UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Interaction Designers vs Algorithms

Speaker: Giles Colborne In this talk we’ll look what algorithms are good for, and where they fall down. It’ll discuss what it means to design a service using algorithms and the skills you’ll need to develop and adapt if you’re to thrive in the next era of experience design.

How We Talk and How Machines Listen

The Structure of Discourse in Human-Computer Interaction Speaker: Abi Jones Abi Jones compares human-to-human and human-computer conversation and interaction, introducing you to the conversational machines in your life and those to come. Learn what makes for great human-computer speech interaction from the first turn to the last, how computers interpret speech, and why it’s more enjoyable and addictive to talk to a 1960s chatbot than most intelligent assistants available today.

Creating Consistent Experiences With Design Principles

Speaker: Adam Connor By understanding what principles are and where they come from we can move beyond the lists of best practices and heuristics we’re all familiar with and create unique, consistent experiences. Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, applications, our bank, our doctor, our government, anyone, we form expectations and understandings of what someone ...

The Invisible Problem with Fairy Tale Experiences

Speaker: Per Axbom Adopting techniques from behavioral sciences we are, as UX practitioners, becoming ever better at nudging users to perform the tasks we want them to perform. But when we remove all barriers and deliver the fairy-tale experience of requiring minimal brain capacity to move forward, we are in fact abandoning our promise of allowing users to make the best choice. In this talk, where fairy-tale and reality intertwine, I will help you catch yourself and remember why you became...

Designing to Learn

Speaker: Melissa Perri Over the past few years there’s been a push in the product development world to “make products that people love”. A great User Experience is now essential to creating a successful product. While many companies focus on having the best design and the greatest experience, they are still missing the most important step in product development - learning about their customers. With Agile and Lean gaining popularity in more companies, we talk about techniques to get things...

The Emerging Global Web

Speaker: Stephanie Rieger In this presentation we explore some of the fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the internet at the hands of consumers in emerging economies. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities, and challenges, we will face when growing a truly global web.

Calm Technology and Wearable Computing

Speaker: Amber Case In this presentation, Geoloqi co-founder Amber Case will take you on a journey through the history of calm technology, wearable computing, and how developers and designers can make apps “ambient” and inspire delight instead of constant interaction. This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing starting from the 1970’s-2010’s and how mobile interfaces should take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way.

Co-Create: Creating Better Together

Speaker: Denise Jacobs Despite the prevalent mythology of the lone creative genius, many of the most innovative contributions spring from the creative chemistry of a group and the blending of everyone’s ideas and concepts. How can we best leverage this collective wisdom to generate creative synergy and co-create? Let’s look at the process of recognizing and removing our personal creative blocks, connecting and communicating with others, combining ideas using play, and constructing a collabo...

Magical UX and the Internet of Things

Josh Clark What if this thing was magic? The web is touching everyday objects now, and designing for the internet of things means blessing everyday objects, places, even people with extraordinary abilities—requiring designers, too, to break with the ordinary. Designing for this new medium is less a challenge of technology than imagination. Sharing a rich trove of examples, designer and author Josh Clark explores the new experiences that are possible when ANYTHING can be an interface. The d...

3 Strategies for Behavior Change

Stephen Wendel Do your users fail to engage with your app, or don't follow through on their goals? Steve Wendel, the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and author of Designing for Behavior Change, will present the three main strategies you can use to support behavior change: building habits, informing choices, or cleverly restructuring problems to help people take action. You’ll learn how to make your products make more effective — for you business, and your users.

Designing with Linked Data

Mike Atherton This is not your usual UX talk. It’s a little about information architecture, a bit about content strategy, but mostly it’s about how we can use information floating around the web to build content-rich products, and how we should try harder to weave our work into the fabric of the network. Linked Open Data lets us expose, share, and connect knowledge. A single, extensible network of information stretching across an increasingly semantic web, making our products more findabl...

