UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Speaker: Susan Weinschenk We think that people are logical and rational, and that their decisions are made by careful thinking. But the reality is that the actions that people take at websites – whether they decide to register, buy, or take the action we would like them to take -- are made in a largely unconscious way. Although some decisions might come from the rational part of the brain, many decisions and actions are based on emotion, and many are based on automatic triggers that people react to from something at the website.

Speaker: Eric Reiss Thanks to CMS, it’s easy to fill a web page with dynamic content. Web 2.0 techniques and technologies make it easy for users to add their own contributions. And graphic designers are constantly seeking new ways to differentiate their work. Yet the noisier our pages get, the more difficult it can be to spot the important information. Worse still, if the information surrounding the core content is irrelevant to the mission of the page and/or the goals of the user, inclusion may actually kill the user experience and undermine the business goals of the site owner. This presentation seeks to introduce the concepts of Web Dogma ’06, a generic mindset created to help web professionals avoid a growing problem.

Speaker: Luke Wroblewski First person interfaces allow people to interact with the real world as they are currently experiencing it. These applications layer information on top of people's immediate view of the world and turn the objects and people around them into interactive elements. First person interfaces enable people to interact with the real world through a set of "always on" sensors. Simply place a computing device in a specific location, near a specific object or person, and automatically get relevant output based on who you are, where you are, and who or what is near you. As interface design paradigms have progressed over time, they consistently reduced the amount of abstraction between input and output. From punched cards to the always on sensors that power FPIs -the amount of overhead required to access information and perform actions has decreased exponentially. This trend is enabling a new class of applications to thrive that allow people to access and manage information with minimum effort and where it is most relevant. Google Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, said it well: "these are early examples of what's possible when you pair sensor-rich devices with resources in the cloud. [...] But something has changed. Computing has changed. And the possibilities inspire us."

Speaker: Jared Spool Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses. However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today’s business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements. In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. He'll demonstrate how successful Experience Design: - Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business - Is learned, but not available through introspection - Must be invisible to succeed - Is cultural - Is multi-discplinary - Thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

Speaker: Donna Spencer Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews? Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including: - Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about your users language and categories - Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features - Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.

Speaker: Dan Saffer New technologies, whether they are fancy, high-concept gestural interfaces or something as behind-the-scenes as a new algorithm, require some extra care when they're first being utilized in a new product. This care extends not only in the design process, but also to its introduction and explanation to users. This talk will cover, via case studies from Kicker Studio, what pitfalls to look out for, as well as what opportunities exist in introducing a new technology. We'll discuss how to design so that Raymond Loewy's MAYA (Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable) principle is put to its best use.

Speaker: Bill Scott In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into “design lenses”. A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design. In this talk, Bill will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lenses inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.

Speaker: Peter Merholz User experience practice focuses on interactive screen-based experiences, typically the Web and increasingly mobile. However, the bulk of our customers' lives are away from these screens. As businesses try to embrace the totality of a customer's experience, crossing channels and coordinating touchpoints, they run up against the limits of their organizational structures and processes. In this talk, Peter will reveal the symptoms of a broken organization, and offer measures you can take to make your business truly customer-centered.