The 2nd year edition of a more mature UX.Live conference invited some fantastic speakers over the course of 3 days.

This blogpost summarises my notes and thoughts concerning Design practice. It comments on talks by Noel Lyons (@noel_lyons), Morgane Peng (https://medium.com/@morganepeng), David Attwater (Enterprise Integration Group), Richard Banks (@rbanks).

Make sure to check out my other article about User Research UX.Live.

Design Contributions

Often people ask about the ROI of Design — treating it like a delivery function only. Building on a talk by Noel Lyons (Barclays) and my own experience I would argue that design contributes different:

• Empathize and answer the question what problem to solve — and…

The 2nd year edition of a more mature UX.Live conference in London invited some fantastic speakers over the course of 3 days.

This blogpost summarises my notes and thoughts concerning User Research practice. It comments on talks by Alexander Muir (@Alexander108), Kasper Friis (https://uxplanet.org/@kafri), Saskia Liebenberg (@SaskiaLieb) and Etienne Fang (https://medium.com/@etiennefang).

Make sure to check out my other post about Design (UX.Live Conference)

Don’t optimize — differentiate!

Alexander Muir gave an inspiring workshop on planning and executing user research. He advised for innovation projects and improvement of services and systems to not (only) look at optimization. Yes, efficiency and effectiveness (key considerations in usability and UX) are crucial but a blind push for optimization might — in the worst case — only re-enforce existing and broken processes. …

Conference Notes, 21st century common sense: Using collective intelligence to tackle complex social challenges, Oct 16 2019

What’s more intelligent, people or machines?

Don’t get me wrong, machine learning and artificial intelligence are fascinating. A combination of statistical, computational and mathematical methods — able to identify patterns, simulate understanding and even transfer learning from one domain to another.

… but so are people! Humans are just really good at having a life, lived experience, domain expertise, being part of the world and knowing about context. I would argue that what makes any system intelligent is often somehow a human element. …

Who owns infrastructure, data and access to technology and therefore opportunity? How to create an equal future, nurture diversity and enable ownership — rather than consumerism?

Celebrating the future at Nesta’s FutureFest in steaming hot Tobacco Dock in East London for two days in July challenged our status quo and reflected on some of these questions. Below just some observations and questions for the conference.

Unequal futures? What about the present?

Debates were kicked of by brilliant panel discussion by Kate Pickett (@ProfKEPickett), Steve Fuller (@ProfSteveFuller) and Kat Arney (@Kat_Arney) on need for equality in research and technology. It was stated that (academic and commercial) research and development of new technology seems to focus on supporting problems of elites primarily rather the wider public. …

UX Crunch’s first conference in London

Earlier this year UX Crunch ran its first conference UX.Live in London. On offer were a selection of workshops and talks around User Experience, Service Design and System Thinking. This article summarises some thoughts on corporate innovation, business origami and internal collaboration.

Corporate Innovation

Kicking off the conference Alberta Soranzo (Systems Thinking Director, Lloyds) reflected on innovation and the “Architecture of Talent”. She stated that once a company has figured out a process to deliver a service, it far too easy to stay within that and optimise for existing use cases only. Starting an innovation lab, or any other dedicated team is helpful to disrupt such existing processes. …

Design is a tool to imagine possible future states.

Working at an innovation lab broadened my understanding of what Design can bring to the table for interdisciplinary innovation.

Innovation v Invention

Design is relevant for innovation. This becomes more clear when we differentiate “Innovation” to (rather technical) work on “Invention”.

If an “Invention” can be understood as a truly (technical) new idea, “Innovation” adds the notion of a “use” of such an idea [wired, 2015]. Success of an innovation cannot be determined purely by technical tests or benchmarking. It needs to be evaluated through context and usage. How do people use this innovative idea? How does it support their tasks and goals? …

The sketch is one of the most important tools in design! Given that also “anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer” (Jared Spool) — Everyone involved in design decisions should sketch!

As part of project work I have been working on workshops with customers and internal stakeholders. Having captured a variety of ideas during an ideation phase, we asked our participants to sketch their dream tool. Not everyone engaged fully, but most produced a range of beautiful, simple, complex and fun sketches.

This motivated a post to explain why the sketch is great, how to make everyone sketch and what to learn from sketches. …

This years IAK17 conference focused on UX for Smart Services. For two full days a series of talks discussed current and future challenges for human-centred product development in an industry that tends towards application of artificial intelligence wherever possible.

Talks touched on innovation, empathic services, privacy and industry use cases. This post comments on talks about conversational interfaces. A previous post was dedicated to Innovation and design.

Chatbots are talked about a lot…

There has been a lot of talk about and experiments with conversational interfaces. A conversational interface — as opposed to graphical interfaces — relies on speech or chat to communicate with the user, this can be in form of a chatbot or speech recognition system. …