UX Australia Podcast: All presentations from 2009-2014: Recent Episodes
UX Australia
Interested in responsive design? Richard and Jolanda will share their key insights in redesigning one of the most highly trafficked Victorian Government websites into a smart, engaging experience. Learn about the challenges of responsive design for large websites and how they resolved them. The VicRoads website will go live one month before the conference.
If we think about the city as an operating system, what would the digital interfaces through which we interact with the city look like? This talk will walk through a series of experimental prototypes and discuss challenges and design lessons learned through their deployment in urban space.
In my usability and user research recruiting I’m worried that I’m getting too many nice people who are self-selecting to participate because they are giving and supportive people. To have a well-rounded picture, we need to talk to the jerks. How do I find the jerks?
Running a half day, or, a full day design sprint is intimidating if you have never run a design sprint before. I’ll focus on why design sprints are awesome, tips for how to include non-designers, my go-to design exercises, and provide a sample agenda to get you started.
This talk reflects interests and confusions in user experience design by comparing two approaches to UX, experience as principle or as the subject, and by introducing “logic of behavior” and “aesthetics of experience” developed by Xin at Jiangnan University. It will also discuss how design may participate in the social and economic transformation of China.
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. In 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.
More designers are being tasked with designing solutions where the contexts of use. purchase, and even realized value may be completely separate. This and other factors that will be used to define the unique attributes of “The Enterprise”. I’ll then relate some stories of my 10+ years of experience specifically designing for these environments where scale, complexity, business models, and culture.
Talk show hosts know all about uncovering deep insights – after all, that’s their bread and butter. In this talk, Kimberley from Meld Studios will share what she has learned from watching and listening to the best interviewers in TV and radio. Please note, this will be an Alan Jones-free zone.
Whether you’re drowning in data or struggling for insights the hardest thing can be getting a project out of the gate. Like Johnny Cash sang, the key is to take it “One Piece at a Time.” I’ll talk about ways to rethink starting (or re-starting) a project without getting overwhelmed.
Our devices and wearables collect so much ambient information about us and use it to create great, often unnoticed and sometimes slightly creepy experiences for us. This talk looks at what this new AI can do for us and how, as UX people, we can use the power for good!
How do you change something as endemic in Australian culture as excessive alcohol consumption? This isn’t a typical consulting job. It requires a design partnership. We’ll describe how Hello Sunday Morning and Tobias & Tobias Australia have been working together to find more effective approaches to affecting alcohol-related behaviour.
The internet as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now the one we carry in our pockets; the one users expect to provide information and to facilitate task completion. If you’re looking to create digital experiences that withstand scrutiny and support both needs, this is a talk you can’t miss.
For many of us, wearables are just cool new tech. For people with disabilities, wearables can be a game changer. Heard about the smart gloves that turn sign language into speech? Come on a brief journey through how wearables can be empowering, transforming and inclusive for a different people.
Having worn at least three wearables for over 12 months, people often ask Oliver “Which is the best?”. For a bunch of black rubber bands they all convey fitness tracking in very different ways. He will talk through the key UX issues with wearables and why they haven’t gone mainstream just yet.
As with all complexity in the world today, it is inadequate to use ‘linear thinking’ in siloed disciplines. To create effective interactions between connected products, the design processes have to integrate Industrial Design and User-Interface Design from the very beginning, in order to succeed at all.
Listening is a foundation skill for all designers. We all know what great versus poor listeners do. But what if you could use a simple phrase that imbued you with the qualities of a good listener as well as making the listening experience more personally engaging for you?
MYOB and HeathWallace have created “Feelix”, the MYOB UX Framework – a trusted, scalable, ‘assertive’ benchmark for tactical direction, strategic thinking, and broader UX education. Hear both the agency and client perspectives as they talk through their case study and discuss how Feelix is being used right now by MYOB.
In Australia it’s estimated over 200,000 people a year acquire an infection in hospital, most of these can be prevented by staff simply washing their hands. This talk provides an inside look at the unique UX driven partnership between Southern Health and Isobar, which aims to discover the reasons behind the current lack of good hand hygiene, and create a lasting behavioral change within the hospital environment.
The human brain is slowing down our ability to design. While neuroscience tells us how the brain’s oscillations aid creativity, little has been done to connect theory to UX. Combining neuroscientific theory with live activities, this talk will demonstrate how an understanding of our brains neural physics can enhance UX design.
Have you ever struggled to create a robust evaluation methodology for diverse and complex products? In this presentation, we describe how we have implemented an effective UX framework suited to large enterprises that acknowledges the voice of the user, while managing stakeholder expectations. Presented by pioneer consultancy U1 Group and Telstra.
Professional factions have made it impossible for the business community to make educated decisions – or even understand what UX is. I’d like to see professional barriers broken down. We ALL bring something valuable to the table – if we’re ever allowed to sit at that table. And I’d like to share a model for UX that respects our differences, but provides an easy-to-understand framework on which businesses can build their UX strategies.
If Customer Experience is one of the most important aspects of contemporary corporate strategy and increasingly necessary for survival, why is it also one of the most misunderstood? And if innovation is recognised as the best way to create market leadership and generate long-term value, why do complex organisations struggle to attain it?
Startups are peculiar and how UX fits in (if indeed, at all…) is nebulous. Hilary will share her insights and approaches, failures and successes when working in this strange frontier.
Customer Experience is tackling bigger challenges worldwide. In New Zealand, the ‘Result 10’ team is working to make it easier for people to deal with government online. How do you set out on a task like that, what do you prepare for? We’ll talk about customer-centricity in a complex environment.
Financial services innovation is exploding in London however; there is the emergence of a two-speed innovation culture where banks and start-ups work together and against each other in an uneasy and sometimes volatile partnership. This talk shares the most exciting directions from the big smoke but also looks at the huge opportunities for the experience design skills of idea connection, cross-disciplinary action and collaboration. Find out how what you know is more valuable than you think…
Steve will introduce the War Stories project, an archive of stories about contextual user research and the inevitable mishaps that ensue. He will highlight some of the patterns these stories reveal and suggest some takeaways that this treasure trove of bizarre, comic and tragic experiences point to.
Visualization is the method to represent abstract data or idea as graphics that can aid in understanding the meaning of such data or idea. A number of practical methodologies can be used in represent data, ideas, information in easy-to-understand visual formats in daily work and life. For example, presentation slides, infographics, and UI design all make communication significantly efficient.
Uncertainty plagues user experience, and constantly in the world of deep research emerging as technology solutions for real world problems. While I don’t have any definitive answers on how to capture and represent uncertainty, I have the start of a framework for reference and a couple of examples.
Executive commitment to improving customer experience is an essential ingredient for success, but is often the greatest challenge for CX teams. We’ll share how 15 minutes and an iPad can be the key to send Executives through a ‘one-way door’ to lock-in their support for CX once and for all.
I have used this talk to take my team mates (comprising of Testers, Business Analysts, Developers and Managers) through various scenarios involving a door. It has helped me bring home to them the process of user centred design thinking in a fun and easy way. I talk everyone draws.
Stories create engagement. I’ve been in positions where a story needs to be told, or a story needs to emerge. I’ve also had to tell this story knowing nothing, or knowing everything. In this talk, I’ll share my insights around what to think about when telling your own story.
Based on our recent project Booksy – booking local services on mobile – I’ll share our experiences with designing the local business onboarding process, done in a mobile first approach.
Various styles of sketching are used in UX and these will be demonstrated. I’m no artist, but I can sketch. They are funny or odd and are definitely not fine works of art. While my sketches are ‘bad’, they are good because anyone can do them and they serve to communicate what’s needed in the design process.
In a world of touch screen this and mobile that, why aren’t we as user experience practitioners rocking minority report style software for our research and design activities? This short talk aims to cover off some of the solid reasons why we use old-school techniques but also challenge us as a profession moving forwards in this digital age.
In a world where the perceived value associated with delightful experiences can help set a product apart, how can designers stay on top of our game? What is this intangible ‘delight’ thing anyway, and is it possible to create it? In this talk, Ben ‘squared’ will explore what makes an experience delightful, and whether the systems and processes that we love and rely on are still relevant in an ever-changing landscape.
Today’s digital experiences are splintered between devices, channels, contexts and need-states along a customer journey. These experiences are not fluid and continuous however. They are discrete events that unfold over time and happen with a certain cadence and intensity. This talk is about how to deliver experiences in the right cadence across the right channels and devices.
Currently, there is a big focus on the ‘how’ ‘what’ and ‘why’ of user experience design; the method, the tool and the value proposition. What’s commonly overlooked is the one aspect that affects all of these things – mindset. Uncovering two influential mindsets greatly affects our approach to methods, tools, and ultimately the quality and trajectory of our work.
This talk is for anyone who designs mobile apps and wants to better engage and onboard new users. You’ll get an overview of best practices, patterns and antipatterns for designing first time user experiences, with suggestions for taking the next steps.
Organisations are turning to people with design sensibilities to inform and lead significant changes within their businesses. UX practitioners have the necessary design sensibilities, but few are applying themselves to these new challenges. In this presentation Iain shares his experiences with non-digital design, describes the challenges and opportunities, and provides guidance to help you get started on a similar journey.
