Learnings from the 2018 Experience Conference

An international event focused on UX Design and digital innovation, that included names like Hannah Pileggi, Research Manager at Airbnb and Jenny Gove, UX Research Lead at Google.

Experience Conference 2018

Bratislava may not be the first place you think about when looking for a conference to attend. The capital of Slovakia is a small and enjoyable city, reachable by train in less than one hour from Vienna. The event that brings me here is the second edition of the Experience Conference. An international event focused on UX Design and digital innovation.

What called my attention to it, was the cost-benefit considering the quality of the speakers. That included names like Hannah Pileggi, Research Manager at Airbnb and Jenny Gove, UX Research Lead at Google. And also, the opportunity to connect with the local design and tech community that, by the way, is passionate about what they do.

Key takeaways

As a way to consolidate what I saw, I wrote about some of the learnings I had during the event:

• Designers often try to persuade people to solve problems that they know users have. But in some cases, the best thing to do is put the stakeholders to see through the user’s eyes.

“Don’t try to be persuasive, let the user do the talking”

• A company without a mission statement and values is a company with no direction. For designers, this means that is hard to make the right decision. Or in other words, how are you suppose to succeed, if you don’t know what the objective of the company?
• No research = Huge risk. Looks obvious, right? But according to Stephanie Troeth, some people suffer from the hunger to be a genius, they will skip the research and if the final result doesn’t work, they will blame the execution.

“We often start at the wrong point within the double diamond, and assume we knew enough about all these bits”

• Design has to overcome the level of being perceived as a cool-to-have. Designers are not only facilitators, they are also able to make decisions.
• Don’t stick to only one method of research, or in Hannah Pileggi words: “Diversify your (insights) diet.”

“Diversify your (insights) diet.”

• The best metric for any user research method is how many unexpected things you found. If all that you discovered you already knew, then you didn’t research enough.
• Do you need to remote test a mobile prototype, but don’t know how to observe users interacting with the device? Here is an idea :)

“Hug the laptop.”

More about the conference

Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Duration: 2 days, the first one just for workshops (paid apart), and the second for speakers presentations.
Dates: 26–27 March
Cost: 299 € (ex VAT), and includes entrance to the conference, afterparty, all side activities and full-day catering including breakfast and lunch (awesome catering, by the way).
Website: https://www.exconf.com

Thank Y🍩u