Awwwards Amsterdam 2019: inspiration, design and sun.
Y’all ready for this?*
What better place than the Awwwards conference to freshen up our design game a bit? During those 2 days, UX Design was all over the agenda and took up a fair amount of time within the talks. Morgane and I traveled to Amsterdam to see what’s up in the design world.
As writing down a whole recap would be too long (and boring), here are my top highlights.
Settling in…
After a great 8 hours of sleep, I woke up and set out to explore my new neighborhood. 15 minutes of sunny ambling later, Morgane and I reached the DeLaMar Theatre and were ready to get stuck into the first day.
We were in for a brilliant introduction by Pablo Stanley and his drawings.
After 20 minutes of hilarious storytelling he came to the conclusion that, even though designers -and human beings to some extent- sometimes strive for freedom and want to be in their bubble doing their things, they also feel the need to belong. Although these two facets of your personality might seem contradictory, Pablo recommends incorporating them both, rather than letting one go by the wayside. Embrace those 2 facets, and try to find the right balance where they can both be expressed.
As I can definitely relate to this, I was pleased to see that it apparently is a common phenomenon. A good start!
High speed, higher expectations, by Raisa Cuevas
This one particularly grabbed my attention as I face these challenges on a daily basis at work. Raisa talked about mobile performances.
It might sound like a dev-team problem but it has a huge impact on user experience. So as a UX designer I was very interested in the matter.
Now, let’s see those UX implications. Let’s start with:
“53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.”
Crazy right? Wait there’s more: in the UX hierarchy, speed comes first for people browsing mobile sites.
Still not convinced? Let’s see the cognitive load associated to mobile delays.
Obviously I wasn’t expecting anything to beat solving a math problem as I suffered way too many years in math classes myself. But the results are impressive: experiencing mobile delays causes the same stress level as watching a horror movie. It is considered more stressful than standing at the edge of a virtual cliff or waiting in line at a retail store.
It might sound like a joke but this is actually a very serious study. And do we want our users to be stressed ? Well, if you don’t hate them, I guess not.
To conclude, Raisa gave us 3 design challenges to improve mobile experience:
#1 Include animated loading sequences in prototypes
#2 Emphasize “speed” in design briefs
#3 Design offline screens, home screen icons and push notifications
So let’s (continue to) do it people!
What designers can learn from (code) review, by Ida Aalen
So yes, I might start nagging my developer colleagues about performance a bit more, but I will also take a look at their code review processes for inspiration.
Say what now?
No no, leave the popcorn, this is not a “Should designers code” debate.
In her talk, Ida explains that, as designers, we might want to consider having design reviews just like developers have code reviews. Meaning, have our work checked by another designer, and check others’ designs too.
That is actually something we do at Societe Generale in an informal way: we ask our UX colleagues for advice, share our doubts with them sometimes and regularly take a look at everybody’s work to find the best pattern to steal for inspiration.
I find it super useful for 2 main reasons:
1- It allows us to see how each of us uses our design system and get inspiration from, which can generate new ideas in our own work.
2- The “pattern stealing” saves time and effort so we can concentrate on other things (let’s say I don’t know…the user maybe?).
To formalize those design reviews, here are Ida’s review principles that might help you (and us) move forward with the idea:
1- Critique the work not the author.
2- Be critical, but remain affable and curious.
3- Differentiate between a) suggestions, b) requirements, and c) points that need discussion or clarification.
4- Move discussion from text to face-to-face.
5- Don’t forget to praise the good parts!
Adopt an unknown unknown, by Andre Jay Meissner
Andre Jay Meissner’s talk was a great way to conclude on those two days and a great reminder of current and future challenges for us, designers.
The main part I found really interesting was this graph that was introduced in an article written by Margaret Gould Stewart, VP of product design at Facebook.
The idea is the following: the more individuals we are designing for, the more complex our work becomes. In the same way, the richer the ecosystem the harder.
To put it simply: the more you try to move to the right and to the top of the axes, the more challenging it gets.
“Designing for all four quadrants, thinking expansively about the impact of our inventions on people and society, that is the heart of ethically responsible design”
Margaret Gould Stewart
A few quotes to wrap up…
The talks I mentioned above were just a small sample of the content shared during those two days, so here’s a non exhaustive list of quotes I loved. I’ll let you interpret them as you see fit…
“Go all out then box it up”
“Be a kid”
“MLP = Minimum Lovable Product”
“Design experiences as a tech agnostic”
“Convention is just permission to try better”
Thanks a lot for reading!
Any feedbacks? Please comment, I’m always happy to discuss!
*Invision’s Pablo Stanley talked about how in his childhood he mixed up U2 with 2U(nlimited) and enjoyed Y’all ready for this while under the impression that it was from Bono’s band. Check out the full story.