Separation Anxiety: Taking Messenger from a Feature to a Standalone App

Marissa Phillips About a year ago, most people didn’t know that Facebook had a separate app for messaging, and Messenger didn’t offer much that you couldn’t already get from the Facebook app. Since then, Messenger was completely redesigned, and it’s now used by millions of people. Learn how the team approached the task of redefining Messenger and struggled with separating it from Facebook. • See how the voice of a sub-brand emerged. • Get tips for writing content that’s really mobile-firs...

Information Architecture for Everybody

Abby Covert What does a restaurant menu, a business to business sales process and an eCommerce website have in common? All of these things involve structuring information for an audience to understand. And while the audience and context may change, the practice of seeing our way through the associated complexities and iterations does not. Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable. No matter what your job or mission in life: if you...

Atomic Design

Brad Frost Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so it's essential to break UIs into their atomic elements in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs. This session will introduce atomic design, a methodology for creating robust interface design systems. We’ll cover how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization and clients up for success.

Content strategy for slow experiences

Speaker: Margot Bloomstein Online experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll exami...

Wayfindr: Independent Travel for the Blind

Umesh Pandya "Investigate what it would be like for a young vision impaired person, to travel London’s transport network in the near future.” In this lightning talk, Umesh Pandya will share the story behind Wayfindr and how ustwo and the Royal London Society for Blind People designed and validated a system that helps vision impaired people move through the London Underground Network independently. Umesh will talk about the tools, techniques, methodologies they used over the course of this...

Words as Material

Speaker: Nicole Fenton  Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to each other. In this session, Nicole will talk about writing—an often invisible partner and material in the design process. You’ll learn how to communicate behind the scenes to define what you’re making, prototype quickly, gather consensus, build clarity, and ship meaningful products.

The Art of Deception

Speaker: Stephen Hay There's a fine line between persuasion and deception. On the web, that line is frequently crossed. Sometimes purposefully, sometimes unwittingly. The best way to avoid falling prey to those attempting to deceive (or accidentally becoming the deceiver) is to be able to recognize the techniques yourself. Find out how people deceive through design, why these practices eventually fail, and how you can make your work persuasive without being deceptive.

Building Innovation in Real Time

Speaker: Josh Seiden Imagine you have a limited budget, a disruptive idea for a social-networking product, and a short timeline to get your vision built and launched. How do you know if your idea will work, without burning through all your time and money? In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into a recent project to see how we went from idea to successful launch in just under 4 months—on time and on budget—by using a “learning from live systems” approach. Product teams often use prototy...

Are we Architecting the Information Age?

Speaker: Lisa Welchman If this is the information age, what special role do information and user experience architects and play? The rise of industrial aged forced changes in supply chain management for physical goods. What changes do we need to make in the information supply chain in order to make sure information gets to the right, person, in the right place, on the right, device, and at the right time. And, what ethical concerns and considerations does that bring to the table, and who...

UX Strategy Means Business

Speaker: Jared Spool We are in an age where poor user experiences become the focus of nationwide attention. One doesn’t need to look beyond recent catastrophes, such as Apple’s iOS6 Maps, Healthcare.gov, and the demise of Blackberry’s smartphone to see the necessity of getting the experience right. Yet, what do we know about ensuring our next design isn’t going down the same road as those that have failed before us? We need to understand how design integrates with our organization’s strate...

Citizen Experience Design and You!

Speaker: Jess McMullin Many governments are dealing with today’s challenges using tools from the last century. UX design (and designers) can help meet those challenges and make a difference in our communities, in our nations, and in the daily lives of regular people.The public sector needs better design, from making forms, processes, and official websites easier to use to helping decision-makers understand and collaborate better when creating policy. Design can help create better experien...

(Re)framing - The first step towards innovative ideas

Speaker: Steve Baty The questions we ask ourselves at the idea generation stage of design play a critical role in the nature of the ideas generated. Bold questions beget bold ideas; and incrementalism begins in the same way. In this talk we will look at how problem framing and reframing can impact the ideas teams generate, and how problem statements can be ‘tuned’ to better deliver feasible concepts within your organisation. We’ll look at some recent examples from our work at Meld Studios ...

