones with physical keyboards; and even phones that become desktop computers. Not to mention new forms of input like cameras, voice control and sensors.
One of the core things that responsive design has taught us is that we have to be comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what the size of our canvas is going to be. Input has that same ambiguity. It is transient. It is unknowable. Reconciling that understanding from a design and implementation perspective is going to be as big a challenge if not bigger than the one we faced coming to grips with responsive design.
We've learned how to respond to screen size. Our next challenge is learning how to adapt to different forms of input.

I’ve worked for a lot of idiot managers in my career. And then, one day, after I had become a manager, it dawned on me: Now I’m the idiot! You see, most of my career has been an exercise in “trial by fire.” This process worked well when I was a designer and was trying to master the art of the task flow, site map, wireframe, prototype, persona, and so on. In leadership positions, the option to go back to the drawing board or to iterate hasn’t always been readily available—nor as painless to my pride and potentially my pocketbook.
Many of these lessons haven’t been easy for me to learn. It’s been tough to simultaneously remove obstacles without becoming one, or learning how to say “no” (and the flavors of yes and no!) when I’ve also wanted people to be satisfied with me and the work I’m doing. However, these lessons have all helped me become better at managing to some degree, while instilling a strong sense of empathy for those people who either report to me, or bless their souls, manage me in one way or another.
If you’re interested in learning from some of the hard lessons I’ve learned, or in just laughing at my folly, there will be plenty of material to provide you with either opportunity.

Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them.
This needs to change. In this bluntly honest talk, Mike will invite you to consider your responsibilities as a designer and embrace your role as gatekeeper. You'll learn how to increase your influence and be moved to use your powers for good.

Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them.
This needs to change. In this bluntly honest talk, Mike will invite you to consider your responsibilities as a designer and embrace your role as gatekeeper. You'll learn how to increase your influence and be moved to use your powers for good.

When something new comes along, it’s common for us to react with what we already know. Radio programming on TV, print design on web pages, and now web page design on mobile devices. But every medium ultimately needs unique thinking and design to reach its true potential.

Through an in-depth look at several common web interactions, Luke will outline how to adapt existing desktop design solutions for mobile devices and how to use mobile to expand what’s possible across all devices. You’ll go from thinking about how to reformat your websites to fit mobile screens, to using mobile as way to rethink the future of the web.

Learning 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

Big 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.

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.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames

The 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.

Addiction 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.

Our 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.

“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 opportunities
• why no-one has got connected home design right (yet), and how experience design is key to creating commercially successful services in this area
• a few practical UX guidelines learned from connected home design that can be applied to any complex multi-device system

In 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.

Designers 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.

Why 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.

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:

• 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 pioneering
• Tools and frameworks necessary to begin tackling mobile UX problems in this rapidly changing design space

Whether 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.

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.

Love creative problem solving, but need something more practical— something specific to User Experience? Stephen P. Anderson will share with you the exercises he uses to solve the REAL problems. 

You'll flex your critical thinking muscle through a series of jump starter activities. Even better, attendees may be encouraged to participate, if not embarrass themselves in front of a room full of their peers as they challenge themselves to see past the first, obvious—and often incorrect—answers, and start to flip problems on their heads to see solutions from a different view.

No matter how many departments your organization has, to your customers, it's all the same business. They expect a cohesive experience across all touch-points with your company, regardless of whether it's related to advertising, customer service, social presence, or the actual product or service you provide. The satisfaction of your customers, and thereby the success of your organization, depends in no small part on your ability to create a cohesive and consistently high-quality cross-channel experience.

Some examples of disjointed cross-channel experiences are:

• The customer has to inform the customer service representative of what the website says about their own return policy.
• The specifications of a product online does not match the actual product a customer goes to pick up in the retail store.
• The experience of the mobile application is far superior to the experience of the standard web application or software application.
• The customer has to make three different phone calls to get their account changed because the information is stored in three separate business units.

Applying consideration for the cross-channel experience is much easier said than done. It requires a significant level of coordination and collaboration between the stakeholders, to understand not just how to optimize their particular part of the service, but to maintain that optimal and consistent experience throughout. For example, the customer service department can do a great job of correcting a problem after the fact, but they can add greater value to the product or service as a whole by collaborating with sales and product teams to prevent the issue from arising in the first place.

In this presentation, you will gain a better understanding of the different ways your customers might interact with your business. We will show how you can map out these touchpoints and help drive the creation of a cohesive experience across the various channels. We will show you how to navigate the political waters within your business to implement a true cross-channel design, which will build great experiences for your customers, regardless of how they are engaging with your business.