In a world obsessed with the success and importance of the ‘individual’ it’s not surprising that we focus our user-experience work on the performance outcomes of a single person, our ‘user’. This talk will look into the emerging practice of Neuroanthropology and how brain science coupled with more pluralistic anthropological thinking; can tell us a few things about what it means to be human and how we can begin to reconcile the cult of the ‘individual’ with the real world of ‘us’.
We developed a target customer experience at NAB, and it looked great. We started using it and it didn’t work well, so we redesigned it. It worked better, but we thought of new ways to use it and redesigned it again. It seems like every month we’ve got something to change or add to it, and that’s just the way it should be.
In this hands-on activity, Mike Biggs will introduce you to the power of the Empathy Map; a quick and simple workshop tool that draws on the knowledge of the team in the room to tease out those key differences between your customers. In less than the time it takes to conduct one in-depth interview, you can paint a picture of your audience, prioritise them, and have your stakeholders walk out of the room in clear agreement about who your strategy is targeting; allowing you to head out and start learning more about them.
Recently, I worked on two experience strategy projects: one – the UX strategy for our own company DiUS, and the other – working with my client to put together a Customer Experience Strategy for her organsiation. This talk summarises the 11 things I found to be important when defining an experience strategy.
In order for organisations to truly become experience-centric, it is critical for IT to shift its role as well. IT has impact on all aspects of how an organisation operates, and this in turn has direct impact on how well the business can deliver value to itself and to customers. Customer and staff experience are at the heart of this shift, as experience is often the only differentiator in an increasingly commodified product and service environment. We’ll explore what an experience-enabling IT function looks like, within shaping experience strategy down to supporting and maintaining the experience-led environment of today. This is a critical (and often-overlooked) part of any organisation becoming, and staying, experience-led.
Discover the power of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and how it applies to strategy design. This technique helps to build participatory practices within organisations through visual and physical co-creation. The method can be applied to design thinking, decision making, team building and organisational strategy.
The conference keynote will be given by Greg Petroff, Chief Experience Officer at GE Software and General Manager of GE’s User Experience Center of Excellence.
Many consultants and designers are starting to be faced with the job of helping a client to connect via a variety of touch points and create a true multi-channel experience strategy. It’s a great opportunity – knowing that your design ideas in one channel can be translated far and beyond. You can give your clients confidence in realising their goals and also help customers know that the brand is ready for ‘on my time. Through trial and error, tears and laughter, we have discovered a range of ways to help clients start the journey to defining a consistent, manageable and own-able customer experience.
This presentation provides practical tips for creating a customer-led vision, strategy and roadmap within a large organisation. We will describe how Westpac uses customer centred design (CCD) techniques to write compelling stories for the future and get buy-in from stakeholders across the business. We will also talk about how we deliver on the visions we set.
The idea of the ‘user experience’ is infiltrating the class room, the board room…and even the cabinet office. Everywhere, small green shoots of design thinking are rising when we need them most. But while the method has transcended the studio, is the rise of design thinking in Australia missing those it needs most – designers? In this presentation Tim offers a short taxonomy of hope, with a skim across work in three states that may just put design back into thinking, including case studies in South Australia, and emerging work in Queensland and NSW.
Thematic analysis is a widely used qualitative method in design research. We will discuss the difference between data driven and theory driven approaches and explore how thematic analysis can be used strategically to generate different insights at various points in the design cycle.
Mark founded Sneaking Duck a few years ago as he believed that buying glasses shouldn’t be like it was. Along this start-up journey he’s had successes, failures, earned the respect of many customers, sadly lost a few forever, won some awards, learned a lot and had some fun!
The idea of “mobility” is rapidly expanding beyond smartphones and tablets that have traditionally defined this area. The emergence of devices such as wearable displays like Google Glass and the Oculus Rift, as well as real-time rich content and scene creation tools like the Structure Sensor present new challenges to how we design experiences for multi-device environments that offer real utility rather than novelty. This session will present case studies across several projects we’ve undertaken utilising these emerging devices and environments with a focus on creating enhanced experiences using a combination of these.
A moment of Wow, a strategy that creates long lasting relationships – that’s how we at Telstra think about Experience Strategy. But how easy is this realistically and how often does an Experience Strategy actually get executed on? In my presentation I will talk about how we create Experience Strategies in Telstra, how we get around the ‘dust collecting’ Experience artifacts, how we learn from our mistakes and why we want to create brilliant connected experiences for everyone.
Does anyone actually get it right all the time? Of course not… Through a candid exploration into ustwo’s own journey in own IP and mobile app development, we’ll see why it’s healthier to assume you’ll get it wrong and the benefits in doing so.
Enabling mobility in the retail environment is usually left to the leaders in customer service; not something you would expect from Government. The new ‘one stop shop’ Service NSW, with help from The Customer Experience Company have designed a mobile application that enables face to face service interactions in a high volume retail environment. This session will discuss the design and implementation of this Customer Flow Management system and the measures that show how much it is improving your experience in dealing with Government.
The Queensland police force is moving to a new mobile information platform that allows officers to conduct police checks from the road; avoiding lengthy radio queues, maintaining higher visibility and getting more work done. This presentation walks through the design challenges we overcame as we sought smarter ways to help police quickly find the information they need, whilst pulling together information from multiple disconnected sources.
What is Responsive web design? What is “Mobile first”? Is responsive the best solution in all cases? How do you wireframe responsive? How do you user-test responsive? Find out the answers to these questions, as well as some real world case studies.
Something shiny, new and happy snuck through the door while everyone was looking the other way; SAFe UX is something more and something “less” Taking the context of “less” UX within the Scaled Agile Framework, or re-framed in this case from a lean perspective, UX is applied daily through routine and repeatable practice at the team level as user stories. At the program level, UX has an architectural perspective across the programmes – this construct offers UX something more than ever before!
Customer Journeys, maps, stories, flows. Whatever you call them they’re a powerful tool for understanding interactions, touchpoints, and moments of engagement between a company and an individual. Given the level of detail possible they often require long cycles, multiple lanes of research and multiple rounds of review to complete. What about a slightly different approach: creating journeys with less information, more inspiration and geared to foster conversations. I’ll take you through the ideas and methods I’ve used to spark discussions, identifying unspoken biases, uncover insights and collaborate with as many people as you can get hold of
Presenting an idea in a visual form is one of the most powerful communication tools a UX practitioner can have but this can be intimidating for practitioners from non design backgrounds. The good news is the success of drawing as a communication tool is less about drawing well than about the ability to draw quickly at the appropriate fidelity required to achieve your goal. This talk covers judging the correct level of sketchiness, some starter drawing techniques and a special challenge at the end to either validate the talk or invalidate it in a blazing tumbleweed of humiliating glory.
There is a lot at stake when designing services to support youth mental health and wellbeing. To ensure they are safe and effective programs are designed on the basis of research data, past evaluations, health planning frameworks and theories of behaviour change. However in order that such programs are relevant, meaningful and useful to the young people they aim to benefit, they must also take into account the context, experiences and perspectives of those young people. This presentation shares our approach to combining user experience and evidence-based approaches to the design of youth mental health services.
Fun for the whole UX family. Ages 7 years and up. Our imagination can fail us. Our ideas about the future can become repetitive, stale and start to lose their zest. What if there was a method grounded in good design practice that would be fun and sparked your imagination? The method has arrived and it’s been gamified. It’s called Pick 3.
Mobile has crashed the UX landscape, challenged many of our UX truisms, and made us rethink some of our user-centered design processes….and it’s awesome! In this talk, we’ll take a whirlwind history tour of technology and UX in the last 20-odd years. We’ll then cover what I reckon as the main challenges for UX about mobile. In particular, animation and gestures – their importance and the fact that they are so damn hard to test early, how mobile has created crazy cross-channel experiences, and how mobile standards have yet to converge.
Great online content is like having a child. Conception is the easy bit; it’s raising it until its ready to leave the nest that takes all the effort. Similarly, a completed Content Strategy represents the start of a journey, not its end; the hard work has only just begun. This presentation will cover a few of the tools and workshop formats we’ve used to help some of NZ’s biggest organisations get their content ready for the big wide world.
Evaluating products and services with end users in multiple countries is increasingly important for companies with global market aspirations. Ilana will provide an overview of the tools and methods available to UX teams, product developers and marketers for conducting multi-national user testing to evaluate and improve is products. The presentation includes interesting client case-studies, including an ‘out of the box’ experience study of a medical device managed by Optimal Experience in 14 countries on behalf of the UXalliance. Ilana will cover pro-tips and pitfalls learnt from many years conducting international user research and testing.
You run usability tests on your designs, but do you test the structure of your site? How do you know it’s better than the old site? Online tree testing lets you test several proposed site structures against each other to see which is most effective. You get quick objective feedback from real users early in the design process. We start with tree-testing concepts and run a live tree test, then dive into the how-to’s of running a good study and the lessons we’ve learned from several high-profile projects. It’s a great chance to add another practical technique to your design toolkit.
Open2Study.com was just an idea in November 2012. Four months later it went live, and now it is a Free Online Study platform with 23 free high quality subjects and more than 34,000 enrolments. This presentation is about the Agile and UX magic we used to make it happen.
