UXLx Talks

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 re...

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 designe...

As designers, we want to be successful, yet in the passionate pursuit of creating compelling and engaging experiences, it can be easy to forget the importance of promoting the success of those who use our products and services. We can lose sight of what is most important to understand about our users if we are to serve them better. Don Norman expressed it most succinctly and controversially, sayin...

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 ba...

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 i...

You’ve done your usability testing, you've gotten your results: now what? Two years ago, Steve gave a talk about the benefits of doing the as little as possible when fixing usability problems you discover in your designs. Now--after struggling for months to write about this topic in his new book-- he finally knows what he wanted to say.

First person interfaces allow people to interact with the real world as they are currently experiencing it. These applications layer information on top of people's immediate view of the world and turn the objects and people around them into interactive elements. First person interfaces enable people to interact with the real world through a set of "always on" sensors. Simply place a computing devi...

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 so...

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,...

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...

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,...

What can UX designers learn from the world's greatest experiment in behavior change? Over the last ten years, UX designers have increasingly embraced the notion that we are in the “behavior change business”. This shift in emphasis, while not universal, is a reflection of a few historic forces, the first being the shift in design away from a focus on the artifacts that we produce towards the broade...

Now that our organizations believe that UX writing matters, there’s too much work to do! Use the Eisenhower Matrix to sort common UX content tasks by importance and urgency, and allow the business to recognize the pain that happens when there aren’t enough content people.  Good news: Our organizations have started to realize the powerful impact UX writers can make to meet our organizations’ goals!...

Over the long-term, conversation-driven products are on a trajectory to be more disruptive than mobile products, in ways both good and perhaps not so good. Conversation is a key marker of how we identify humanness, and technology is beginning to be capable of mimicking it.  For our part as designers, how do the product approaches need to evolve and guide the innovations we need? Phillip will break...

Discovery is one of the most critical points at the beginning of any project especially when the stakeholders and the project team don’t know each other. Discovery not only yields the information that will inform the rest of a project, it’s a time to start building relationships and trust among team members. We relied on exercises that invited collaboration using low-tech, face to face methods. Di...

Research is the most important part of Human-centered Design, it's also the most difficult part. What makes it difficult, is also what makes it valuable; we're dumb humans, and we make decisions for very weird reasons, and we have no idea why we make very weird decisions. Figuring out these odd and mysterious motivations is what makes experience design work or not work. In this talk, we'll look at...

You're growing a design team and facing challenges of scale and focus. You're not alone. For many design leaders, the shift from craft to team is fraught with mistakes and challenges. Learn from Martina's experience growing a design practice from the first hire in Europe to leading a global design practice of over 100.

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

TalkStrategy and the Design of Services Strategic design is the process of translating game-changing decisions into clear, concise, and complete instructions for execution: the who, why, how, what, when and where of operations. Encoding them into the designs of systems and services allows us to “take more risk while avoiding it.”  Having it both ways requires dexterity in switching between the abs...

Designing and delivering great closure experiences for products and business Face it, all your projects are going to die and you haven’t even designed the end. In a world that is flooded with new apps, services, and products can we really assume that our product won’t be killed off in the evolutionary cycle of the ‘next big thing’? While we blindly focus on creating a user experience for on-boardi...

It’s tempting to create one-size-fits-all onboarding experiences, constrained to a new user’s first day with your product, but onboarding can serve a much broader purpose. Products are constantly evolving. People are constantly learning. And everyone learns at different speeds.  In this session, Krystal will share how good new-user experiences can be effective throughout the entire customer journe...

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

Opening Keynote at UXLx Masters in 2021 with Peter Morville.

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

Disinformation, data bias, dopamine addiction. Is our digital transformation going dystopian? Or has social media simply unmasked society? Socrates claimed that the printing press was killing words and true understanding, and society now faces a similar debate over ideas and information on digital platforms. Explore technology’s positive impacts in lowering barriers to access and uniting the margi...