UX London 2019, What I’ll Remember
Conferences are great — you get inspired, meet your peers and talk to great people. But what happens after them?
The UX London conference took place 3 months ago, with 3 intense days dedicated to User Experience and Product Design. While I was expecting the in-depth topics on tools and methodologies, I was surprised by the talks reflecting on design on a broader scale.
So, here are the insights I’ll remember!
“AI is your new design material”, by Josh Clark
“How do we use technology to amplify human potential?”
As we collaborate more and more closely with the data science team in our day-to-day work, this question raised by Josh Clark can only be meaningful to me.
His main point is that designers should consider Machine Learning as a design material, similar to HTML or CSS, and use it to amplify human potential to focus on people’s added value:
But, how can we transpose this in our designer lives? Josh Clark illustrated his thought with a famous application many designers dream of: Uizard. This mobile app automatically transforms hand-drawn wireframes to Sketch files with their corresponding front-end code. For Josh, Uizard is a real opportunity and an example to follow on how to bring added-value to our work while spending less time on “painful” tasks.
Later on, Josh introduced other AI applications worth studying. He took us more specifically through how we can detect patterns in anything and act on them. This is already used today for instance for:
· Recommendation, with the example of Slack
· Prediction, with smartphone keyboards
· Classification, like Google forms
There is a wide array of applications where AI can increase designers’ powers exponentially. Do you think this is the future of design? After attending this riveting talk, I know I do 😊.
If you want to be inspired by the work of Josh Clark, here’s a similar article on his Big Medium website: Why machine learning and AI matter for design teams or the video of his talk.
“Anticipatory Design & the Future of Experience”, by Sarah Doody
Sarah Doody’s talk on anticipatory design was helpful to me because it covered a recurring challenge on my projects: facing requests to display always more information, while trying to challenge the status quo to give only key information to users.
By anticipatory design she means “Predicting people’s needs and giving them the right information at exactly the right time”.
Anticipatory design addresses mainly decision fatigue, which is caused by the average 35.000 decisions we have to take per day. The example chosen by Sarah of Netflix is totally relevant and easy to relate to: users spend a large amount of time scrolling before finding the content that suits them.
Today, users spend an average 3h18 a day on their smartphones. So they should be able to navigate in an ecosystem where they have fewer choices to make and keep a fluid and pleasant experience that saves time.
To achieve such a goal, Sarah shared her principles for anticipatory design: be transparent and allow people to easily take back control and reverse decisions, make curation human and aim for quality not quantity, and create a system of give and take that builds trust with every input and action.
A great and useful talk (available here), which ended with the following statement which I totally love:
“We have the responsibility to solve problems… but also not to create bigger problems.”
“Designing Great End Experiences across Product Sectors”, Joe Macleod
“How can I put an end to my gym subscription, that I’ve been paying for a while without ever setting a foot there?”
We have all experienced a similar this situation: it is always a nightmare to cancel, and it can take months. This leaves a bitter taste and a negative feeling towards the brand.
The main subject of this talk lead by Joe Macleod is the “end experiences across products” — again, a very meaningful topic to me as we are currently working on it. The on-boarding and use of a product are only 2/3 of the complete user experience. Designers really need to focus on the off-boarding too as it can actually increase user engagement. We need to shift from single to multiple (and repetitive) engagements. And a good off-boarding helps multiple engagement.
According to Joe Macleod, for a good ending we need to move from “this is someone else’s problem” to “this is our accountability”, perfectly illustrated by this picture:
As designers, we should take care of these problematics, which are often not prioritized.
To go further, read Joe Macleod’s book ‘Ends’.
“Beyond the UX tipping point”, Jared Spool
My fourth and last talk highlight is a global reflection on the user experience industry by Jared Spool. According to him, companies move from individual UX contributors to dedicated teams, then to enabling the whole structure to have UX competency. This requires a culture of continuous learning — UX teams has to be infused within the whole organisation.
“Developers, Products managers, Stakeholders, the Executives and even all the people from Legal, Compliance and Regulation are now helping us make better design instead of just making decisions they don’t think about the user at all. At that stage it’s called infused UX Design”
This is a culture change that many of us are experiencing in large corporate companies, especially those that have been around for decades.
You can watch here the entire talk or a very creative summary, I strongly advise you to go and check Maggie Appleton’s sketches available on Twitter.
I’d like to conclude my highlights of these amazing 3 days on a quote by Erika Hall, which stresses how we all have the power to make good design and change the world:
“You can be the hero”
