Ze frank giving his ‘human test’

43 Things I Learned From UX Week

I was only able to attend UX Week in San Francisco for one day, but in that one day, my was mind blown. These are some of the highlights I picked up from each speaker:

Brenda Laurel — Adjunct Professor at UCSC

1. “Timothy Leary had the kind of crazy hope that inspires projects.” Once you find a friend that has that type of hope, never let them go.
2. The capacity to feel immersed in something isn’t just sensory, it’s also the ability to take an action.
3. We have augmented reality now.
   You know the stuff from Terminator, or Robocop?
   You know what we are doing?
   Wasting it on Yelp reviews.
   Let’s change that.
4. Hope is an action verb.

Dan Klyn — Information architect at the Understanding Group

1. Order encodes meaning.
2. What before how. The classic, pervasive notion for designers is to find a solution instead of finding the truth.
3. You only understand something relative to the things you already understand.
4. Terror and confidence are incredible traits. “The gift I have is that nothing is easy. Difficulty excites me.” — Richard Saul Wurman
5. Be dumb. Innocence allows your mind the freedom it needs to make and form patterns.

Lane Halley — Digital Product Designer & Agile Coach

1. Put yourself in an agile mindset. “[Do] everything you do now, but less of it, and continually.” — @williampietri
2. Be part of the team. Go to all of the meetings, even if they don’t seem particularly relevant to you, as a UX designer.
3. Create conversation. Walk through your wireframes with others.
4. Talking to users shouldn’t be special. Continual customer engagement is important.
5. There is no silver bullet. Find what works best for your organization.

Jason Kunesh — Director of UX for the Obama Campaign

1. Know your audience, so that you can support them as best as possible.
2. A leader figures out the value of the people around them and then organizes them so everyone can shine.
3. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
4. Ignore whatever is outside of your control.
5. If you are explaining, then you are losing.
6. Make everything you do participatory.
7. Celebrate little victories.
8. The value of community is immeasurable.

Heather Gold — Writer, comedian, and creator of public intimacy

1. Lack of emotion may be the single biggest problem on the internet.
2. As far as emotional maturity, the web is still at emoticons.
3. We’ve designed everything on the web to be an object. That includes people.
4. You have to know and understand yourself before you can understand others.

Chris Risdon — Design Director at Adaptive Path

1. Think about feed-forward loops. Help users make the right choice.
2. People don’t want a relationship with their data, they want help to acheive their goals.
3. Always aim to increase motivation and decrease friction.
4. Devices are closer to us now. That means we have a direct relationship with technology.

Sophia Voychehovski — Senior User Experience Designer
at Enguage

1. The complexities of our jobs as experience designers are about to go supernova.
2. The users expectation is that their products will communicate with each other. As more devices are made (think watches, Google Glass, etc.) the users will expect everything to work seamlessly.
3. Simplify your designs, your teams, prioritize prioritization, iterate on fidelity, and make time for simple.

Paul Ford — Writer, editor, programmer

1. A good user experience educates constraints. A good UX designer communicates a system of constraints.
2. Some of the biggest sites on the web are constraint driven platforms. Think of Youtube, Soundcloud, and Medium.
3. You must define your constraints up-front. Only then are you able to have useful conversations about the experience.

Tom Rockwell, Director of Exhibits at the Exploratorium

1. The exploratorium looks awesome, and I need to go.
2. Everything at the Exploratorium is iterative and constantly changing. They embrace that spirit by having their workshop in the middle of the building.

Ze Frank — EVP of Video at Buzzfeed, creator of online play spaces

1. User experience is an odd term. User is foreign while experience is personal.
2. “People will fill the cracks with emotion.”
3. Base your work off your personal experience, and you will connect with someone. The more specific you are the deeper that connection will be with those who feel it.
4. Clicking a link is easy, but sharing that link is difficult. When you share a link, you are relating to that link and communicating that to the world.
5. The things that make us feel the most alone, have the greatest power to connect us.

Special thanks to Adaptive Path for putting the event on, and @brandonschauer, @alisoncramer, and @abbylarner for the wonderful conversations.