Take a tour around the globe and get a glimpse inside 10 of the best and most innovative intranet designs (including mobile) we’ve seen including some from our Annual Intranet Innovation Awards. This showcase will give you many ideas to use in your own intranet designs.
Creative processes have adapted to business demands, our brains haven’t. Psychologist Graham Wallas (1926) posed a model for creativity, a simple 4-step process. I’ll cover step 2-‘incubation’ and how it can fit into project plans so that we can produce truly innovative ideas with less effort in the same time-frame.
What causes a behaviour? Why do we act so illogically at times? Are our decisions being made for us? Behaviour Design is a new field based on understanding the mechanisms of decision making, and designing systems to fit the way people actually behave.
I’ll talk about using design methods to explore and discover what gives a person meaning in their life. I’ll refer to my own experiences of career seeking in sharing this idea.
So often digital and online projects are a set and forget affair. There is an enormous amount of effort put into the design and pre-launch, but like a baby after its birth, a digital project needs ongoing love, attention and regular feeding to fulfil its potential into adolescence and adulthood.
If there’s one problem UX designers are familiar with, it’s the problem of getting their designs implemented – a 2012 survey of practitioners revealed the number one reason usability problems go unfixed is that the solution conflicts with the decision maker’s belief or opinion. This humorous talk reveals how I threw together a mixture of psychology research and conjuring techniques to get more of my work implemented as I felt it should be.
This fast Pecha-Kucha style talk summarizes a year’s quest to explore novel cross-device gestural UX, collaborating with Citrix Labs. The goal was to define a set of UX principles via paper prototypes, threshold mapping and user studies. This informed later design iterations for a digital demo.
This presentation centers on a user research project conducted in the emerging market of rural India, and how even a small bit of information about real-life users can supplement and sometimes override numbers-driven product development. I’ll outline the origins of the project, along with the planning, execution and findings from this very interesting group of people. The influence the research had on the overall project will be discussed as well. We’ll also have an interactive discussion about the misconceptions we sometimes carry with us into research. We’ll finish up by using the research findings to discuss design ideas for emerging markets.
We helped ANZ Bank’s KiwiSaver Investment Statement become the first to achieve the WriteMark Plain English Standard. KiwiSaver is a national retirement savings scheme — the investment statement would be mailed to over 200,000 existing customers, so the stakes were high. Our combined approach of user-testing and assessing against an elements-based quality standard helped to create a document that was clear, concise, and accessible. We’ll describe measures for determining success and monitoring return on investment, and constructive ideas for building accountability into a document project.
During May 2013 the Meld Studios team conducted a three-week long observational and contextual research project for a cafe chain in Western Australia. After 110 hours of observation in 18 locations, nearly 200 interviews, and thousands of photographs we had collected a lot of data, and learned a lot more about the conduct of field research. This presentation will look at the research objectives, research plan, our experiences in the field, and reflect on the extent to which we successfully captured – and were able to communicate – what we saw, heard, smelled, touched and felt.
3D printing, wearable computing…the future is here! This fast paced talk looks at the rise of the Maker Culture, and how we can apply the hacking/making philosophies to solve design problems. There may be robots. And lasers.
In our struggle to get a weekly stream of customers coming in for usability testing, we’ve got a few stories to tell about what has worked well and what hasn’t. And how we now have at least 5 customers in for testing every. single. week. Pro tip: don’t get the receptionist to do your usability testing recruitment.
From Google Glass to the fabled iWatch, wearable computing seems to be everywhere. But is it really the big societal shift that people claim it is? This fast paced talk will look at the type of behavioural shifts to expect, triggers for change and potential barriers that may prevent change.
Having woken her dormant creativity at a UX workshop Rebecca was inspired to sit in the back row at TEDxMelbourne and complete seven sketchnotes in one day. She will share her story and 7 tips to help you think visually and take your handwritten notes to the next level.
We instantly recognise the design craft and appeal of an iPhone or a Porsche, but why are our experiences with telcos, insurance companies, airlines, banks and other services regularly so awful? The answer is usually that they have ‘just happened’ and not been designed. This talk explores two themes – designing for people’s lives rather than their lives lived out on screens; and how to design coherent multichannel experiences for people’s messy, complicated lives.
Requirements-driven product definition is a sure-fire way to get 100% of the wrong product launched. The assumptions that requirements are based on are usually not accurate enough to determine the exact solution those requirements dictate. Instead, teams should focus on creating a series of hypotheses that define potential solutions to their business problem business problem and then work together to learn which of these hypotheses are keepers and which ideas to kill.
Miles will talk about his experiences at Google, working on large scale projects where data is critical to understanding the user experience, and has become an essential part of the success (or failure) of projects. He’ll also talk about how data can be used (and abused!) as a tool for iterating design, the different ways in which stakeholders see data, and how you can embed data into your design craft and team.
The conference keynote presentation will be given by Stephen Anderson, author of the book Seductive Interaction Design.
Kevin will show you a selection of simple meeting interaction frameworks that get actionable results and help course correct when meetings aren’t hitting the targets that they should, even if you aren’t in charge. You’ll facilitate agreement faster in design discussions, manage feedback better, and explore web design problems in productive, inspiring multi-hour workshops.
This talk offers insights from real experiences working with top-level execs (including the CEO) on major UX projects to achieve tangible results. As UX designers we constantly clamor for a seat at ‘the table’, but what happens when you actually get there? How do you react and assert yourself as an authority of design that is perceived, respected, and valued as such, not just someone who ‘makes pretty pictures’ or ‘plays with stickies’? My goal in this talk is to set up design leaders for success by raising their ‘executive IQ’.
This is the story of how a regional Australian Health Insurer with a history deep in steel manufacturing was able to value not only the efforts of designers but the authority of design itself… Kind of – well, sort of.
Imagine building a massive network of private schools that costs only $5 a month for students to attend. Bridge International Academies of Kenya is doing exactly that, and mobile technology is integral helping the schools run efficiently. But how do you design a complete enterprise management system to run on a $50 phone? Motorola wanted to create a phone for low-income illiterate people. But how do you design a handset UI that is usable by people who cannot read? This session will walk through examples of how organisations working in developing countries are using mobile technology in novel ways to solve real problems.
New Media artists have spent the last four decades exploring the aesthetics of modern technology and interaction and it’s effects on human behaviour, relationships, and evolution. Join Matt Nish-Lapidus, a practicing new media artist and designer, to explore the history and language of new media and interactive art, how it relates to our work today, and what we can learn from the seminal works of important artists and innovators including David Rokeby, Stelarc, and Steve Mann.
We are all bombarded with surveys every week, with some good, but many quite bad. With the availability of free online survey tools, it is easy for anyone to “just ask users some questions”; however, it is deceptively easy to collect meaningless data. By understanding how certain survey questions can result in biased responses, it is easy to design a survey that will get you exactly those answers you were hoping for; or, if you prefer, to actually design surveys that are free of any such biases.
Designing social experiences requires three elements: a process to deal with complexity, the right set of intrinsic motivations and an effective social usability. This presentation, with more than 120,000 view on Slideshare, gives you the tools to use these elements in your projects, with hands-on use cases.
If you work in the creative world, chances are you work on a team. And every time you start a new project or join a new company, you’re starting from scratch. Who are these people? How can I get them to respect me? How can we create the best solution together? Or (more commonly) how can I work with them without ripping my hair out? This presentation helps you recognize your personal problem solving style, gives you tips and tricks on how to use that info, and, most importantly, asks you (the audience) to contribute your real-life challenges in order to help you with actionable advice.
Digital technology is advancing at a rapid rate. From old Nokias to Apple iPhones, we have seen users move from pushing physical buttons to swiping touchscreens. Now, we are beginning to see gestural control take over devices such as gaming consoles (Xbox Kinect and Wii), TVs and cameras – and gesture control is going be the next big thing in terms of interaction. Anyone involved in interaction design or user experience better get ready for the change.
This presentation focuses on the realities of designing successful social networks in the enterprise, including the promises and challenges of going social, woolly objectives to watch out for, leadership and employee behaviours that can make or break a deployment, the critical importance of using organisation-specific language and terminology and how to bust those crazy adoption targets.
Information architecture design is difficult at the best of times. With the additional complexity of targeted content, integrated collaboration content, enterprise search and social content – AMP’s collaboration platform is a complex system to design and deliver. This presentation will provide a sneak peak of the inner workings of the machine that delivered this innovative and leading platform to the 7000+ employees at AMP. As the design lead, Octavia will take you through the problem space, approach and the learnings along the way to one integrated Information Architecture.
As we squint into a bright future, let’s first glance back at the user experience industry’s well-meaning, but mostly murky past. UX’s foundation is a sordid mix of lies, shams and idiocy: We never designed experiences and things like mobile have always been adjectives, no matter how many times we sold them as nouns. Now we’re hyperventilating about designing responsively across channels, like that will change everything. We’re still talking about users and those bald apes haven’t changed in thousands of generations. No device-based solutions nor any other rocketship technologies are going to save us.
This presentation will argue that as digital matures and becomes one again with physical, immersion in cross-channel experiences will be rather achieved through abstract navigational grammars and place-making, rather than through literal, skeumorphic, in-your-face representations of the real, and will offer a few rules of thumb for turning information patterns into navigable space and actionable places.