These days everybody talks about game mechanics, badges, points, and leaderboards, but less attention is paid to the role of play in digital experiences. After childhood, play rarely "just happens," but you can design for it. 

Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how our designs can foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules, the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences.

Children gravitate toward play-acting naturally but over time those skills can be lost. Giving people contexts in which they can explore alternate identities, wear masks, co-create stories, re-enact important events, or make snowmen and sandcastles can summon up that inner never-fully-lost capacity to enter a flow state.

Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That's a stretch, but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer some form of gather, arranging, and displaying objects. Just so, even an HR portal may offer some opportunity to incorporate a collecting "game" into the workflow.

Christian will share techniques for introducing a sense of play into the experiences we're designing and will exhort the assembled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.

As user research becomes firmly established in organizations around the world, it's tempting to congratulate ourselves and retreat to our shiny new labs. But our work is nowhere near complete. As currently practiced, user research remains narrow in focus, often limited to the qualitative methods that reflect our own educational biases, and the tools that fit within our own comfort zones. 

Other research practices, such as web analytics, business analytics, and market research, are equally powerful ways of learning about users' wants and needs. More importantly, they're often complementary with what we do. When our organizations combine methods that tell what is going on are combined with methods that tell why, only then will they truly realize the value of all user research.

In his keynote, Lou Rosenfeld will explore the complementary aspects of the different research perspectives, argue for breaking down the silos that divide them, and suggest a framework for developing products and services that are better analyzed, better designed, and, ultimately, better performing.

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.

However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today’s business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs.

He'll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

• Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business
• Is learned, but not available through introspection
• Must be invisible to succeed
• Is cultural
• Is multi-discplinary
• Thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment

You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

As designers, we want to be successful, yet in the passionate pursuit of creating compelling and engaging experiences, it can be easy to forget the importance of promoting the success of those who use our products and services. We can lose sight of what is most important to understand about our users if we are to serve them better. Don Norman expressed it most succinctly and controversially, saying, “Focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves.” Designing for user performance is about enhancing the success of users in performing those activities and achieving those purposes that make the most sense to them—activities within which the use of our products and services may be but a small part.

In this talk, award-winning designer and design methodologist Larry Constantine will draw on examples as diverse as medical systems and consumer entertainment to demonstrate how a shift in focus can show the way toward more successful users and more successful, broadly useful and usable products and services with lasting value and appeal based on a deeper understanding of human activity and what is needed to support its performance.

We think that people are logical and rational, and that their decisions are made by careful thinking. But the reality is that the actions that people take at websites – whether they decide to register, buy, or take the action we would like them to take -- are made in a largely unconscious way. Although some decisions might come from the rational part of the brain, many decisions and actions are based on emotion, and many are based on automatic triggers that people react to from something at the website.

Thanks to CMS, it’s easy to fill a web page with dynamic content. Web 2.0 techniques and technologies make it easy for users to add their own contributions. And graphic designers are constantly seeking new ways to differentiate their work. Yet the noisier our pages get, the more difficult it can be to spot the important information. Worse still, if the information surrounding the core content is irrelevant to the mission of the page and/or the goals of the user, inclusion may actually kill the user experience and undermine the business goals of the site owner. This presentation seeks to introduce the concepts of Web Dogma ’06, a generic mindset created to help web professionals avoid a growing problem.

You’ve done your usability testing, you've gotten your results: now what?

Two years ago, Steve gave a talk about the benefits of doing the as little as possible when fixing usability problems you discover in your designs.

Now--after struggling for months to write about this topic in his new book-- he finally knows what he wanted to say.

First person interfaces allow people to interact with the real world as they are currently experiencing it. These applications layer information on top of people's immediate view of the world and turn the objects and people around them into interactive elements. First person interfaces enable people to interact with the real world through a set of "always on" sensors. Simply place a computing device in a specific location, near a specific object or person, and automatically get relevant output based on who you are, where you are, and who or what is near you.

As interface design paradigms have progressed over time, they consistently reduced the amount of abstraction between input and output. From punched cards to the always on sensors that power FPIs -the amount of overhead required to access information and perform actions has decreased exponentially. This trend is enabling a new class of applications to thrive that allow people to access and manage information with minimum effort and where it is most relevant. Google Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, said it well: "these are early examples of what's possible when you pair sensor-rich devices with resources in the cloud. [...] But something has changed. Computing has changed. And the possibilities inspire us."

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:

• Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about your users language and categories
• Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features
• Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas

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.