History of the Button

Speaker: Bill DeRouchey The most significant things are often hidden in plain sight. In the world of design and technology, it’s the button. Let’s take a 100 year tour of the history of the button to see how it’s changed how we think, understand and interact with the world. Products, movies, advertisements and more will reveal how we evolved from a mechanical to a digital world.

The Mechanics of Magic

Speaker: Christina Wodtke The web world thinks of game design as the next silver bullet, and companies are slapping badges and progress bars over every annoying thing they wish users to do. But as users tire of everything looking like a game, “gamification” is starting to get discarded as just another fad.. Games have been core to human experience since ancient times, and the game industry now makes more than the movies industry. If we want to create amazing experiences for our users, ther...

Adaptive Input

Speaker: Jason Grigsby Windows 8. Chromebook Pixel. Ubuntu Phone. These devices shatter another consensual hallucination that we web developers have bought into: mobile = touch and desktop = keyboard and mouse. We have tablets with keyboards; laptops that become tablets; laptops with touch screens; phones with physical keyboards; and even phones that become desktop computers. Not to mention new forms of input like cameras, voice control and sensors. One of the core things that responsive ...

Things I've learned from leading UX Designers

Speaker: Russ Unger I’ve worked for a lot of idiot managers in my career. And then, one day, after I had become a manager, it dawned on me: Now I’m the idiot! You see, most of my career has been an exercise in “trial by fire.” This process worked well when I was a designer and was trying to master the art of the task flow, site map, wireframe, prototype, persona, and so on. In leadership positions, the option to go back to the drawing board or to iterate hasn’t always been readily available...

How Designers Can Build a New World

Startups; coworking; traction; lean everything. Traditional forms of work are breaking down and reforming into new models, and entrepreneurs carry the torch of change. At the same time, the UX field has matured and become more stable and specialized, often pushing UX into an execution function. The costs of starting a new product have never been lower. So why aren’t more designers embracing the world of entrepreneurship? Turns out designers have a way of looking at the world that is an exce...

How Designers Destroyed the World

Speaker: Mike Monteiro Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change. In this bluntly honest talk, Mike will invite you to consider your responsibilities as a...

Mobile to the Future

When something new comes along, it’s common for us to react with what we already know. Radio programming on TV, print design on web pages, and now web page design on mobile devices. But every medium ultimately needs unique thinking and design to reach its true potential. Through an in-depth look at several common web interactions, Luke will outline how to adapt existing desktop design solutions for mobile devices and how to use mobile to expand what’s possible across all devices. You’ll go...

Learning to See

Speaker: Oliver Reichenstein Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse — once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance...

Big Data UX

Speaker: Aarron Walter Big data is helping many industries discover new insights creating smarter companies, and now it’s empowering UX practitioners to see patterns in mountains of data. Customer feedback, trends in support issues, analytics, usability test notes, customer interview transcripts, tweets, blog comments and more can be connected and searched to find serious flaws in designs or inform the next design. Research has always been a core part of the UX workflow, but after a study...

Designing for Delight: How to create products people love

What is it that delights users? And how can you measure the return on investment of creating interfaces that make users smile? I’ve interviewed experts and users and come up with some surprising findings that will help you plan and design better user experiences and focus your attention where its really needed.

The Mobile Content Mandate

Speaker: Karen McGrane You don’t get to decide which device people use to access your content: they do. By 2015, more people will access the internet via mobile devices than on traditional computers. In the US today, nearly one-third of people who browse the internet on their mobile phone say that’s the only way they go online—in many countries, those numbers are even higher. It’s time to stop avoiding the issue by saying “no one will ever want to do that on mobile.” Chances are, someone al...

Beyond Usable: Mapping Emotion to Experience

Speaker: Kelly Goto Addiction or devotion? The complexity of our relationships between connected experiences, devices and people is increasing. Design ethnographer Kelly Goto presents underlying emotional indicators that reveal surprising attachments to brands, products, services and devices. Gain insight into the future of UX and understand the importance of designing user experiences that map to people‛s real needs and desires — the unconscious side of the user experience.