There are literally hundreds of techniques available to UX practitioners – but which techniques are the most effective? We all have our favourites, but how do you know if you’ve chosen the right combination for your project? We chose to answer this question by tackling a project where time was largely a non-issue – not a Mickey Mouse personal project, but a real ecommerce redesign project for a real client: the Mathematical Association of Victoria’s online bookstore. We managed the client’s expectations on timeframes to allow us to apply every technique in the UX toolkit. So began our quest to determine, once and for all, which UX technique was most valuable.
This presentation will give an introduction to two dominant models of design-driven innovation – hypothesis-led and insight-led. It will look at the advantages and disadvantages of each; and look at the issue of localised optimal solutions and what this means for innovation.
In this presentation, I will be talking about a unique user research project which sought to explore the user experience of public spaces in New York City. I will describe the challenges we faced in adapting research methodologies traditionally used in the digital space to the physical world, dealing with hostile stakeholders, the mistakes we made along the way, and ultimately the success we achieved. I will also describe the methodology we developed (loosely described as ‘agile ethnography’) and provide practical examples of how it can be used in other user research projects.
Growing consumer businesses in search of new markets need to take emerging market users seriously. But designers often have problems empathising with emerging market users – we can be blinded by what we want them to have, instead of seeing what they really want. In this talk, I draw on the learning curve I went on in my time in emerging market research at Nokia, and give you a new framework to understand and design beautiful and relevant experiences for emerging market users.
This is the story of Tatts Group’s digital revolution, peering into the last five years of the company. It covers the struggles and successes encountered on the way to turning the group’s fractured online presence into one of Australia’s most visited websites.
The touch device landscape is diverse, fast paced and changing every week, providing new challenges to designers with each new incarnation of device or operating system. But there’s more to challenge designers… thinking about inclusion of people who may have visual, cognitive, hearing, motor or speech impairments…or some of all of them due to age. So what do we mean when we say “designing for all” in the world of touch devices, what makes it so darn hard to do and how can we create user experiences that are inclusive for this hugely diverse group of people?
As the complexity of our digital world increases with tremendous variety in screen dimensions, resolutions, dots-per-inch and input methods, appropriate navigation design and use of proportion is more important than ever. Through better balancing of navigation element sizes, use of space, positioning, appropriate iconography and use of responsive design, a more frictionless user experience can be achieved for competitive edge.
How does a major government department with over 60 completely different sites trying to be ‘all things to all people’ transform its web presence into a something coherent and usable? This project was a case of real life being messy and User Experience imitating life! Come along and get the inside track on how we got over our first reaction of throwing our hands up in horror, and after various false starts and mistakes, developed an approach that has valuable lessons for any large-scale web project.
All UX projects have a community of some sort associated with them. Whether we’re referring to our communities as users, audiences, stakeholders, or people our techniques are focused on engaging with those communities to ensure that we are designing the most appropriate solutions. It is not surprising then, that it often emerges that a UX or concept design job is as much a community management strategy piece as a UX piece.
In co-design those impacted by the proposed design are actively involved as partners in the design process. Co-design is being used in government, community and health sectors to extend traditional consultation methods and increase program reach and impact. Co-design approaches are also being used by corporates to engage internal stakeholders and customers, identify new service opportunities and improve existing ones. But what is it, why do it and how?
Jaro is a “Gamified Crowd Funding Platform” that launched in April this year. Users of Jaro pay to play in the knockout tournament for a cash prize that is split between charitable causes and one lucky winner. Chris will take you through the Journey from the first patent lodgement in 2008 through Jaro’s launch in 2013 and beyond: How they got started, how they got stuck and how they learned from failing fast and failing hard. They’ll wrap up with lessons learned after launch.
…getting 100% participant compliance and delivering meaningful results. On a recent project we undertook a cultural probe as part of our research activities. It turned out to be very successful in that every participant turned in a completed diary and camera full of photographs but most importantly, because of the way we structured the participant activities, we were able to take the data collected and formulate very meaningful results that drove our design decisions. We’ll explain how we achieved this success and set out some recommendations for others looking to run their own cultural probe or diary study.
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 the ringer off 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.
Just as the medical profession knows what needs to be true in and around a person to have a healthy body, what if businesses and designers had a way of thinking about what makes up a ‘healthy’ service experience? I will explore the beginnings of such a model.
Smartphone penetration is growing exponentially in New Zealand and the banks are leading the charge at the ‘enterprise end’ of mobile design. I will present a thorough assessment of New Zealand mobile banking offerings against a clear framework of user experience and interaction design principles.
This presentation will describe some of the current challenges in retailing – showrooming, comparative shopping, intelligent agents – and describe how to provide value and gain customer loyalty.
Over the past 10 months we have conducted over 78 user interviews and test sessions, resulting in around 60 hours of footage from our mobile ‘sled’ and wireless testing setup in the Boomworks lab. We’d like to share some of the insights we have gleaned from these sessions, punctuated by actual video and commentary from users as they interact with mobile and tablet interfaces.
This presentation will explore the navigation challenge for large sites being used on small screens. It will go back to first principles and look at the purpose of various navigation types then explore ways of achieving the same goal via a small space.
If you’re new to mobile usability testing, fear not. It is not as hard as you might think but there are some key differences to testing a traditional website in a lab that you need to be aware of. This talk will outline 10 things about mobile testing tools, technologies and methods that I’ve learned from testing mobile sites and apps over the last year.
As the number of types of device grows, each with their own interaction model, designing and developing becomes more complex. How can you deliver a consistent interaction design across devices? With mobile design patterns.
So everyone’s got smartphones these day yes? But not everyone who has a smartphone can see, hear, move or handle cognitive loads without impairment. So how can we include everyone in our mobile design? This talk shares some top tips on how to create an inclusive mobile design and reveals some things you may not know people with disabilities can definitely do on a mobile device.
The proliferation of mobile device form factors has prompted a re-evaluation of how to best support mobile device users. Responsive Web Design is a promising technique for cost effectively responding to this challenge. However, to date most discussion has revolved around content-driven websites. But how might this approach apply to web applications? How does it compare to other approaches, such as device-specific workflows? In this talk Saasu’s Chief Design Officer, Grant Young, will explore these challenges and the Saasu team’s response to them, illustrated with examples from the Saasu online accounting application.
Voice controlled interfaces and natural language processing are becoming normal. Major mobile platforms now have voice integrated into the operating system, and Google has been engineering its voice search experience in leaps and bounds recently. Voice interactions will transform how we interact with computers and – just like the touch interfaces that came before them – mobile devices are driving the change.
Mobility has exploded in the consumer space, and this has forced companies to respond, delivering mobile apps, or responsive web designed website. Hidden within organisations, an equally large sea change is occurring. Bring your own device (BYOD) policies are being forced on IT by staff whose personal phones and tablets are better than corporately provided devices. This session shows screenshots and examples from the innovators around the globe, and provides a framework for planning enterprise mobile solutions.
I love Axure RP as a prototyping tool – it’s in fact one of my favourite software (jeez that sounds geeky). But I want to talk to you about why it can be dangerous (it sounds harsh, but yes – dangerous) to use a prototyping tool such as Axure.
The precursor to designing successful tablet applications is to gain a thorough understanding of how people use those devices today. This talk will detail my original research in this domain as well as review other user and market research to highlight when, where, why, and how people interact with content on tablets. Insights are drawn from various research using surveys, diary studies, interviews, and observations. The talk will also discuss trends that are starting to emerge, challenges, as well as implications for designing for tablet devices.
Do you “do innovation”? Is it critical to your success? How do you turn ideas into tangible, profitable projects? I want to introduce a method we use at Vivant that was effective and efficient (and minimises meeting time). The result: an energised team, solid project proposal, and traction with the clients.
Soft skills are the interpersonal, communication and behavioral skills that can make or break a UX practitioner. Sure you can prototype and card sort, but how are you at selling ideas, negotiation and constructive criticism? This talk explores what soft skills are most useful, and hardest to master, for UXers.
If you’re a designer new to UX, it might seem depressing to hear you won’t automatically succeed just on your awesome design skills. However, this can be a good thing. Here’s five things I’ve learned about making successful projects and happy clients – none of them to do with good design.
Air travel has been quietly transforming over the last few years. Technology is influencing all aspects of the experience, from the materials used in aircraft, dynamic cabin lighting, through to how we plan travel, check in, spend our time onboard and remain connected throughout the entire experience. During this session we’ll share innovations affecting the future of airtravel and the UX challenges in designing them informed by practical examples from designing solutions for Qantas, Emirates and Virgin Atlantic.
Unique experiences across channels, that are bespoke to a user’s needs, goals and motivations in context, and fulfilling these with minimum user input, are the Holy Grail’s of UX. In this talk, we will explore technologies that help understand users and create engaging experiences through intelligent profiling and learned data.
UX work can be hard enough when you have to educate external stakeholders about its value within a truncated timeframe and the constant drumbeat of innovation faster now. But what if your challenge lies within your organisation? How do you develop, much less maximise, the UX capacity of interested supporters, while also engaging those who don’t see UX as their responsibility (or worse, see it as frivolous)? The key is to use tried and proven community organising strategies to develop an internal UX community.