Effective collaboration remains a challenge for many. How can we make the most of the collective expertise in a team, whilst ensuring that each person can work in a way that enables them to do their best work?
This talk shares both practice-based and research-backed insights on characteristics of high-performing teams, principles for designing an effective team culture and how to create good team habits that stick.

TalkStrategy and the Design of Services

Strategic design is the process of translating game-changing decisions into clear, concise, and complete instructions for execution: the who, why, how, what, when and where of operations. Encoding them into the designs of systems and services allows us to “take more risk while avoiding it.” 
Having it both ways requires dexterity in switching between the abstract and the concrete. It requires thinking and tooling that is at once simple and sophisticated, advanced and primitive. This talk gives two examples of strategic design in practice: within a government agency and a major healthcare initiative.

Designing and delivering great closure experiences for products and business

Face it, all your projects are going to die and you haven’t even designed the end. In a world that is flooded with new apps, services, and products can we really assume that our product won’t be killed off in the evolutionary cycle of the ‘next big thing’? While we blindly focus on creating a user experience for on-boarding and usage we overlook the off-boarding.
Improving the design of endings promises enormous opportunities. Endings improve the accuracy of deleting, reclaiming or removing materials. They raise brand perception through increased communication. Businesses with better endings surprisingly have higher consumer satisfaction. Product creators have an opportunity and responsibility to lead in this emerging field of design. With the world in need of responsible consumer experiences, endings will be a competitive differentiator. 
The talk will reveal how shards of the consumer experience break lacking a coherent ending. It will provide examples of how this can be avoided and the improvements people can make. Techniques and approaches will be shared that help discussion, design and delivery of endings for consumers in your own projects and products.

It’s tempting to create one-size-fits-all onboarding experiences, constrained to a new user’s first day with your product, but onboarding can serve a much broader purpose. Products are constantly evolving. People are constantly learning. And everyone learns at different speeds. 
In this session, Krystal will share how good new-user experiences can be effective throughout the entire customer journey. You’ll see why it’s important to design guidance that addresses a range of product and user situations, and how onboarding makes sense as part of a longer-term approach to in-product education.

Closing Keynote of UXLx Masters in 2021, with Pamela Pavliscak.

Opening Keynote at UXLx Masters in 2021 with Peter Morville.

Design is one of the most powerful social influencers we have in shaping the world, so how can we use design to create a future that works better for all of us? Shifting from linear to circular systems requires a shift in mindset, development of creative tools and the adoption of systemic approaches to how design influences society and the environment.

Disinformation, data bias, dopamine addiction. Is our digital transformation going dystopian? Or has social media simply unmasked society?
Socrates claimed that the printing press was killing words and true understanding, and society now faces a similar debate over ideas and information on digital platforms. Explore technology’s positive impacts in lowering barriers to access and uniting the marginalized. Tackle myths about misinformation and language decay. On the technological horizon, Web3 and decentralization open the path to an inclusive digital future.

Sharing work with your cross-functional colleagues can be a source of major stress and anxiety. How are people who can't do your work supposed to understand your work? What if they think you're bad at your job? Or, even worse, what if they ask you to make changes that are ill-advised or impossible?
In this talk, product leader and author Matt LeMay proposes a powerful yet counterintuitive approach: if you want to collaborate more effectively with your colleagues, show them things that are intentionally unimpressive, unfinished, and incomplete by design. This simple approach can dramatically improve team alignment and engagement--but only if you're willing to work through the uncertainty and discomfort of giving it a try!
This talk provides real-world examples and actionable guidance for designers, researchers, product managers, and anybody else working on a cross-functional team.

Stress changes the human brain, enhancing some abilities and degrading others. In some of the most dangerous industries, creators of life-saving products have discovered how to leverage brain science and smart design to harness good instincts while reducing panic and aggression. They use human-centered design to help their users land airplanes, avoid car crashes, resuscitate heart attack victims, and escape burning buildings. Apply their techniques to your work in any field to create clear, intuitive experiences that effectively guide the behavior of your users, no matter their state of mind.
Key takeaways:

• Learn the secrets of designing for users under stress developed by practitioners in some of the highest-stakes industries like healthcare, avionics, and the military, but applicable for great design in any field.
• Unlock the science of the human survival instinct and learn how moments of peak stress change users’ physical and mental capabilities, affecting their ability to use certain types of designs.
• Apply techniques for identifying potential high-stress moments and crafting experiences that can harness the user’s instinctive behavior, suppress it, or protect the user from panicked-induced actions.

