UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

The Long Neck Versus the Long Tail

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:55:18 GMT

Speaker: Gerry McGovern

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

Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:32:00 GMT

Speaker: Jeff Gothelf

Designers have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their vision for products and experiences. As technology has evolved to offer more complex and intricate interactions, the deliverables we've been creating have followed suit. Ultimately though, these deliverables have come to serve as bottlenecks to the creation process and as the beginning of the negotiation process with our team mates -- a starting point for conversation on what could get built and launched.

Lean UX aims to open up the user experience design process with a collaborative approach that involves the entire team. It's a hypothesis-based design approach that tests design ideas early and often and, along the way, builds a shared understanding with our team mates that eliminates the dependencies on heavy documentation and challenging communications. Lean UX is a solution for the challenge of Agile and UX integration while it also works effectively in traditional waterfall and other hybrid environments.

The Mobile Frontier

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:31:14 GMT

Speaker: Rachel Hinman

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

In this talk, Rachel will provide:

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

Design for Engagement

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:38:00 GMT

Speaker: Jesse James Garrett

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

Journey mapping as insight tool: a healthcare case study

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:43:33 GMT

Speaker: Kim Goodwin

If you want a team to see the world through users' eyes, there's nothing quite as powerful as involving them in ethnographic field studies. However, teams can still struggle with translating their field experience into product features and design decisions. Journey maps help teams structure and share field data, identify opportunities, and determine what kinds of tools and information to offer and when.

The talk is illustrated with field data and a map of the patient journey through serious illness, based on recent work with PatientsLikeMe.com.

Refined Design: Thinking Beyond the Device

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:18:21 GMT

Speaker: Derek Featherstone

Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.

In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.

After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.

Microcopy: How to write small, deadly copy for all occasions

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:37:06 GMT

Speaker: Joshua Porter

The difference between a happy user and a confused one is small…many times our success using software hinges on the smallest of interactions. In this talk Joshua Porter will discuss microcopy, or the tiny bits of copy that helps users in times of need. Examples include reminding people to use the right email address, informing them that their credit card is not needed, or that they don't have to create an account to continue. In many ways an interface is made up of many of these bits of copy…here's how to write it well and make users confident they're on the right track.

Discover and act on insights about people

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:43:15 GMT

Speaker: Steve Portigal

Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

Presenting UXLx 2013

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:31:54 GMT

The Architecture of Understanding

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:57:17 GMT

Speaker: Peter Morville

Peter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb, one of the most popular visuals in our discipline, encourages us to go beyond usability by creating products and services that are also useful, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.

Now, for the first time, Peter explains why we must go further by creating "architectures of understanding" -- and why designing for insight and inspiration is in the best interests of our firms, our users, and ourselves.

Living with Complexity

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 14:03:59 GMT

Speaker: Don Norman

Complexity is not only good, it is essential. Our lives are complex as are the activities we do. Our tools must match the activities. People think they want simplicity, but they are wrong, as evidenced by the fact that when offered the choice between a very simple product and one with more features, they opt for the feature-laden one. We don't want simplicity: we want understanding. Complex things can be made understandable: that is the role of good design. One solution is modularity, which is why we have so many different kitchen utensils. Which is why owing a portable computer, a desktop computer, a smart phone, and a pad computer -- all of them -- makes sense for some people. Each is used for a different reason, in a different setting for different purposes.
Managing complexity is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools.

Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Squandering the Cognitive Surplus

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:53:59 GMT

Speaker: Christopher Fahey

Clay Shirky coined the phrase "cognitive surplus" to describe humanity's untapped mental energy, energy being put to spectacular and beneficial use in collaborate efforts like Wikipedia. User experience designers are rapidly learning how to tap into this surplus through social and psychological insights into human behavior, inviting users to channel their intellectual energies into technologically-mediated interactions that people find emotionally rewarding and deeply compelling.
But where is the line between compelling interaction and compulsive behavior? With so much enthusiasm about "gamification", game mechanics, and behavior change, and with millions of people tagging other people's content and checking in every time they move around, designers of interactive systems should be asking themselves: what kinds of compelling and powerful interactive experiences actually enrich our lives... and what experiences simply drain our time and energy while providing nothing of value in return? How can we be sure we are using these psychologically engaging new interaction design patterns to make people's lives better?

We'll look at some real-world "anti-patterns" of interaction design, where human behavior is, to put it bluntly, being exploited. But we'll also look at how well-intentioned interactions might inadvertently dehumanize users by failing to address their deeper personal needs. Finally, we'll try to define some guiding principles around how to create engrossing, even addictive products and experiences that nonetheless empower and enrich the people who use them.

Cage Match: Mobile Web vs. Native App

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:43:38 GMT

Speaker: Josh Clark

Get ready to rumble with this mobile battle royale: native app vs mobile web. Your referee Josh Clark pits the polish of native apps versus the accessibility of the web to help you choose the right platform for your app and audience. It's a decision that hinges not only on tech specs or audience reach, but also on subtle cultural differences, user needs, and audience personalities. (Hold onto your seats, folks, the winner of this prize fight may surprise you.)

Content / Communication

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:41:28 GMT

Speaker: Kristina Halvorson

The way we talk about our content has significant impact on the way we treat it within our organizations… and, therefore, the quality of the content we produce.
How can we make the shift from treating content as a commodity to valuing it as a business asset? With a little storytelling and the help of a few powerful metaphors, you can begin to turn the tides.