You’ve done the research and designed a fantastic user experience, but it wont go ahead until the client commits! I’ll share some techniques to help you connect your clients deeply with their users to advocate for your user centred designs, recommendations and innovative ideas.
Get a glimpse inside 10 leading-edge intranets from organisations around the world. This fast paced session will share examples from a number of different industries including award winning sites from the Intranet Innovation Awards. Be able to take away award winning ideas and apply them in your organisation.
“I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning,” wrote Robert Venturi, father of postmodern architecture. We contemporary experience architects are devoted to the very modernist objective of intuitively satisfying user needs. Nevertheless, I’ll suggest that becoming a bit more postmodern might just be a good thing.
Designers use many different techniques and methods, but they are all eventually performed. Whether it’s a workshop, pitch, interview or even a report, we take on a role and play it. Design is a performance, and I want to talk about different approaches to performing design.
Current UX approaches are based on problem finding and solving. The focus on dysfunctions contributes to sapped morale, political games and decision paralysis in multidisciplinary teams. Positive Design is an alternative strength-based method which promotes positive change and innovation through human-centric cooperation and collaboration across organisational boundaries.
Following the trend of ‘Shit [insert possessive pronoun here] say,’ the UX team at Boomworks have put together a short presentation of actual user & client quotes, which will be interlaced with what we would have liked to say in response.
100 years ago ships in England were being sunk for money. Hundreds of people were dying. Enter Samuel Plimsoll; champion of the common man. His mark, a painted circle with a line through it, persists on ships today. Showing that idea driven solutions, that solve problems, outlast technologically driven ones.
The oncoming tidal wave of Big Data, with its rapidly evolving ecosystem of multi-channel information saturated environments and services, brings profound challenges and opportunities for the design of effective user experiences that UX practitioners are just beginning to engage with in a meaningful fashion.
It lurks everywhere, part of everyday life. And yet in most cases opinionitis has minor flareups and is forgotten. But there are certain conditions which can cause opinionitis to transmute into a deadly syndrome that sweeps all before it. And certain environments which allows opinionitis to rage unchecked. Those conditions, and that environment, is the product development team.
This talk describes a project to test the new NAB retail store design and how it became a catalyst for increasing the respect and strategic use of experience design in a large organisation.
As UX designers, do we really know our audiences, and do we fully appreciate how some might experience things differently to others? What are we doing to design for the broad range of experiences and abilities of our users?
Change aversion is a natural response, which technology often exacerbates. Evolutionary changes can be subtle and occur over many generations. But Internet users must sometimes deal with sudden, significant product changes in applications they rely on and identify with. Despite the best intentions of designers and product managers, users often experience anxiety and confusion when faced with a new interface or changed functionality. While some change aversion is often inevitable, it can also be managed and minimised with the right steps.
Designers research people to understand their needs, challenges, and the environments through which they navigate their day-to-day lives. By working through our observations in particular ways and questioning the insights we derive with a focus on key areas, we increase our chances of conceptualising and realising breakthrough ideas.
This presentation highlights our beloved ’3-in-a-box’ model that we have introduced at Citrix, a 20+ year old enterprise software company, to foster cross-disciplinary partnership and thus, innovation. Our model represents a pressure cooker, that forces 3 core domains of Engineering, Product Management, and User Experience to bond closely from end-to-end on a project to final delivery in a very tightly communicative and collaborative manner.
This presentation will describe how a small Project Team within Suncorp combined Agile, Lean and Usability techniques to simplify and improve online Service delivery and increase the productivity of 16,000 Suncorp employees.
Has UX changed for you? Not so long ago user experience expertise was bought in for occasional projects, reporting to Sales or Marketing or Engineering. Now consultants regularly work with experienced internal UX teams, with their own methods, problems and even ideas... Complementing in-house teams isn’t always easy, there’re the mysterious journeys the team have taken, the ideas they’ve kept and those taboo decisions that must never be mentioned. Drawing on personal experience of work with in-house teams I’ll explore projects where I’ve got it wrong and what I’ve learnt from my mistakes
At Atlassian, the developers outnumber the design team 25-1. We have a strong Developer on Testing initiative and a famous Developer on Support rotation. Both programs make us stronger in the areas of QA and support. To truly become a design led organization, we asked ourselves: why not Developer on Design?
When tooling around with all the technological toys, tricks and trinkets at our command there is a constant danger of losing sight of the common core of the matter the humans in the mix. However in this case I’m not talking about users. I’m talking about you the designers, developers, product managers and well, yes... ok the users as well. Can’t forget them now can we. Can we? My basic premise is that it doesn’t matter what process you use or what flavour you are. What matters is the people you have and how they play together.
This presentation will explore how we map the phases of the customer journey against specific areas of inquiry related to customer needs and then apply this framework to a review of competitive and comparative brand experiences. The outcomes of this analysis deliver both qualitative and quantitative results that inspire our clients and us. In turn, the insights gained enable our design team to deliver far more compelling experiences.
What does your office look like? Is it a big space or a small space? Open plan or partitioned? Have you ever thought about the influence of space on your design work? We’ve been experimenting with space and time constraints to explore new ways of interacting with our environment to produce awesome designs and get stuff done.
Life brings with it many uncertainties. That we all die, however, is not negotiable. As technology creeps into more aspects of our personal lives, we must begin to consider what death means for the interactive technologies that we design and build. For example, have you ever considered what should happen to all your saved emails after you die? Whether you are designing banking systems, attempting to grow an online community, or building an online store for a retailer, there is no escaping human mortality. In this talk, I ask the audience to consider death and its impact on such interactive technologies.
I’ll explain the process of designing a 4 and a 1/2 star app. I’ll share our successes and our lessons learnt from the project.
A quick introduction to the Design Studio Methodology and how I use a version of it to quickly produce wireframes while getting buy-in from the project team and stakeholders – in just a few hours.
You can’t learn what you already know. In an epic quest to truly uncover customer innovation I share learnings and unlearnings from the early stage of our iPad app project. Goal 1: Unlearn complexity; Goal 2: Relearn simplicity. Why? To deliver on true business innovation – the one that is for the customer.
We have seen a proliferation of sites lately adding social networking buttons to every page of their website. But do users want to share your website with their friends and if so, how do they want to do this? I will share some of our recent usability test findings.
Sometimes testing your designs in the lab just isn’t going to cut it. Get out on the streets and test! I’ll share 30+ tips for testing on the streets, cafes and shops. Find out why chocolate is the ultimate lure, why women trump men and why cardboard is your new best friend.
Designing for mobile is challenging. I’ll discuss 5 things which everyone should be considering when they create their mobile strategy, such as “having an app isn’t everything” and “context is everything”. I’ll include some examples of mobile strategies that have been successful and some that have been failures.
The GOMS keystroke level model is a simple technique that allows you to quantitatively compare the efficiency of alternative designs. Its powerful, compelling and can be done in a few minutes yet most UX professionals have never heard of it. A 10 minute introduction is all you need to get started.
After printing out key sections of bbc.co.uk onto what has now become known as the ‘Wall of Shame’, the BBC decided to embark on an ambitious project. The goal was to create a global experience language to drive consistency and coherence across the diverse, cross-platform portfolio of BBC products and services, all of which had different brands, audiences, contexts of use, and most problematically, design teams.
Culture change is hard and it can take a long time. Over the last decade the understanding of how to do usability (properly) has become mainstream. We’re too impatient to wait that long for accessibility and inclusive design to become mainstream as well; after all, isn’t access a fundamental part of the user experience?
Australia’s cities fuel our economy and define the quality of our urban life. But as Australia’s population ages we need a different strategy for the future. What role can design play in more integrated decision making for a more productive and human-centred city? Adelaide’s 5000+ is a national urban pilot bringing design-based thinking to public policy. Can design be used as a tool to more creatively engage people in shaping the cities we all want? Are design-based methods the key to more effective urban governance? Does Australia’s design community have a role to play?
Designers must continually learn to survive. New technologies, new philosophies, new roles and responsibilities, new tools and methods all keep designers on their toes throughout their career. But one skill persists no matter where designer find themselves, the ability to ask Why? Asking customers why they do what they do or believe what they believe unlocks the foundation for inspired design. Asking organizations why they follow their strategies unearths good habits or dangerous ruts. Asking our most traditional institutions why things are the way they are uncovers the potential to remake our society. Constraints, myths, assumptions and perspectives can all melt with a well-timed and well-framed Why? Let’s apply some toddler magic to our adult careers and ask Why?
What does it mean to be human? How can an understanding of what humans are, have been and could be, mean to a designer? How do you begin to access a more meaningful world, for you as a designer and the people you are designing for? Taking an Anthropologist’s mindset allows us to glimpse the beauty of what it means to be human. How we as designers can create objects, interactions and services not just to meet needs, but to meaningfully grow the people who interact with our work, be they customers, colleagues or our future selves.
This talk is about the journey from ‘secret design business’ to ‘design transparency’. It’s my own journey at Atlassian, relevant to anyone who is on, or about to embark upon, a similar journey. Industry leaders paint a picture of how things should be, and that’s great, but I’ve always had trouble bridging the gap. HOW do I get there? What do I do first? They make collaboration and design processes seem simple, but the truth is they’re hard. You may need to change both your own, and your team’s habits. This talk aims at bridging the gap by learning through some of my wins and even more importantly, my failures.