One of the best books on user experience design is Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People. No, really. This classic manual on human relations is more relevant than ever as human-computer interaction increasingly mimics human-to-human interaction. (Consider: conversational design, chatbots, voice interfaces, AI assistants, etc.)
In this session, you'll learn how to craft friendlier, more humane experiences by applying Carnegie’s “Nine Golden Principles to Become a Friendlier Person” to the design of digital things. Each principle is illustrated with examples of good and (hilariously) bad practices. If your app or site knows how to smile, your users might smile right back. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Designers are in-demand more than ever and we need to be creative in how we solve our hiring challenges. Learn how Wendy built entry level design programs with Amazon's UX Apprenticeship, Publicis' Early Careers, and at early stage startups – and how you can build the next generation of design talent at your company.

As the second year of the pandemic began, Christian Crumlish started working with the Office of Innovation in the State of California's Government Operations agency as a product manager on the state's Covid response website (COVID19.CA.GOV). Today, more than one year later, Christian is now lead PM for the state's Covid site, along with Cannabis.ca.gov, digital.ca.gov, and upcoming projects.
Meanwhile, he is still trying to figure out how "product mindset" maps to public-sector work, or even whether it should at all. His goal is to start a larger conversation here about how and where product frames are valuable and when they are not.

The stories we tell the world about our products and services are polished and clear. We invest in these stories, hire shiny agencies and experts to craft compelling messages to inspire our audiences to respond as we hope. The results are undeniable—higher sales, greater connection, better success—so why are the stories we tell each other internally so lousy? Why aren’t we investing time and effort into our own stories, so our communications to our colleagues sing, our ideas land, our pitches hit.
In this talk, I will share how to harness the power of storytelling to communicate your ideas, light up hearts and minds, and catalyze people into action. Want to inspire change in your organization? Craft your story and tell it well.

Notes extend our minds. They offload our memories and allow us to think through complex issues.
People have amplified their cognition using notes for a long time. But something is new: the hyperlink. Mindfully linked notes create networks that extend our minds in powerful new ways.
This presentation offers an overview of current note-taking practices and technologies and shows how a bit of information architecture can help you think more effectively.

What exactly does "working in the office" mean in a pandemic reality world? There are lots of opportunities to reframe collaboration, teaming and leadership to yield the best innovation and meaningful work. 
The place to start is by applying Natalie Nixon's 3i Creativity™ framework: inquiry, improvisation and intuition. 
In this talk, Natalie shares examples and tactical methods to boost emerging critical skills in our new working world of blurred boundaries and ubiquitous technology.

Design leaders have evolved from being responsible for executing design concepts to having a crucial role in driving change across organizations. This is welcome progress, but with greater responsibility comes new challenges, especially when it comes to championing change in organizations likely to resist it.
As design-driven changemakers have risen in the ranks of business, they’ve “learned on the job,” experiencing both setbacks and victories. We captured many of these learnings by interviewing over 40 design leaders and incorporating their shared wisdom in our book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Whether these leaders worked at IBM and Google, a US government agency, or a small consulting firm, their insights and observations are applicable to all and well-worth considering.
This presentation will offer an overview of what we learned. It will cover Top 5 mistakes changemakers make as they navigate the messy processes and people issues involved in driving any type of change. You'll learn how to determine the ground conditions needed for success, how to find and align supporters, how to minimize detractors, and how to repurpose design tools, frameworks, and techniques to your advantage.

Design teams and organizations are confronting rarely-seen degrees of turbulence, unpredictability, ambiguity, and complexity today. Generational trends and macro-economic forces are creating a pressure-cooker for business and design leaders where every decision can seemingly save or sink the company. 
But there are techniques and approaches design leaders can deploy consistently with their business, product, and engineering partners, and within their design teams, that can improve your odds for success. This talk will explore those approaches by examining the role of how systems thinking prepares us for designing in complex spaces, and how experimentation gives us a path forward when we’re confronted with uncertainty in front of us and shifting foundations below us.
Walk out of this talk with a renewed focus on looking for moments of interconnected opportunities, ways to gain the insights you need to have conviction to move forward, and how to bring your leaders along with you as you successfully navigate these new environments and ecosystems.

Most people know about AI through movies and TV shows. This one has an unblinking, red eye. That one crushes human skulls under its metal—and humanoid—foot. But how does the AI seen on screen match up with the science of AI? How does what you’ve seen color the way you think about it? How optimistic you are? What you think should be done, and how you would vote on AI policy?
Join Chris Noessel, keeper of scifiinterfaces.com, as he explains what screen AI aligns with the science, what is pure fiction, and what we should be telling ourselves but aren’t.