Critical Thinking Skills for UX Designers (or Anyone, Really!)

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:16:04 GMT

Speaker: Stephen Anderson

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

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

The Cross-Channel Experience

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:17:00 GMT

Speaker: Nick Finck
No matter how many departments your organization has, to your customers, it's all the same business. They expect a cohesive experience across all touch-points with your company, regardless of whether it's related to advertising, customer service, social presence, or the actual product or service you provide. The satisfaction of your customers, and thereby the success of your organization, depends in no small part on your ability to create a cohesive and consistently high-quality cross-channel experience.
Some examples of disjointed cross-channel experiences are:
- The customer has to inform the customer service representative of what the website says about their own return policy.
- The specifications of a product online does not match the actual product a customer goes to pick up in the retail store.
- The experience of the mobile application is far superior to the experience of the standard web application or software application.
- The customer has to make three different phone calls to get their account changed because the information is stored in three separate business units.
Applying consideration for the cross-channel experience is much easier said than done. It requires a significant level of coordination and collaboration between the stakeholders, to understand not just how to optimize their particular part of the service, but to maintain that optimal and consistent experience throughout. For example, the customer service department can do a great job of correcting a problem after the fact, but they can add greater value to the product or service as a whole by collaborating with sales and product teams to prevent the issue from arising in the first place.
In this presentation, you will gain a better understanding of the different ways your customers might interact with your business. We will show how you can map out these touchpoints and help drive the creation of a cohesive experience across the various channels. We will show you how to navigate the political waters within your business to implement a true cross-channel design, which will build great experiences for your customers, regardless of how they are engaging with your business.

Playful Design

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:08:10 GMT

Speaker: Christian Crumlish

These days everybody talks about game mechanics, badges, points, and leaderboards, but less attention is paid to the role of play in digital experiences. After childhood, play rarely "just happens," but you can design for it.
Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how our designs can foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

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

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

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

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

Going Beyond User Research

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:29:21 GMT

Speaker: Louis Rosenfeld

As user research becomes firmly established in organizations around the world, it's tempting to congratulate ourselves and retreat to our shiny new labs. But our work is nowhere near complete. As currently practiced, user research remains narrow in focus, often limited to the qualitative methods that reflect our own educational biases, and the tools that fit within our own comfort zones.
Other research practices, such as web analytics, business analytics, and market research, are equally powerful ways of learning about users' wants and needs. More importantly, they're often complementary with what we do. When our organizations combine methods that tell what is going on are combined with methods that tell why, only then will they truly realize the value of all user research.

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

UXLx 2011 Highlights

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:20:33 GMT

UXLx Video Pass gives you access to the videos from all the keynotes that took place on May 13 2011.

You'll get to watch more than 6 hours of videos with 9 indudstry-leading speakers: Louis Rosenfeld, Christian Crumlish, Nick Finck, Stephen Anderson, Kristina Halvorson, Josh Clark, Christopher Fahey, Dario Buzzini and Don Norman.

The videos were filmed with a multi-camera setup and have integrated slides.

Get your video pass now at:
http://www.ux-lx.com/registration.html

Animations: ActiveMedia
Registration System: CoreFactor
Editing: Raio Filmes (Mário Lopes)
Music: M-Pex (Marco Miranda)

The Lazy Person’s Guide to a Better World

Thu, 05 May 2011 16:58:21 GMT

Advantages of Doing The Least You Can Do™

Speaker: Steve Krug

You’ve done your usability testing, you've gotten your results: now what?
Two years ago, Steve gave a talk about the benefits of doing the as little as possible when fixing usability problems you discover in your designs.

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

Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?

Thu, 05 May 2011 16:04:28 GMT

Speaker: Susan Weinschenk

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

Killer content or content that kills?

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:19:07 GMT

Speaker: Eric Reiss

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

First-Person User Interfaces

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:15:33 GMT

Speaker: Luke Wroblewski

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

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

The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:13:27 GMT

Speaker: Jared Spool

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

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

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

He'll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

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

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

Design Games

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:44:50 GMT

Speaker: Donna Spencer

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?
Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

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

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.

Designing for (and with) New Technologies

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:35:21 GMT

Speaker: Dan Saffer

New technologies, whether they are fancy, high-concept gestural interfaces or something as behind-the-scenes as a new algorithm, require some extra care when they're first being utilized in a new product. This care extends not only in the design process, but also to its introduction and explanation to users. This talk will cover, via case studies from Kicker Studio, what pitfalls to look out for, as well as what opportunities exist in introducing a new technology. We'll discuss how to design so that Raymond Loewy's MAYA (Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable) principle is put to its best use.

Designing with Lenses

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 05:27:49 GMT

Speaker: Bill Scott

In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into “design lenses”. A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design.
In this talk, Bill will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lenses inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.

Upgrade your Mandate

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:50:43 GMT

Speaker: Peter Merholz

User experience practice focuses on interactive screen-based experiences, typically the Web and increasingly mobile. However, the bulk of our customers' lives are away from these screens. As businesses try to embrace the totality of a customer's experience, crossing channels and coordinating touchpoints, they run up against the limits of their organizational structures and processes. In this talk, Peter will reveal the symptoms of a broken organization, and offer measures you can take to make your business truly customer-centered.