UX Camp awesomeness and why you should support it too!
If you missed the UX Camp Netherlands on the 24th of September or if you haven’t heard about UX Camp before, sit down and give me a few minutes. You need to know what it is!
If you have heard of it, I want to share the amazing experience I had on the UX Camp Netherlands — so give me 5 minutes too :) .
UX Camp is an admirable initiative on its own. It is a User Experience Conference planned, organised and completely made possible by designers that get together to exchange knowledge, tips and — why not — questions and fears. The intention is clear: collaboration. Together we can help each other by sharing our experiences, expertise and vision.
But let me highlight something before we move on: it is extremely hard to find a conference that has the same energy of a UX Camp. As an open project, anyone can take the initiative to organise a UX Camp locally. The whole idea is that the UX Camp needs to be free for every participant, so we need engaged designers volunteering to share their ideas and thoughts. Sponsors are always welcome, of course, but the core content is built (or designed!?) by designers who go to the conference on the day, pitch their talks & workshops and the audience gets to vote on what topic they are most interested in listening to!
The variety of industries and experiences always make it even better: there is always something that will catch your eye, no matter what you are working on in the design field. The Dutch version of the UX Camp happened last Saturday (September 24th) and the talks this year varied from “Designing for Virtual Reality” to “Planning & Productivity” & “Combining design methods with agile and remain sane” and the audience was presented with 4 long workshops for sketching, wireframing, designing experience maps and experimenting how to work on multidisciplinary teams.
I wish I had Hermione’s Time Turner so I could have attended them all…
My first contact with UX Camp was back in February, when I got to know what it is while helping a few designers organising our first Irish Edition (see more here!) — my personal contribution to the event was slightly different this time, though. I was extremely excited to be invited to be part of the Panel Discussion. As my first panel, I need to confess that I didn’t know exactly what to expect: what type of questions will they ask? What are their thoughts on our Industry? How can I collaborate? What is the best way to share my own experiences in order to add some value to the discussion?
The only thing I actually knew about it was that I was extremely excited — but there was no way to prepare myself to get ready for it. I would need to go with all my heart, share my thoughts and hope for the best.
So I did!
And beside two amazing colleagues (see more here!), we had a really great discussion that just made me feel even more excited to be in the design industry in such a great moment — so let’s just recap the top 5 topics and questions from the 120 designers, students, project managers and developers that joined our discussion this Saturday for some fun and networking.
Will the UX Design role be extinct in the next years? What will be the next big move?
Designers were curious to understand how we see the role evolving over time and how we can possibly get ready for it. My colleagues on stage highlighted the growth of the industry and the need of really specialised professionals. The role might need a new label, but as the industry grows and we prove the value of design, designers will be probably working full time on really specialised fields instead of generic projects from varied industries.
As a UX Designer that watched the role being defined and conquering space in the enterprise industry over the past few years, I couldn’t help and had to bring IBM & Watson to the discussion: cognitive will definitely be one of topics that designers will be hearing & learning about. As users will have even less time for solutions that are not “smart” enough for their problems, learning how cognitive solutions can help solve this challenge was one of my bets for the future within the field.
So are you saying that technology will be the next big star — I was asked.
And I nearly fell off my chair when I said “absolutely not!.”
I truly believe that service design and cognitive technologies are joining forces to make our products smarter according to our users need, but cognitive is nothing without user interaction or without data, so we can’t go too far without the human factor.
Collaboration is, from my perspective, the future.
If you think about Airbnb, Uber and their different ways of using what was already there — we are looking at service design changing human behaviour by enabling people to step in and offer their service without much dependency on big corporations. That said, I do believe that the future is to connect and to empower people through collaborative platforms. And I need to be honest here, I can’t wait for this time to come.
And what are the biggest challenges we face in the design industry?
As a UX Researcher, my colleague Karin Slegers mentioned the challenge of translating the insights and findings of her researches into ideas and actionable products. From her perspective, that was the hardest and most exciting part of the job — especially when it comes to getting investment and interest from the market to transform ideas into real products.
From an IBM perspective, I mentioned the challenge of transforming really huge and complex products into delightful (and scalable!) experiences. We need to dive deep into our users worlds to understand how different industries tackle similar problems and adapt it to different processes — but this challenge is exactly what makes our work so special and exciting.
And how do we fill the gap between design and engineering? How do we make everyone speak the same language?
That was definitely a big topic present during the whole day. How do we connect the dots and reduce the frustration behind the dev & design relationship?
And no, I don’t have THE answer, but I am a huge fan of the IBM Design Thinking Framework and I do believe in its tricks: by putting multidisciplinary teams to work together in order to understand the user’s perspective through Design Thinking, we are able to create empathy for the user and to create empathy for each other, which is the key for any healthy relationship in life.
And what is your piece of advice for the designers present in the house today?
- “My piece of advice would be to take more responsibility over your challenges and make things happen. As designers, we complain a lot about not working with all the resources we need and being blocked by the company’s constraints, which sometimes doesn’t understand why our design process is essential for a great outcome. But we also need to understand that our field is new and design is proving its value as we show results — so be patience, stop complaining and fight for what you believe in. It is our responsibility to sell the value of design and get the company’s buy-in.”
So I hope I was able to sell a bit of how amazing the UX Camp Experience is and why you should support it by participating, organising it locally and/or spreading the word!
Let’s keep encouraging the design community to get together and to join forces to make our field even MORE amazing! (Is it possible?)
Want to know more about it?
#UXCampNL https://twitter.com/hashtag/UXcampNL?src=hash
And a big, huge and warm thank you to USInet team (Stefan Manojlovic, Emanuela Cozzi, Debargha Dey, Katerina Gavrilo, Lindsey van der Lans and Jan de Wit) who organized the UXCampNL and kindly invited me to be part of this awesomazing day!
Originally published at medium.com on October 4, 2016.