AI-enabled systems that are responsible and human-centered, will be powerful partners to humans in the very near future. UX research (UXR) is necessary to create systems that people are willing to be responsible for. This talk describes the UXR skills and methods that are needed for proper data identification and preparation, bias identification, prevention of harm, human-machine interaction design and prototyping, and the critical oversight activities needed for dynamic AI systems to continue to be effective.
These UXR skills and methods support creation of AI-enabled systems that responsibly augment human abilities. AI-enabled systems that provide appropriate evidence of system capabilities and integrity will support calibrated trust (an individual’s balanced view of the risks and rewards of collaboration), and UXR informs what is appropriate in each context, how the AI system will augment the experience, and how the dynamic nature of the experience will be managed. This session will introduce each of these complex topics and provide references for further exploration of these exciting issues.

New tools can help you be more strategic about the impact your can make in your career, projects, and organizations. Nearly everyone wants to make a positive contribution to the world but traditional UX tools haven’t made this particularly easy nor empowered UX professionals to participate at a strategic level.
I’ll explain some of the new tools that can help you leverage your skills to accomplish not only your team and company’s goals, but your own, as well—however you define that.

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but now somehow everyone seems to know. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. Doesn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?
Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket.Or your bank. Or your boss.
In this talk, Noreen Whysel will discuss a framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and the digital harms and dark patterns that, whether we know it or not, violate that relationship. You will come away with an understanding of how to determine that what you are creating is fair, secure and in the user’s control. And that your relationship will be sound, respectful and long lasting.

Designers have been sensing a mismatch between their tools and methods and the needs of a world that operates at scale. This mismatch often results in unintended consequences, as well as potentially harmful outcomes. To mitigate, designers need to take on a systems thinking mindset. I'll introduce you to why this is important, and how design thinking and systems thinking can work hand in hand.

Here is a scenario - does this resonate?
You conduct data gathering in a research study. As the researcher, you place heavy emphasis on how to ask the “right question”. Even after careful scrutiny of your questions, in your interactions with participants, you get shallow answers. This results in lots of chatter afterward about the participant being “good” or “bad”.
Let’s think about the details here.
Do you really ever deliver the question *exactly* as it is written? When was the last time you spoke about a topic that you don’t think about all the time, for one hour or longer? Are your thoughts always well-formed?
It’s time to rethink the way we connect with participants when asking them questions.
In this talk, Meena will introduce the concept of an activity-based protocol, one that invites participants to think more deeply about what they want to share, and in a way that allows them to unravel their own thoughts. By applying this approach, it also inherently removes emphasis on the researcher to craft the “right question”. Meena will share examples from the field that encourage participants to share rich answers, while also allowing everyone involved in the research process to have a bit of fun when listening to participant stories.

If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It may be time for you to look at your design system from a different perspective.
In this session, Ben Callahan will show you how design systems and company culture are inextricably linked. We'll examine how a deeper understanding of each is necessary to get you where you want to go, including:

• An exploration of four types of organizational culture
• An understanding of design systems as a bonafide subculture within an organization
• A discussion of how misalignment between design system culture and organizational culture can create major problems
• An explanation of the two most dominant design system subcultures—collaborative and controlling and how each—while viable—presents its own unique challenges

In this session you will learn the importance of cultural alignment so that you can achieve the goals for your design system faster. You will also be able to avoid past pitfalls thanks to a greater recognition of your newfound understanding of the importance culture plays in a systematic design practice.

s user experience a creative expression? We typically think of creativity as an external force that we don’t control or an artistic talent that we don’t have. The reality is that creativity is a procedural, programmable characteristic of problem solving. Which makes creativity a skill, one we not only practice daily in UX, but one we can improve. And Creative Boot Camp author Stefan Mumaw is going to prove it to you. He’ll not only show you what makes us all creative and what simple changes in our processes can have the greatest effect, he’ll run you through a series of creativity exercises that will prove that a few small creative steps will have you generating ideas in greater quantity and quality.
Stefan will elaborate on the key characteristics of prolific creative output, identifying the obstacles to effective creative training and breaking down ideation into digestible steps, all the while using short, fun creative exercises to illuminate key points about creative practice, philosophy and application.

Here's the deal: Average ideas for average people wins the race to be… average. Innovation isn't magic; it's predictable and repeatable if you know where to find it. Treating accessibility as an extreme use case (not an edge case) generates new valuable products — both digital and physical. 
We'll see how accessible first design is not just the right approach for innovative UX outcomes— it's the smartest.