Microsoft’s “Metro” design language first appeared on Windows phone, and has now been adapted for Xbox and Windows 8. Since its appearance it has generated a combination of praise, confusion and copious discussion among interaction designers. Is Metro a valid attempt to evolve the art of interactive products and services? Or is it a deliberate strategy to commoditise interaction design to the point where it requires less design, and less designers?
If ‘good enough’ is the new ‘above and beyond’, how do we make sure that we’re building the best experience? This final ramble will attempt to bring together underlying themes that constantly emerge and how we can make the rules of agile work.
Share Tref’s experiences on a Lean UX project working in quasi startup mode. See him present it assisted by an agile scrum board, a backlog of story cards and not a single powerpoint slide. He’ll discuss ideas of negotiation, compromise and surrender, giving up some control and knowing how much to retain, and earning the respect that allows you to do it.
Agile development is fast and lean and requires a close knit team of people working and collaborating day to day and hour to hour. We’d like to talk about our approach as an external UX team needing to integrate closely with a client and their agile development team. We’ll demonstrate how we retain our working space and how we synchronise and integrate our team into the agile development team without having to camp out on their doorstep bathed in fluorescent lighting.
Through the lens of product reagileux-2012leases for JIRA 4.2 and FishEye 3.5, this presentation will walk through social & cultural difficulties involved with inserting UX practices into a classic developer-driven agile culture, and the tools we used to overcome them.
The UX industry has settled into maturity, with definite methodologies, and approaches. In no way attempting to create another one, this talk looks at the permaculture principals of community, fairness and sustainability and how they can neatly fit into a balanced design ethos. This talk will reference content from http://permacultureprinciples.com.
What do natural selection, fibonacci, agile development and parenting have in common? This talk will explore the reasons why agile is the way to go, naturally.
This presentation will describe strategies and techniques to overcome design resistance and get work done. These include knowing when to stop designing, how to pair with developers, annotating cards, using a UI bootstrap and pattern companion, and the importance of a trusting culture.
In this presentation, Ben will share some Lean UX methods and approaches to get out of the deliverable business and to start becoming an integrated part of Agile software delivery teams - to collaboratively develop great experiences in short time frames.
Agile is changing the way we create software. Design, and Design Thinking, is becoming pivotal to business success. The UX game is changing, and you need to step up! This talk will challenge your thinking about your approach to design, and introduce you to new methods for increasing your influence in software and business strategy projects.
Sometimes it seems that kids today are born with an innate understanding of technologies their parents had to learn. In this presentation, James & Gerry will describe how school children in NSW interact with computers and the Internet. Based primarily on interviews and observational sessions with approximately 100 children in primary and high schools, they will tell a story (that may be surprising to many) of traps and pitfalls and poor design that makes mastery an unnecessarily difficult challenge.
The discipline of design is reaching a point of clarity. This is a point in time where our value is no longer questioned and we begin to share a common understanding of our role, responsibility, methods and processes. This point of clarity is one of maturity, and with this maturity comes the opportunity to tackle more complicated, nuanced, and intellectual disciplinary challenges. I view this as a chance to move beyond both normal practices of usability and the constant drive towards innovation, and an opportunity to bring personality and attitude to the artifacts we introduce into the world. In this talk, I'll explore this chance for discursion, and describe a new form of authorship: one that builds upon, rather than rejects, our rich history of thoughtful and responsible design.
While designing a simpler hand-held device for controlling a recipient's bionic hearing, the presenters navigated many design challenges. Working with industrial designers, firmware designers and electrical engineers, they learned as much about designing compact devices as they did about innovation in large organisations. Hear about the ethnographic research approach. See actual concept sketches and wireframes. Learn how we did it.
In a weird, navel-gazy kindof way – and totally leaving aside what a talk is actually about – it's been really interesting watching people present at UX Australia conferences to date. So here's a look at how they've been doing that.
Connected and Smart TVs herald a resurgence of the big screen as the heart of entertainment and information services in the connected home. But what's the role of the big screen within a multi-platform service? We share insight gained partnering with the BBC to design a new experience of news.
Design teams use 3 things all the time bluetac, postits and sharpies. We're forever segmenting bluetac into the right sizes and sticking it onto paper. This should be easier, sexier, smarter and way cooler. Wait! a solution is at hand – follow the production journey of the world's first Bluetac Gun.
Your sister has had another baby. Nice. Now you've got a dilemma. If you go to your favourite ecommerce website and buy her that little set of onesies, you'll never hear the end of it. Because every time you come back to the site, you'll be besieged by bodysuits, blankets and tiny, reversible hoodies.
Life happens offline but increasingly our interactions take place online. By looking at Ocado, the world's largest online grocery retailer, we can examine how this service-driven model ties together what happens on the touch-screen to what takes place on the warehouse floor in order to deliver one seamless experience.
There's more to measuring success than analytics. There. I said it. How can we define success in a way that doesn't restrict design? I'll share some observations on challenges, pitfalls and success, using examples of measuring experience design at Vodafone.
Albert Einstein said 'We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.' So where does the new thinking come from? I'll share a very strange experience whereby I gave away the tools, became a participant and let everyone be the facilitator.
Often the most obvious assumptions about users turn out to be wrong. This talk uses a case-study to consider how a brief but comprehensive research phase helped challenge obvious-seeming business – and designer – assumptions about the needs of students.
It's 1989. There's no internet. No mobile phones. You want to book a flight. How do you do it? By looking at 'how things used to be' we'll explore the impact the digital & technological worlds have had on how people interact with, and what they expect from, service providers.
Now your apps can see, hear and feel! Digital sensors are flooding through our daily life and this is one of the key challenges UX practitioners face over the next 2-5 years. Rob will explore how you can use these new streams of sensor data to create dynamic new experiences.
In 2006 Air New Zealand set out to redesign the long-haul flying experience. In 20010, they unveiled the Skycouch, the world's first lie-flat economy-class bed. This story is one of world-class innovation, inventive design research and old fashioned hard work.
Designing experiences for web for the desktop environment is something many of us have been doing for a while. Toss in mobile, sprinkle that with some social integration, a native app or two and things suddenly start getting a bit more interesting. How do you approach this always moving target of multi-device, multi-context & often multi-role?
In this talk, I'll be describing some of our recent research on Passenger Experience in airports. I'll show some of the ways we make sense of the complexity of service, from how we investigate it, to how we describe and model it.
The talk discusses challenges for designing the user experience of applications beyond the desktop or mobile screen. It draws on research projects from this realm and a case study, where we designed a public display showing the household's energy usage, for which we introduced chalkboards as a new prototyping technique.
What is the future of shopping? Will consumers research, browse and purchase as they go about their daily routines? Just as we have seen GPS allow us to navigate in real time, smartphones are allowing consumers to gather information and make purchasing decisions with the same ease. But how well do these devices and virtual experiences work with our current retail landscape and how can digital user experiences begin to influence these environments? Based on research done with consumer using smartphones in Best Buy stores we can begin to explore the impact of these devices not only on how we shop but on how these spaces may begin to change to accommodate consumer behavior.
Increasingly, designing effective mobile interactions requires companies to think about how they can create connected, contextual, and conversational services in a consistent yet device appropriate manner. Here we present our recent work and lessons learnt developing a strategic design framework to span 1ft, 2ft and 10ft contexts.
The future of design is everywhere the customer touches our product or service – digital or physical. User experience practitioners must move beyond the screen to designing a holistic customer experience that is seamless across channels and devices. In this session, Samantha will provide specific recommendations for designing successful cross-channel experiences.
How to overcome badly managed change? How about treating the entire change process as a designed user experience? This case study with a difference will illustrate design principles applied to creating a positive user experience in the introduction of new ways of managing business information.
Usability testing is our training ground. It's where we hone our skills - through bitter experience. Speaking of bitter experience, Matt and Shane have a presentation again this year. To help you avoid the same mistakes yourself, we'll attempt to make every possible testing mistake in a live usability test.
Using the FlavourCrusader mobile application prototype as a case study, this presentation considers: how social technologies can assist in achieving sustained changes in people's food habits; design approaches for sustained behaviour change; and rapid testing and research techniques in a group testing environment.
This presentation is about how the UX practice is changing and how UX practitioners and UX teams around the world are designing user experiences for a global context. Our goal is to share what people are thinking about how they work in UX practices in global, cross-cultural, distributed team environments.
This practical presentation is aimed at helping you get your mobile services into customers' hands early in the design process, and the different ways of exploring mobile user experiences to better inform your design.
Learn why gamification usually sucks and how you can really put the heart and soul of game design into designing experiences. Use game mechanics to make your products more engaging, but don't go too far
The EchoViz team will discuss the challenges of working in a surgical environment as researchers and UX designers. They will offer practical advice and engaging stories as they tell you why this is the most exciting and meaningful place for user experience designers to work.
Prototyping GUIs is a creative & analytical juggling act of requirements, data, technical limitations, appeal and edge-cases. Mockupitis is a term I coined to describe common errors that creep into a UI prototype. Join our discussion of common oversights and tricky situations, and some methods and tools to overcome them.