Microinteractions: Design with Details

Speaker: Dan Saffer The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn on mute on your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments–which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored–can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. This talk provides a new way of thinking about des...

Designing for connected homes

Speaker: Claire Rowland “Siri, did I leave the oven on?” The idea of the connected home has been around for 40 years or more, but has never taken off as a mass market proposition. But this is changing. Mainstream retailers are starting to bringing out connected home hardware and services to help consumers understand and control their energy use and heating, secure their homes, know who’s in and out, be alerted to any emergencies and generally feel reassured that everything’s OK at home. I...

A Means to An End

Speaker: Jon Kolko Our material is less then 25 years old. HTML was invented in 1990, and most of us have enjoyed building with it since. Many of us actually helped invent it, or parts of it: the HTML specification, advancements in client-side scripting, new device platforms, new possibilities. We have an intimacy with the material, in the same way that a potter knows her clay. This technology – this powerful force, this beautiful material – can be aimed and directed. But where shall we di...

Ubiquitous Computing and the Emerging Digital Eco-System

Speaker: Bill Buxton In 1991 Mark Weiser published what is now a classic paper, The Computer for the 21st Century. In it, he laid the foundation for what has become known as Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp. Ironically, by having the word "Computer" in the singular, the title of his paper is at odds with the content, since the whole point is that we will not have just one or two computers; rather we will have hundreds, and deal with hundreds or thousands of others as we go about our day-to-...

Presenting UXLx 2014

The Long Neck Versus the Long Tail

Speaker: Gerry McGovern Why the tiny tasks in the Long Tail get in the way of the top tasks of the Long Neck—and what to do about it. All websites are made up of a series of customer tasks. Some—the top tasks—are much more important than others—the tiny tasks. Unfortunately, many organizations spend more of their time on the tiny tasks than on the top tasks. This talk will give you a way to prove that the top tasks are where the majority of the focus and attention should be.

Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business

Speaker: Jeff Gothelf Designers have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their vision for products and experiences. As technology has evolved to offer more complex and intricate interactions, the deliverables we've been creating have followed suit. Ultimately though, these deliverables have come to serve as bottlenecks to the creation process and as the beginning of the negotiation process with our team mates -- a starting point for conversation on what could get built and lau...

The Mobile Frontier

Speaker: Rachel Hinman Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space. In this talk, Rachel will provide: Insight into how designers and UX ...

Design for Engagement

Speaker: Jesse James Garrett Whether you design websites or shopping malls, hospitals or mobile phones, you're designing for people, and people want to be engaged by the products and services in their lives. But human engagement comes in many different forms, and traditional design practices don't say much about creating engagement. As design evolves toward delivering integrated experiences across media, designers need ways to understand modes of engagement and mechanisms for creating it. I...

Journey mapping as insight tool: a healthcare case study

Speaker: Kim Goodwin  If you want a team to see the world through users' eyes, there's nothing quite as powerful as involving them in ethnographic field studies. However, teams can still struggle with translating their field experience into product features and design decisions. Journey maps help teams structure and share field data, identify opportunities, and determine what kinds of tools and information to offer and when. The talk is illustrated with field data and a map of the patient j...

Refined Design: Thinking Beyond the Device

Speaker: Derek Featherstone Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications. In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how th...

Microcopy: How to write small, deadly copy for all occasions

Speaker: Joshua Porter The difference between a happy user and a confused one is small…many times our success using software hinges on the smallest of interactions. In this talk Joshua Porter will discuss microcopy, or the tiny bits of copy that helps users in times of need. Examples include reminding people to use the right email address, informing them that their credit card is not needed, or that they don't have to create an account to continue. In many ways an interface is made up of ma...

Discover and act on insights about people

Speaker: Steve Portigal  Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can ...

Presenting UXLx 2013

The Architecture of Understanding

Speaker: Peter Morville Peter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb, one of the most popular visuals in our discipline, encourages us to go beyond usability by creating products and services that are also useful, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible. Now, for the first time, Peter explains why we must go further by creating "architectures of understanding" -- and why designing for insight and inspiration is in the best interests of our firms, our users, and ourselves.