If you’re just getting your start in UX and you’re hoping to learn more, or you’ve been in the field awhile and want to stay current, UX Camp is for you. A full day–2 full tracks–of UX talks, surrounded by impressive keynotes and all for a great price that includes your lunch.
Have you ever had too little time or money to do good UX research? Trying to fit research into your tight budget, agile sprints or fast-moving project? Feel like giving up? You can do good research under quick timelines and little budget.
I’ll share tricks for fast moving and cheap research that doesn’t compromise quality:
– Using the Goldilocks method to scope doable, but impactful research
– Writing a useful research plan that isn’t ten pages long
– Recruiting participants in under 24 hours with no money
– Building data collection process that surfaces insights as you conduct research
– “Make-in-an-afternoon” deliverables that are just detailed enough to compel your team
I’ll share examples from my experience coaching designers and researchers in lean environments. I’ll also share some of my fast moving research fails, and how you can avoid them. Hopefully, you can learn from my past mistakes and do research quickly, cheaply and well.
15 minute break.
Establishing a cohesive UX strategy is a challenge when your organization lacks a measurement framework. We’re constantly striving to make great products, but it’s difficult to get stakeholder buy-in and make product decisions when you can’t state the impact on the user experience.
We understand – this happens to us too! During this session, we’ll share how we addressed this gap by exploring the framework we used for measuring UX impact across different audiences. We’ll discuss how we approached gathering usability and customer satisfaction metrics, establishing benchmarks, and applying this data to improve products. Not only will you learn about tools to help you make informed decisions on your products, but you’ll also come away with the ability to demonstrate the value of UX to your stakeholders.
15 minute break.
In UX design, empathy is a critical skill to creating user satisfaction. No one tells us how to develop empathy! Finding that connection starts with drawing from personal resources.
Many people in UX careers started in positions not even remotely connected to UX design—and that’s been their benefit. These non-traditional, if not all, experiences provide unique insight when it comes to improving our empathetic approach to human-centered design. Diversity is also key to collaborating with and understanding unique voices and problem solving to meet the needs of others not like us. Along with consumer data and journeys, empathy helps design teams deeply analyze user situations to create solutions.
1 hour and 15 minute lunch break.
Join me on a package delivery gone wrong and get a better sense on why User Experience needs ethnography and why technology needs UX.
As humans we live in a world where daily actions and decisions are closely linked to technology. We are presented with an array of technological options for completing a simple task and the choices we make can either enhance or inhibit our experience completing those basic tasks. Opportunities for businesses to consider human-centered design are everywhere, and often the most relatable and frustrating experiences with technology are missed opportunities to consider context of use, social norms, and human culture. With technology becoming increasingly automated, ethnography provides a unique opportunity to understand how tech augments an experience rather than replaces the user’s role.
From the narrative perspective of a cultural anthropologist and UX researcher, this presentation will cover how UX approaches ethnography differently, and how its focus on interaction and design marks a departure from other qualitative ethnography. From startups to tech giants, every business can benefit from understanding their customers in their real use environment, as well as all the nuance that context brings in developing and designing a product or service.
15 minute break.
The “Core Protocols” are an ever-evolving set of team and personal practices, in ongoing- development for 25 years, the Core Protocols predicted both Agile-style iterative development and the central role of social and emotional competencies for effective teams. Best of all: They’re open source and freely shared. This talk will give attendees 5 easy-to-use practices that can transform their effectiveness with team-members, managers and, most importantly, clients. The Core Protocols have been taught to and are in use by professional teams on 4 continents. Plus they are fun just might prevent cavities.
30 minute break.
Wrapping up the day.
Most mainstream games are so good at interaction design that the complexity of these interactions is almost invisible. But when you start stripping away the elements that make them sing, it becomes obvious that something is wrong. In this session we’ll investigate some “bad” games, and use their failures to glean takeaways on creating clear interactions in mediated experiences.
15 minute break.
Mired in deliverable purgatory, and possessed of strategic skills that are continually undervalued, UX professionals are further humiliated by hiring requirements that include portfolios. I will explain why portfolios are entirely wrong for evaluating the worth of a UX professional, why hiring managers can’t seem to stop demanding them, and propose a path out of this quagmire.
1 hour and 15 minutes break.
In the early 1900s the CMO position was created, and ever since it has been one of the most heavily resourced departments in almost every major organization. The Chief Marketing Officer “controls the brand.” But over the past decade the tectonic plates of business have shifted. Earthquake after earthquake has shaped a new world in which Users sit at the Brand control panels. And broad online conversations prevented companies from using flashy marketing to cover up product problems.
With all this User power, why do leading business schools still teach that “Marketing drives the business” when we all know it is the User? And why do so many organizations still struggle to “control” their brand without investing in the User up-front? In this talk, Alex digs into the “why“ AND what you can do to help shift the balance towards the User in your organization.
15 minute break.
Nerditees
Lead Honestly
Boxes and Arrows