We all have different roles and responsibilities in projects, so isn't it only natural that we'd have different objectives and priorities too? Learn from my experiences with trialling 'total transparency' in projects, which has seen cross-functional teams acknowledge the 'agendas' of others, thereby enabling a more collaborative environment.
What does it take to get a User Focused Design process introduced into a large Australian Health Insurer – some pitfalls, some observations and just a little bit about bathroom design.
How do we influence experience in a large organisation? I say the old 'get engaged early' and 'get buy-in' are red herrings. From my experience, what needs to happen is to build relationships with product managers to show them not just what we do, but why we do it.
Recently, Digital Eskimo and the Powerhouse Museum collaborated to create Water Worx. Through this project, Anthony will reveal how co-design built trust and confidence across the project team. He will also present a range of successful formal and informal co-design, prototyping and testing activities from the project.
Five tips to focus content creators on the 'why' (eg objectives and strategies) of a new online initiative rather than the 'how' (eg a fancy drop down menu or twitter channel) based on two and a half years of content coaching in NSW government.
Designing for cognitive disabilities is often thrown into the 'too hard' basket. This talk will cover a brief overview of cognitive disabilities and as many practical 'designing for cognitive disabilities' tips that we can fit into a 10 minute slot!
The design wall is a great collaborative tool, however the team needs to be in one location. With increasingly distributed teams, who in some cases never meet face to face, how does one implement a design wall? This is the search for a solution to find the Virtual Design wall.
Cognitive psychology provides insights into the minds of our end users. But how might this field help us understand the importance of client involvement in the UX process? Irrational behaviours such as the "IKEA Effect" and the "Not-Invented-Here Bias" indicate why stakeholder involvement is so critical to a project.
To design appropriate products or services, designers need to understand the contexts in which the product or service will sit. Janna will demonstrate practical ways for designers to consider levels of context from the beginning of a project and how to integrate this thinking into every facet of the project.
How do you design a mobile money service for people who’ve never had a bank account? Or an address book for people who’ve never had an address? Rachel will share her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities designing for global markets will present to the user experience industry in the years to come.
How can we develop more and better leaders to help build our profession and deliver great experiences? We can broaden our view of what a UX leader is and focus on both practice leadership and change leadership skills.
Service Design is about more than systems and touch-points. It is about understanding human experience and creating the pathways people take through life.
Before the detailed design of a complex service concept starts, there are four pieces of context that need to be established: The strategic context (why are we doing what we're doing?) The business context (what are we changing?) The user context (who are we developing the service for?) The capability context (what skills do we need to do it?)
In organisations large and small, technology underpins the majority of customer service interactions. But, what do you do if you can’t afford to update systems? In this talk, Anthony will explore recent experiences designing services in large corporates, when tweaking technology was not an option.
Service design cannot be practiced to its fullest extent without the capability of capturing and expressing what a service is.
NGOs and companies have a lot in common, but they think they are very different. In some cases they absolutely are and in some cases they are not. We have worked with several NGOs and several corporations and realised that each service design projects needed differing approaches and ways of thinking.
Both urban design and sustainability are about creating better places to be. What role can service design play in supporting these practices?
After spending many years consulting to corporations, Opher Yom-Tov will share his recent perspectives designing from inside a service organization.
The hardest part about user experience design is not the design work itself, but getting the organisation and the technologists to implement your vision. Matt presents a method and toolset to help you affect a structured decision making process between business, technology and user motivations, ensuring your designs are implemented.
How do we ensure that what we design actually ends up really working, once people start using it? We'll chat about moving from design to development, with a concentration on specifying experience design artifacts for those who have to glean meaning from our work: developers, business stakeholders, and other teams.
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.
c Grounded by Westpac experience there is value to those that are battling to embed UX practices in the corporate environment as well as providers that can help battle this challenge from the outside.
This talk covers overview of touch/gestural interaction; how touchscreens change the way people interact with technology; learnings from touchscreen projects; best practice for educating people on how to use gestures; how to design for other types of environment and social interactions that influence touch interfaces and the customer experience.
We all believe truly innovative cultures to be right, yet in many ways they are rare in large organisations. This talk focuses on sharing experiences of the agony and ecstasy of building leading innovation teams projects in 12 global markets in stores from 35sq.m. to 160,000sq.m over 15 years of retail design leadership.
After user research has discovered content opportunities what is the transition that needs to occur for the research outputs to activate a content strategy? This presentation will discuss how NDM are trying to understand and test content consumption and discuss approaches to being influential with the content experts.
What is Augmented Reality and how is the consumerisation of the technology changing people's experiences and relationships with the real-world, other people and themselves? How do we as practitioners approach defining and translating this so it enhances our experiences and interactions within our environments, rather than just be novel and throw-away.
Interaction design is often focused at the interface between a person and a system in the form of a series of request-response actions. But interaction design can be positioned at the strategic level when the interaction designer looks at the transition between interactions & touchpoints; and the aggregate effect of these interactions on the overall service experience.
As UX practitioners we focus heavily on the user, but this can cause us to undervalue what can be the most crucial input into a design solution – the client. A great client has excellent domain knowledge, harbours years worth of ideas and is able to clearly articulate their goals. This talk will provide tips to make every client a great client as you work together towards a better solution.
How can you quickly ramp up your knowledge in a new domain?, engage stakeholders in the design process and vision, ensure the project runs smoothly? In this talk we will share our experience in using participatory design techniques for tapping into internal IP to unearth ideas through problem-solving brainstorming and prototyping, and to ensure engagement and buy-ins from the stakeholders.
We all know that usability testing can sometimes miss the mark, no matter what we do the test subject can never be completely unaffected by the situation they are asked to take part in. This was never more obvious than our first usability tests on a multi-touch, multi-person device. What then?
At SEEK, we value insights supported by evidence that provide a deep understanding of the utility and usage of our products. This helps us prioritise enhancements that will result in the biggest improvement to experiences. I’ll discuss a couple of case studies from the past year.
I’ve worked in media company portal design for 10 years and have decided they the enemy of the users. Portals are monsters that exist for their own benefit and provide little to no enhancement to the user’s online experience. Using examples and drawing on what we know about users, we will take a look at why the era of the portal needs to end.
In recent projects, some key stakeholders have preferred the look of my wireframes to the look of the visual design guide. The visuals looked great, but what was it about the wireframes? Should I stick to sketchy style in future? Make them deliberately look less finished? But then how do I get honest feedback on my work?
Developing a compelling UX strategy and presenting it in a form & format your business stakeholders can related to is a good way to get traction for user-centred design, especially with stakeholders who don’t fully understand or appreciate the value of great UX.
Relying heavily on the work of others, you the audience, and props – Matt and Shane continue their journey to identify those nuggets of insight and technique that form the basis of the interaction designer’s craft. Come again this year to enjoy more of Matt and Shane’s unique brand of not preparing.
A Tale of Two Portals: Rod Farmer and Anton Sher present as a case study the conception, design, and delivery of the recent AIMIA awarding winning “Best mobile product or service” – 3 Mobile iPortal. This presentation will discuss mobile strategy, designing for different devices and platforms, and building product awareness.
As a design manager in a large organization, I’m often asked by our UX design providers:What happened to my deliverable? It’s been a while and…nothing? Drawing on real-life experience and insight, this presentation sheds light into the gloomy interior of the black box of corporate design management.
This presentation will guide people towards assessing, understanding and discovering value in order to make valuable stuff in the world; zero in sharply on the on the 'analysis' or 'up front piece' of product development i.e. at the strategy stage, when products are being planned; look at how to implement ‘value questions’ as part of product planning, so it will provide practical tips along the way.
Having listened to many great case studies at conferences like this one, Michelle wanted to get down and dirty with her audience at UX Australia this year, to reveal the challenges faced in a recent project.
Nobody in the UX field is showing their work or the process behind their work out in the open. It's time to pull back the kimono and show our stuff.
In December 2009 Object Gallery invited us to respond to a statement addressing the challenges of sustainability in design. We chose to use this opportunity to introduce the Change Agents project, which is a collaboration between Digital Eskimo and the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) at the University of Technology, Sydney.
To get your users beyond just not hating the product and closer to not being able to live without it, it takes keen attention to the relationship your design has with the user. I’ll show you samples from research I’ve done of how a few organizations have made designs that people want to come back to, that make ordinary things less ordinary and sometimes even pleasurable.
This session explores the imaginative and atmospheric use of real time biometric feedback within interactive digital environments. What can we measure, react to, and creatively leverage when implementing individual and group biofeedback? Are there currently accessible, effective and accurate devices? Are there any advantages or disadvantages to the use of biofeedback?
Designers constantly deal with the ill-defined to help people negotiate uncertain situations or artifacts, but how well do we understand our own ways of dealing with ambiguity? Using examples, I’ll discuss three approaches to ambiguity that can inform design, and how these approaches can affect peoples experience of products.
In the red corner, the reigning champion of video on the web: Flash! In the blue corner, a new rising star – HTML5! Will Flash continue its winning run or has it met its match? Who should UX practitioners cheer for and why? How will this affect how we design sites with video? Should we even care?
