UXConf Brazil: Usability in essence
It’s no news that UX has become one of the most important factors in every kind of Business. Forbes writer, Karen Clark Cole describes in her article “How User Experience Is Revolutionizing Business,” that not only UX is bringing competitiveness and quality of online products, but also it has been facilitating the way people live their lives.
Recently, the third edition of the UXConf Brazil happened in Porto Alegre, South Brazil. A conference made to gather professionals from all over the country and the continent to discuss and collaborate on a variety of topics.
At the conference I asked myself the following question:
What can Brazil, a country considered third world, with many political and social issues, learn from the concept and the power of UX? A lot!
Every single Brazilian knows the “jeitinho brasileiro” (the Brazilian way) of doing things. We tend to always look for the simple and quick solutions. That applies to inventing new kind of gadgets to get your USB cable to stop having a faulty wiring for example or to create simple formularies and fields for an online Business. It’s within us, Brazilians, to always find an easy way to do things and that’s an awesome thing when it’s not used for bad intentions. We are solvers, we know how to figure things out.
What we are learning to do is grow. This conference to me was an example of it, of growth, personal and professional. It was fascinating to see how Brazilian companies and Worldwide Corporations like Google, Huge and Banco do Brasil have been facilitating lives, developing new market solutions only by focusing on giving the best experience to users.
Cases of Visual Design, Service Design, Graphic Design and all others who can fit into the Design category and have something to do with UX were presented during the conference. Solutions that seemed harder, habits that seemed they were never going to change and a so-called unreachable knowledge, suddenly solved and presented into talks of 10, 20 and 30 minutes that changed a lot of minds sitting in the auditorium.
Going back to my question, what can Brazil, Brazilians learn from the power of UX? The answer relies not only on implementing solutions but on implementing diversity. Brazil is one of the most diverse countries, geographically and ethnically speaking. One of the principles of UX which is to understand the users in order to give them the best experience suddenly becomes harder to complete in our scenario. What if there are too many different users? Too many realities and locations? This edition of the UXCONF Brazil showed me that we can do this, we can make this real.
Lectures about Gender Diversity and how can platforms talk to both cisgenders and transgenders publics, projects about accessibility and how to include people with mental and physical disabilities, keynotes on how to develop and create the perfect UX Strategy of an app to help social services on the adoption process, and talks that encourages designers to look after social projects and create new solutions for it.
This.
This is what we can learn from the power of UX.
We can learn to respect and accept the diversity of things, of users, of people. Learn to get ourselves involved and respecting the differences. Thinking about the perfect solution that not only creates a platform, a project that will be successful by bringing profit but successful because it embraces what we as a Country, we that have a lot of political and social issues, are. We can grow then, grow together accepting who we truly are.
To the Organizers of the UXCONF Brazil all I have to say is: thank you and be sure I’ll be attending the 2018 edition of the conference.
