UXLx Talks

As designers, we are lucky enough to get to interact with many different types of people during the course of our work. We observe people using technology and proposed design solutions. While working on our projects, we collaborate directly with our team, clients, and stakeholders to bring a solution to life. All of this interaction exposes us to lots of body language. The language of the body off...

In this presentation, Geoloqi co-founder Amber Case will take you on a journey through the history of calm technology, wearable computing, and how developers and designers can make apps “ambient” and inspire delight instead of constant interaction. This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing starting from the 1970’s-2010’s and how mobile interfaces should take advantage of location, proxi...

By understanding what principles are and where they come from we can move beyond the lists of best practices and heuristics we’re all familiar with and create unique, consistent experiences. Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, applications, our bank, our doctor, our gov...

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

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

Despite the prevalent mythology of the lone creative genius, many of the most innovative contributions spring from the creative chemistry of a group and the blending of everyone’s ideas and concepts. How can we best leverage this collective wisdom to generate creative synergy and co-create? Let’s look at the process of recognizing and removing our personal creative blocks, connecting and communica...

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

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

This is not your usual UX talk. It’s a little about information architecture, a bit about content strategy, but mostly it’s about how we can use information floating around the web to build content-rich products, and how we should try harder to weave our work into the fabric of the network.

What does a restaurant menu, a business to business sales process and an eCommerce website have in common? All of these things involve structuring information for an audience to understand. And while the audience and context may change, the practice of seeing our way through the associated complexities and iterations does not.

Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so it's essential to break UIs into their atomic elements in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs. This session will introduce atomic design, a methodology for creating robust interface design systems. We’ll cover how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization and...

Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to each other. In this session, Nicole will talk about writing—an often invisible partner and material in the design process. You’ll learn how to communicate behind the scenes to define what you’re making, prototype quickly, gather consensus, build clarity, and ship meaningful products.

There's a fine line between persuasion and deception. On the web, that line is frequently crossed. Sometimes purposefully, sometimes unwittingly. The best way to avoid falling prey to those attempting to deceive (or accidentally becoming the deceiver) is to be able to recognize the techniques yourself. Find out how people deceive through design, why these practices eventually fail, and how you can...

Product teams often use prototyping to explore new products, but in social-networking systems, prototyping will only get you so far. In other words: some kinds of innovations just need to be launched to test. Come hear the story and learn when this Lean Startup-inspired approach makes sense, and hear a detailed case study on how our small team of designers, developers and product managers did it—c...

If this is the information age, what special role do information and user experience architects and  play? The rise of  industrial aged forced changes in  supply chain management for physical goods. What changes do we need to make in the information supply chain in order to make sure information gets to the right, person, in the right place, on the right, device, and at the right time. And, what e...

We are in an age where poor user experiences become the focus of nationwide attention. One doesn’t need to look beyond recent catastrophes, such as Apple’s iOS6 Maps, Healthcare.gov, and the demise of Blackberry’s smartphone to see the necessity of getting the experience right. Yet, what do we know about ensuring our next design isn’t going down the same road as those that have failed before us? W...

The questions we ask ourselves at the idea generation stage of design play a critical role in the nature of the ideas generated. Bold questions beget bold ideas; and incrementalism begins in the same way. r\nIn this talk we will look at how problem framing and reframing can impact the ideas teams generate, and how problem statements can be 'tuned' to better deliver feasible concepts within your or...

Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed b...

Many governments are dealing with today\'s challenges using tools from the last century. UX design (and designers) can help meet those challenges and make a difference in our communities, in our nations, and in the daily lives of regular people. The public sector needs better design, from making forms, processes, and official websites easier to use to helping decision-makers understand and collabo...

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

The web world thinks of game design as the next silver bullet, and companies are slapping badges and progress bars over every annoying thing they wish users to do. But as users tire of everything looking like a game, “gamification” is starting to get discarded as just another fad.. Games have been core to human experience since ancient times, and the game industry now makes more than the movies in...

Windows 8. Chromebook Pixel. Ubuntu Phone. These devices shatter another consensual hallucination that we web developers have bought into: mobile = touch and desktop = keyboard and mouse. We have tablets with keyboards; laptops that become tablets; laptops with touch screens; phones with physical keyboards; and even phones that become desktop computers. Not to mention new forms of input like camer...

I’ve worked for a lot of idiot managers in my career. And then, one day, after I had become a manager, it dawned on me: Now I’m the idiot! You see, most of my career has been an exercise in “trial by fire.” This process worked well when I was a designer and was trying to master the art of the task flow, site map, wireframe, prototype, persona, and so on. In leadership positions, the option to go b...

Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change. In this bluntly...

Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change. In this bluntly...