“Eyes expect conformity, ears expect variety” — highlights from the first UX meetup in Karlsruhe

One of the most common mistakes made by young tech entrepreneurs is underestimation of the importance of well designed and properly tested User Interfaces and User Experiences. We all believe our logic is intuitive and UX/UI design is based on the common sense. But sometimes it can go completely wrong.

I live in Karlsruhe, the heart of German software engineering culture. Karlsruhe Institute of Texhnology is one the biggest tech universities in Europe and there are thousands of young engineers passionate about building new products and dreaming of changing the world.

To support the entrepreneurial culture in Karlsruhe Linda Brandl as UX researcher and I as software engineer and decided to host a series of events where we could drive more attention to the topic of User Experience, discuss most common mistakes and best practices, and most importantly create a platform where people can bring their products to test with other tech specialists and identify mistakes at early stages of the product development.

On March 1st, we hosted the first meetup in the office of a great tech startup Campusjäger. We were quite impressed by how many people showed up to express their enthusiasm towards the topic. People had a completely different background: engineers, designers, business people, product managers and a KIT professor.

For the first event, we invited speaker one Alide von Bornhaupt to talk about the concept of UX in general and most common mistakes in its interpretation. People quite often see UX as something necessarly related to design, but it’s much broader than that, it’s about the whole experience in general starting from the first contact with the product.

Then Tim Kahle who is an expert in designing voice interfaces presented the differences in voice interaction design compared to the visual ones. As stated in the title on this post, the key difference lies in the variations. When it comes to visual design, there are some established patterns that are reproduced again and again for the sake of intuitiveness. But with voice our expectations are totally different. We expect the interaction flow to be natural like with normal speech, which means voice UI designers have to build many conversational patterns to make experience as diverse as possible.

You can check out the 16 must-knows when designing voice interfaces here.

After the presentation we had a user testing session. Startupers brought their products to see how people who never used them before interact with interfaces. Product developers got some valuable insights on UX/UI improvements and everyone else had a chance to see how relative the concept of intuitiveness is when it comes to UX/UI design.

Summary

The topic of UI/UX design is vital for product development and we see a huge potential for building a UX design community in Karlsruhe. Have an idea on a cool topic or great speaker? Reach out to me here.