My 5 Usability and UX Insights from WebExpo to Design Better Products
UX Design | UI Design | Usability (WebExpo 2017)
by Brett Mazoch, published in A Designer’s Thoughts
Every year the capital city of my home country, Prague — the Mother of Cities, hosts a special web event which brings together business, development and design people with the purpose of sharing knowledge across these fields. The event is called WebExpo (22nd–23th Sep 2017) and like the last year, I attended this conference to gather fresh ideas on user experience, usability and design workflows.
In two days I’ve seen about 14 talks and spent really good time talking with designers from Mozilla, Trainline, Adobe and other companies. This is so great about the conference! In this article, I will introduce you the best 5 talks of my choice. All of them cover information hugely useful in the area of UI/UX design for web/mobile apps and complex information systems.
So what are the ideas I gathered that can help you to design and develop highly usable software and digital solutions?
Contents
- Think beyond measured data
- Drive your designs by fast learning
- Create higher level design systems
- Communicate in user-friendly UI language
- Research, prototype, engage users
01 — Think beyond measured data
Beyond Measure
by Erika Hall, Mule Design
“Data can tell you what is happening, but not why.”
The main takeaway for me was…
We generate a lot of data nowadays and data-driven decision making is more important than ever before. Interactions can be tracked and stored and data helps us understand and justify actions. However, quantity of data does not ensure that we are making good decisions.
Data doesn’t have meaning. Numbers are meaningless without understanding the underlying assumptions. And that is the reason why we should look at data with right questions in mind. Fit data into stories. We should make sure we are getting useful information which actually answer the questions we need to answer to create sucessfull design solution.
Watch the talk…
► Video with slides available here
02 — Drive your designs by fast learning
Building data-driven products at speed
by Jan Šrůtek, Trainline
“Optimise your product design process for speed of learning. Ship fast, learn fast.”
The main takeaway for me was…
Designing complex data products is challenging — you never have all the information you would like to have, people can use your products in so many different contexts and scenarios which makes it hard for contextual usability testing, data which you are trying to prepare designs for may not be available in time of designing…
How to deal with that? Let it go trying to make the solution perfect first time, instead iterate quickly in users feedback loops. A good idea is to also organise product development into two parallel work streams based on Dual-track framework: 1. Discovery (includes a lot of research, prototyping, customer validation) and 2. Delivery (effecient releases of solutions).
And finally, remember this: Good designers design, great designer deliver. Optimise your design process for creation of outcomes and fast learning, not outputs (wireframes, mockups, reports and so on).
Watch the talk…
► Video with slides available here
03 — Create higher level design systems
Scale your Design up
by Emanuela Damiani, Mozilla
“Users care about the coherency of experience.”
The main takeaway for me was…
Designing complex user-facing products requires from design teams having a logical system behind their designs. The best design systems define and reuse patterns and rules in typography and colours, layout architecture and composition, visual communication and interactions. A good example can be Firefox’s Photon design system. The goal is to ensure coherent interaction experience between the solution and its users.
But we can go even further. How? By looking at design systems as a shared languages and trying to reuse defined principles in other products and internal/external communications. Also consider establishing so called Design Operations team (DesignOps) which can optimize communication between discovery (designers, data analysts) and delivery teams (developers), manage the design system and ensure a continuous conversation with users.
Watch the talk…
► Video with slides available here
04 — Communicate in user-friendly UI language
What Language Does Your Product Really Speak?
by Sagit Siegal, Thomson Reuters
“Be your users waiters and use user-friendly language.”
The main takeaway for me was…
Warning and error messages. Action labels and term abbreviations. Descriptions, instructions, manuals… These text copies are for sure in every user-facing system and people can easily experience difficulties connected with UI language. For instance, if call-to-action text is not clear, the user can bypass the quickest way of accomplishing a given task. Too long text can “invite” users for skipping it and so maybe miss important information. And the list goes on.
Language is an inseparable part of user interfaces so what can we do to make also the language usable? Try to use so-called simplified and user-friendly English => text copies are supposed to be simple, clear enough, not culture-centered and always with the smallest possible number of words. On top of that, the key is to test the text with its consumers — the users.
Watch the talk…
► Video with slides available here
05 — Research, prototype, engage users
Assumptions Prohibited
by Andre Jay Meissner, Adobe
“Leave your own assumptions at the door!”
The main takeaway for me was…
To develop products which people like and which solve people’s real problems in the best possible way, the high emphasis needs to be put on users research, user engagement and also their feedback. The assumptions are prohibited there. Instead, every design decision and feature/functionality request should be justified by users of the product through already mentioned users research followed by users testing.
We all know, that development of software solutions takes a fair amount of time. The resources of developers building the solutions are in high demand. So how can we save developers time and help design teams test the right user flow before its implementation? The answer can be incorporating tools for creating clickable prototypes into our design process. One fresh example is Adobe XD which possibly can (in the coming years) play important role in digital design, products prototyping and design collaboration.
Watch the talk…
► Video with slides available here
Final thoughts
That was my top design insights I gathered from WebExpo 2017. I hope you find them useful as well! If you missed the conference, or if you are just interested in more talks on business, development or design, I recommend page WebExpo videos. There were many great talks at WebExpo 2017. To mention few others worth of watching, have a look on:
- Accessibility in code: demo and design examples [in Czech]
by Martin Michálek, - Pull them into the game [in Czech]
by Petr Pouchlý, - Redesigning the Czech Airline portal [in Czech]
by Gabriel Zábušek and Pavla Nýdrle.
I am thinking now what do I actually really appreciate about the WebExpo, when all talks are always available online anyway?
- First of all, it’s the opportunity to meet other fellow designers and other web people to share experience and informally discuss things which you might be focusing on in that time. You could even start thinking about design and web business in different ways like it happened to me.
- And secondly, it is simply great to listen to ideas from people working in well-known and industry-leading companies (Adobe, Microsoft, InVision, AirBnb, …). On top of that, you can always personally meet and ask them questions in the speaker’s corner after every talk!
So thank you to all promoters and speakers for WebExpo 2017!
WebExpo, this year it was your the 10th anniversary and I wish you to continue in style, have fun, improve every year and to keep providing useful and practical content!
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The article was written by Břetislav “Brett” Mazoch while working as a designer in England. He moved there from the Czech Republic to follow his traveller’s dreams and work passion — UI/UX Design and Front-end Development.