As service designers our work typically ends with the design ‘blueprint’ and our involvement is often cut short of the implementation work so critical to the quality of the service. What is the most appropriate model for service designers when the project reaches implementation: conductor, film director, screenplay writer?
This talk is about how we use Agile Acceptance Tests. These tests are a mix of a function test and an acceptance test. First the developers complete the UI layouts from the UI Guidelines and Wireframes. Then the UI is tested using the test scripts that have been created from the user stories.
Looking for ways to engage my quirky client who found it difficult to get involved in the grit of interaction design. Usual suspects, reams of A3, coloured pencils and quick sketches were encouraging, but one flippant comment set the tone for future design sessions. Fuzzy felt. Felt personas, shiny interaction buttons and Silverlight sequins.
Giving and taking critique are fundamental design skills. In the UX field a common source of design critique is from usability studies. My talk addresses how we can deliver the results of research in a way that builds up the design, rather than just points out flaws. As UX professionals, how can we make sure we critique rather than just complain?
Having trouble creating useful User Experiences? You’re probably bad at expressing your (UX) emotions. Discover why finding the right words for the right things is one of the most important things you can do when designing your next User Experience. And yes, there might be a few Madonna references.
A presentation by a trio of developers on how to get usability done by hook or by crook in a large and slow moving environment. Getting people on your side, maintaining interest, and aiming for outcomes that produce stability.
There is an endless list of wickedly complex systems that thousands, millions, billions of people interact with every day. Think of the medical system, the school system, the tax system, the transport system or the voting system. Users come into contact not just with one or two, but with dozens aspects of these societal systems every day. Wide design is about how designers who work for or with the Government can practically design wide system evolutions that work for people.
The way businesses perceive design is changing. Businesses are awakening to design as something that can help solve organizational problems, drive meaningful innovations and inform business strategies. Or at least that’s what we’re being told by the popular business press.
Join Stephen on an epic journey analysing the Gordian knot of over 400 customer centred design projects for Westpac. Learn about the journey, the challenges and the insights that come from such a task. Help start the discussion how consultants and CX teams can build stronger relationships through ongoing research that crosses the boundaries of individual projects.
Anthony Colfelt, Creative Director at Different will show how to form a solid, visionary yet credible experience strategy by becoming a protagonist in product development. He will explain how this interleaves with a product strategy or a business strategy; and how this can benefit you and your organisation or clients.
We often discuss the need to be designing for an experience. And we talk about the importance of experience design - and design generally - playing a strategic role in business decisions. But we're less forthcoming when it comes to discussing what is an experience strategy?
UX consultants can be great at giving others advice - but how many of us truly live by what we preach? Sam Ng presents 3 truths and a lie about employing UX in building a software as a service company.
User research, prototyping, and interaction design are some of the stock-in-trade of the modern user experience designer. They're applied to the design of digital contexts in hundreds of projects around the world every day. But less common, and perhaps much more interesting, is the application of those techniques to the design of physical products like the Cargoo.
The Airbus A380 is the flagship aircraft of Qantas. Despite a significant budget being allocated to the design of the in-flight entertainment (IFE) system, it already appears to be outdated and in need of a refresh. Looking to current models of interaction, this presentation discusses the uxd history of the A380 IFE and examines what went wrong and why.
iPhone + Twitter = awesum? Not always sometimes iPhone + Twitter = teh sux. Even though Twitter's API creates a level playing field in the world of iPhone Apps the variety of experiences avialable via iphone applications is seemingly endless. From bare bones read only type functionality to paw friendly touch interfaces for cats. Oliver and James explore twitter on the iphone and mobile user experience design.
Commercial off the shelf (COTS) products don't often lend themselves to customisation. And when they do, the customisation tends to be driven by feature-level requests. User needs, if they're considered at all, come in a distant last. So to see a COTS product turned into an engine for a user-centric solution is a rare and beautiful thing.
Itsme is an on-going project that aims to design and develop the next generation workstations based on a radically new metaphor called 'Stories and Venues'. This presentation reveals a step by step activity focused on defining and developing both the interaction paradigms for ITSME and its interfaces.
Designing the experience for multiple channels is not enough anymore. In order to create a fluid and cohesive experience, we need step back, capture and coordinate the interactions between the different media. In this session, be exposed to the set of tools available for cross-channel design including the Hyperwireframe and Experience Map as holistic visual representations of the overall user experience across locations, time and channels.
User Experience designers and Information Architects are more and more likely to be dealing regularly with the challenges of rich data presentation. This talk examines some approaches to the analysis and presentation of rich data sets on the web. Drawing on the presenter's own direct experiences from large scale projects in the pharmaceutical, educational, aged care and consumer advocacy sectors, it will discuss tools and techniques for synthesising the needs of users and business owners into useful and highly usable interfaces and interactions.
Few activities in business follow rigid IT-centric lines of thinking more stringently than the selection of an IT platform as core and fundamental to the company as its reservation and management system. And yet we can still improve these projects by taking a human-centred view of the problem, and designing from the outside in.
"101 Things I Learned in Architecture School" by Matthew Frederick delivers practical, experience-based advice to architects. Where's our equivalent? Where is "101 I learned in Interaction Design School"? Well, let's get started. You nominate a number from 1 to 101. I translate that architecture principle into an interaction design principle. If I can't, then you get a go.
Good content is essential to good user experiences, and to making good information architecture work. I'll highlight two ways to include content quality in the scope of UX: involving content owners in a Delphi-like review of website (or intranet) structure; and delivering practical writing specifications to help subject-matter experts produce useful content - even if they're not natural communicators.
Early project information and documentation e.g. scope, project objectives, business requirements often take an organisational or technical perspective in describing the future system. A UX strategy on the other hand takes as its start point the perspective of those who will use the system. We define the development of a UX strategy then, as the process through which project information is critically translated and interpreted into a description of the future system from the perspective of the user experience. Our process starts by taking existing project information including user research and translating it into relevant user stories.
One of Atlassian's core problems is the difficulty of sharing and manipulating content in one application from within another. The Design Engineer assigned to the project of resolving this problem, Lachlan Hardy, will lead you through the design choices and implementation decisions that produced the new open dashboard which allows simple powerful content sharing from external sources on the web as well as our own products.
We've all heard it. Customer experience should consistently engage a customer across all touch points. This utopian vision speaks to our souls and warms our empathetic hearts it can also fry the mind. This talk will highlight the challenges of creating an integrated customer experience, then share practical models and techniques that help break it down to size - interaction by interaction.
In this talk, writer and researcher Alex Wright will take us on a guided tour of the many ways people have collected and shared information over the years: from the earliest folk taxonomies to the origins of writing, books, libraries and early hypertext systems that in some ways surpassed the present-day Web.
We (Design Researchers at the People and Systems Lab, QUT) do a lot of work with video, collected in our usability lab and in the field, but we rarely show that video to other people. We've found that by turning video into visualisations it's easier to compare different videos.
Playing games is more fun than work, right? So if we can combine games and work, work will be fun. Design games can help you learn about your users, or help a design team generate better solutions.
Let's talk about examples of really bad UI/UX design collated from around the web/mobile/software/etc. Everyone can email me their favourite bad examples in the lead up to the conference and I'll collate and host.
Why are some robots perceived as being cute while others are just plain freaky? This is a (mostly) irreverent exploration of recent robots and an introduction to the uncanny valley hypothesis.
The agile movement, which grew out of the arena of software development, has much to teach user experience and visual design. A concentration on the thing itself, less time wasted on pretty but non-functional deliverables, treating clients as partners and flexibility can only help designers achieve more, better and faster.
A brief overview of how car makers are either supporting or sabotaging their precious brand image through HMI design.
Design visualisations are information products that communicate how new products or services will work. The way they do this is by showing the new product or service in action, using a combination of text and pictures to tell the story of the future user experience. Design visualisations can stand alone as documents, but are often presented to audiences for the purpose of communication, consultation or (most usefully) design collaboration.
In this talk, Dr Chris Khalil of News Digital Media (NDM) will explain how NDM are using an innovative web/mobile based approach to Cultural Probes (digital scrapbooks) and other research tools, utilising an array of low cost and freely available web and mobile applications such as Tumblr and Facebook.
To design an interaction you must commit to writing a narrative of human behavior mediated through time and space. Immersive Social Media sites, because they are built on the collective participation of individuals, can only be effectively guided by means of a researched and learned examination of social psychology. It is the interaction and interface designer's job to understand how social media ecosystems are likely to evolve, given the rich power of Ajax and Flex to creative immersive experiences with users.
We need to sell UX but not all organizations have the same level of interest and receptiveness to UX. Some just don't care. What should we know about an organization that will help us sell UX more effectively? What questions should we ask about organizations, its people and its culture? What can we learn from organizations where UX has become part of the DNA? What factors can increase our chances of promoting UX successfully now and in the future? We will tap into more than 10 years of experience in selling UX and share the successes, pitfalls and failures.
In this 'warts and all' case study we'll report on a project to design a multi-touch gestural and tangible user interface for a retail store. How do you design a UI that bridges the physical and the virtual? We will cover the challenges of designing for gestural and tangible users interfaces, including design for 360 degrees and simultaneous control.