For almost any conference, the talks that linger most with me are those that help me see things from different perspectives, especially if they give me insight into how design challenges are solved in other fields.
Three talks bubble up to the top in this sense, and if I could make a UX Week mixtape to hand out, three talks would definitely be on it, covering toy inventing, spacesuits, and the quest for creative inspiration.
Smart UX managers deliver better experiences and better revenue. That's their job.
At the heart of this year's MX Conference was a talk by Hotwire Group's head of mobile, Melissa Matross. Her story starts with her hatred of display ads and how they took away from the quality of the Hotwire experience as a “necessary evil.”
Knowing her frustration with the ads, her boss challenged Melissa saying, “If you want to get rid of the ads, find a way to replace the revenue.” This was the opening that Melissa says changed her career.
Before her story's done, you hear how she found revenue, dramatically improved the experience and Hotwire's brand impression, and ignited her career:
Melissa Matross | Better Revenue through UX: Bringing Down the Banners the Hotwire Way
In September I had the opportunity to travel to New York City and take the stage with U.N. Global Pulse to talk about our work on HunchWorks. Together with Chris van der Walt and Sara Farmer we spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Conference, an event dedicated to the emerging field of data science and the brilliant developers, analysts and researchers who find themselves working with petabytes of unstructured data on a daily basis.
Seven weeks ago, an amazing group of about 500 creative individuals from around the world were all wrapped up in the warm n' fuzzy blanket of community and inspiration at UX Week 2011. UX Week is our biggest conference of the year and offers the opportunity to meet with friends (old and new), dig in deep with hands-on workshops and swap stories from the front lines of user experience. And, of course, hear from some great speakers on the main stage.
Our annual MX conference helps managers working to deliver better experiences to the world. And that's right in line with Charles Warren's 10 minutes on how the three little words “How Might We” makes design deliver significantly better results.
Cleverly elegant: That’s how to describe the work of Ben Fry, a storyteller whose medium of choice is data-sets.
His work is a shining example of how aesthetics and function can work together. Watch his talk at UX Week 2010 to get an overview of his process, take a tour of his work, discover the power of his key question (How are people going to use this data?), and start to imagine the possibilities of pocket-sized technology that enables us to take giant-sized data sets anywhere.
If you’re a programmer you’ll be inspired to start designing, and if…
I selfishly agreed to review Nicole Lazzaro’s talk and write this introduction after missing her talk during UX Week. She’s been working in game design for the past 20 years and I wanted a closer look at her model of the 4 keys of emotion and fun in game play. They include, Easy Fun, Hard Fun, People Fun, and Serious Fun.
Game design is already a popular topic for experience designers and it will continue to gain in relevancy. It’s clear that games are a great framework for the increasing number of data feedback loops from our smart objects,...
I want to introduce you to a UX Week talk called “Data Informed, Not Data Driven” by Adam Mosseri, Product Design Manager at Facebook. While his talk focused on the role of data in design and decision making, I was more intrigued by the sub-text of the story, which I’ve synthesized as:
Innovation comes from creative cultures that value collaboration, informed risk-taking, transparency, and trust in one another to make decisions.
More magic that I culled from Adam’s talk:
The most successful teams are small and empowered to make decisions. Trust is a great motivator.
Good decisions…
I tweeted a while back that it’s been discovered you can boost creativity with side-to-side eye movement. People who watched a target moving side-to-side for 30 seconds have been tested as producing significantly more ideas when immediately given a creative task. This technique is, “thought to increase the cross-talk between the hemispheres.”
So I put together both a PowerPoint and Keynote file to help you do the same thing. Try it out before your next design session, and let us know if you think it works!