Schedule

The Most Harmful Profession

In the early 1970’s prophetic designer Victor Papanek wrote, “There are professions more harmful than design, but only a few of them.” That’s more true now than it was 40 years ago: Never have so few people, so young, had such direct impact on so many. Our decisions as designers directly affect billions. We give people email apnea—causing people to literally hold their breath. We’ve made social media more addictive than cigarettes with the top minds of our generation working to distracting us, all in the name of monetizing those lucrative eyeballs. But it’s not all bad: To design is to cause behaviour change, and behaviour change is the solution to this centuries top-five diseases. “The Most Harmful Profession” is an exploration of the harm and the hope for design in an Internet-scale world.

Build for Speed: How to Prototype and Test Any Product in Five Days

The current methodology for building applications is broken. Most teams go through the classic agile pattern: ideate, build, launch, measure, iterate, repeat. Even when executed efficiently, this process stifles innovation under the burden of engineering and product launching. Using real-world examples, Daniel and Jake will show how to test your theses more quickly and increase the overall effectiveness (and happiness!) of your whole team.

From the Front Lines of Multi-Device Web Design

It’s hard enough to design a great mobile or Web site but what about experiences that span these devices and more? Join Luke for a set of lessons learned designing Web products that attempt to embrace simultaneous and sequential multi-device use. What worked and, more importantly, what didn’t?

The UX of news: The good, the bad, and the downright ugly

In the last year Martin Belam has helped Trinity Mirror launch two news-related sites, UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d. In this talk he outlines how years of experience designing at places like the BBC and the Guardian, and consuming news, were distilled into designs that were purposefully optimised around the mobile sharing of content.

Information Entropy

Will information technology affect our minds the same way the environment was affected by our analogue technology? Designers hold a key position in dealing with ever increasing data pollution. We are mostly focussed on speeding things up, on making sharing easier, faster, more accessible. But speed, usability, accessibility are not the main issue anymore. The main issues are not technological, they are structural, processual. What we lack is clarity, correctness, depth, time. Are there conter-techniques we can employ to turn data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom?

Psychophysics, Qu’est ce que c’est?

Design can only really work when we know the bizarre features of human perception and cognition. The best designers have always understood this instinctively. Science is now beginning to catch up.

Designing the Good Life: Ethics and User Experience Design

“You cannot not communicate,” psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick once famously said. Similarly, whatever we create as user experience designers influences others - even if we don’t intend it. And as software is eating the world, the domain of our responsibility is rapidly becoming all-encompassing. Layer by layer, question by question, this talk invites you to reflect on the moral dimensions of your work.

You live and die by your ideas

Designers live and die by their ability to innovate. The problem is we’re expected to generate great, new ideas for our clients everyday. How do you do this in a highly pressurised world? Peter helps global organisations innovate by better understanding their products and the people they serve. With examples from his recent redesign of the airline boarding pass, join Peter as he talks about unleashing your ability to innovate and think disruptively.

Redesigning For Millions

MailChimp underwent a dramatic transformation in 2013. The entire app got a new look and was made responsive for a mobile, collaborative workflow. Redesigning for millions of customers is scary. With so many moving parts and entrenched customer workflows, how do you move a product forward without leaving users in the dust?

Aarron Walter, director of UX at MailChimp, will share the back story of the project, including the research that led to the redesign, the challenges of the creative process, and the design patterns that made the build out possible on a tight deadline.

Open for open questions

Many design and usability research methods cater for delving into a focused topic: You set a goal, establish hypotheses, gather data and gain insight to help create the proof, story, a view point, strategy, or whatever you are looking for – within the given budget and time. However, there can be situations where your research may focus too much on individual ‘trees’ that it cannot provide much information about the ‘forest’. For instance, what if you have perfect usability test data to prove the effectiveness of your design, but your client may be more interested to know what types of people would buy the product (and get disappointed to hear that you don’t know)? What if your polite research participants never want to talk with you about negative things about your design? This talk will share a few anecdotes exemplifying the importance of factoring in the space when exploring broader viewpoints to the user research questions, through informal social encounters, serendipitous interactions, and activities that are designed for cross-examining their results.

The Physical Web

• We’re thinking about the IoT all wrong, there is likely a backlash coming
• The IoT is focusing on coordination when discovery is the killer ability
• This is a fundamental rethinking of ‘the web’, moving from virtual to physical interaction
• Every device can contain a URL, them means anything and offer more information or interaction
• Companies are likely going to try to own this, under the guise of security, circumventing the open nature of the web
• The W3C needs to get off its ass and do something about this. If it waits to copy an industry standard it will be too late.

Beyond progressive enhancement

The time is 2020. The inflection point has long passed. Most web traffic is now coming from some manner of portable device. And if Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (and many others’) predictions have come true, we will have truly reached the time where “...[technology] will just be seamless. It will just be there. The web will be everything, and it will be nothing. It will be like electricity.”

If “seamless” is what we’re after, we have a long way to go :-) This presentation will challenge us to think about the role of the web going forward. What steps can we begin to take to create seamless interactions between the web and other platforms? What would a seamless web even look like? How can we ensure the web remains strong amidst all the new technologies that are on the way?

“I HATE THIS… ★★★★★” How EVO evolved the digital magazine - and why it resulted in a revolution

Clearleft worked with Dennis Publishing in 2013 to design a new form of digital publishing product. It tested well with users, but on release the product caused confusion amongst existing subscribers and resulted in bi-polar reviews and strong opinions. Rob Boynes and Ben Sauer will explain what happened and examine why the product is so important in publishing user experience - an industry where traditional magazine subscriptions are falling fast and replacement revenue is elusive to many.

Making meaning in an Internet of Things

Something exciting has been happening to our everyday objects. Things that were once silent and static can now sing, glow, buzz and be tracked online. Some are constantly listening for sounds, sights and touches to translate into meaningful inputs. Others have the ability to learn, refining their behaviors over time. They can be connected to one another as well as the Internet. As people continue to interact with data in all aspects of life, they will expect their digital devices to deliver real-time, visualized, networked feedback. As designers, the emergent Internet of Things presents a juicy opportunity to pioneer new territory in rich interaction, but it also can backfire, filling people’s lives with more frustrations over technology than ever before. In this talk, Carla Diana, who works on smart objects in her studio and the award-winning firm Smart Design, will share stories from the front lines. She will explore both the opportunities and the challenges that come with designing interactive hardware/software products and ecosystems through a series of case studies and design experiences.

Designing how cities happen (after the internet)

As people, buildings, infrastructure and objects lead increasingly connected lives, we now have an historic opportunity to reshape our cities. While the ‘smart city’ movement has focused on making urban processes more efficient—sometimes necessarily—there are more interesting, and arguably more radical, possibilities that might shift how cities actually happen—how citizens engage with city-making, for instance, and how we might enable systemic changes within and across cities. As a ‘fugitive from UX’ working on major urban projects worldwide, Dan will share insights and experiences into how the dynamics of the internet are beginning to in turn transform the dynamics of cities and buildings.