Machine learning and AI are already defining the next era of digital products, and designers have an urgent role to play. This lively and inspiring talk explores what makes machine learning such a compelling and challenging design material—and shows you how you can start using it right now in your everyday practice. Refit familiar design and UX process to work with the grain of the algorithm, to help the machines solve real problems without creating new ones. The challenges and opportunities of AI and machine learning are plenty; discover your own influential role, and learn to handle this powerful new design material with care and respect.
Josh Clark is a UX leader who helps organizations build products for what's next. He is founder of Big Medium, a New York design studio specializing in future-friendly interfaces for artificial intelligence, connected devices, and responsive websites. His clients include Samsung, Time Inc, ExxonMobil, J.Crew, About.com, TechCrunch, Entertainment Weekly, eBay, O’Reilly Media, and many others. Josh has written several books, including Designing for Touch and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. He speaks around the world about what’s next for digital interfaces.
Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a producer of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the popular “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running schedule, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)
Technology is now with us from dawn to dusk. It’s increasingly an intimate companion, a go-between for our relationships, and a trusted friend helping us to develop new capabilities. Even so, it can be a struggle to live harmoniously with technology. So far, technology’s EQ hasn’t caught up to its IQ. Technology is aligned with productivity, not attuned to our inner world. More than designing machines that sense emotional signals, it’s about shaping technology that make us feel more human. Join Pamela to consider how we might design technology that is attuned to the emotional side of experience.
Pamela Pavliscak studies our emotional relationship with technology. As a creative strategist, she collaborates with organizations like Google, IKEA, and Virgin to craft emotionally intelligent experiences. As faculty at Pratt Institute, she teaches next-gen designers. Her work has been featured in Slate, NPR, and Quartz and she’s spoken at SXSW and TNW. Her book, Emotionally Intelligent Design, charts a tech future with feeling.
Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in a modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.
In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation. He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.
Good design systems can help you create digital products with efficiency and consistency. But great design systems will support and strengthen your team’s creativity at the same time. In this talk, Yesenia will discuss how to communicate your brand ethos through a design system and how to collaborate across teams to create harmonious, branded experiences.
Yesenia Perez-Cruz is a designer, speaker, and writer based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is currently a Senior UX Manager at Shopify, where she leads the Polaris design system team. Previously, she was the Senior Design Director for Product at Vox Media.
Connected tea kettles that advertise themselves to thieves. Fitness trackers that tell your enemies where to find you. Go beyond the dystopian headlines and into pragmatic advice on how user experience design can promote security, privacy, and transparency. There’s a leadership role for interaction design, brand strategy, and copywriting in making products people trust. Join Simply Secure’s Design Director Ame Elliott, for an approachable look at how user experience design can brighten up the shadier side of the Internet of Things.
Ame Elliott is Design Director at nonprofit Simply Secure, where she cultivates a community of professional designers, developers, and researchers working on privacy, security, and ethical technology. Previously, Ame spent 15 years working in Silicon Valley, as Design Research Lead for IDEO San Francisco, and as a research scientist for Xerox PARC and Ricoh Innovations. She has delivered technology strategy for global clients including Acer, Ericsson, Fuji-Xerox, HP, and Samsung. She was recognized as a Most Creative Person in Business by Fast Company, and her award-winning design work has been included in the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Ame earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University Colorado, Boulder.
When content is your product (spoiler alert: it always is) what does it mean to design for a better experience? And with more channels, devices and platforms than ever before, how can you give people the stuff they want, wherever they want it? Let's go deep beneath the user interface and figure out what your audience really cares about. It might just change your idea of what it means to be a designer.
For over 20 years, Mike Atherton has been connecting people to content. A specialist in structuring information, he has chunked, pushed, presented and linked compelling content for the BBC, Huddle, and, in a different age, Playboy TV. Now a content strategist for Facebook in London, he collaborates with product specialists to build experiences from the terminology up. He is also co-author of the book Designing Connected Content.
If you’re not leveraging interface animations to influence your users, you are missing a critical component of UX design. Like body language, motion design supplies a rich, often-subconscious layer of meaning & personality to every micro-interaction. Digital products can leverage the same techniques used by cartoon animators, actors & dancers to convey personality, improve comprehension & influence behavior through movement. Learn the right animation styles for your brand, users & product.
Katie leads the experience strategy for Allstate online marketing products including the Allstate.com quoting experiences and My Account. Originally educated as a theatre director, she brings a unique perspective to digital work. She believes if brands wish to truly connect with consumers they must combine emotion and utility, storytelling and technology to create experiences that go beyond satisfaction to delight. Prior to joining Allstate, Katie was a UX Director at FCB Chicago where she was the UX lead on the 2016 global redesign of JackDaniels.com as well as leading experience design for many other clients such as Cox Communications, and Toyota Financial Services.
Digital product design have grown exponentially over the last decade. From 'a cherry on top' to a household name valued by nearly everyone. The teams and budgets are getting bigger and bigger, but with all this power comes responsibility – we’re expected to deliver more, at a higher level of quality and… faster. Scalability of the design process became a requirement.
To answer this challenge companies all over the world started to invest into design systems. Unfortunately the problems of scale did not magically disappear. Design systems, deeply rooted into the coded foundation of digital products, lacked any natural and automatic connection to a vast majority of design tools. Why? Majority of design tools operate on the level of vector graphics and hence cannot in any way understand production code and connect to it.
Design tools have failed us. To get rid of this issue and enable scalability of design synchronized with development processes, a new class of tools emerged on the market – code–based design tools. Solutions such as UXPin, Interplay, Framer X, Modulz are able to connect to coded design systems and enable a completely new workflow for both designers and engineers. In this talk I’m going to dive deep into the nature of this new workflow and show examples of how designers and engineers can reach a completely new scale of operations by investing into code–based design tooling.
Marcin Treder is the CEO and co-founder of UXPin, a code-based design platform. Since co-founding UXPin in 2010, he has helped build and lead product teams in the Poland and Silicon Valley. Previously, he worked on projects for two companies that IPOed and managed design team for one of the biggest eCommerce companies in Eastern Europe. Marcin has been selected to numerous awards including MIT 30 under 35 for his accomplishments in design and business.
Doing the things you love for work is energizing and fun and the reason why we designers – like most others – have chosen our job: it’s our passion. Yet we often struggle and feel a lot of pain when working for our clients. Why is collaboration with our clients so hard at times?
And how can we cope with this discomfort that ranges from mild annoyance to rageful job quitting?
For Nihan, shifting from working FOR to working WITH the client has proven to be one of the most powerful solutions for these kind of challenges. By sharing the lessons learned, she will talk about her insights and observations from numerous collaborative projects, and illustrate how most of us share the same feelings when it comes to the occasionally annoying but mostly fruitful client work.
This talk is a service designer’s take on how to become a successful team with your client rather than just delivering, and how to get back the energized feeling of joy.
Nihan works as a Senior Service Designer at Futurice in Berlin. As such, she is a crossbreed with a pinch of nerd and the goal to empower people in order to innovate.
Before Futurice, she worked as a coach for the renowned Stanford program in Design Thinking “ME310” at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland.
During the last years, Nihan facilitated numerous creative workshops and worked on innovation projects across industries with a focus on the automotive sector.
Above all, Nihan is strongly driven by her passion for human factors. As people are the essential ingredient to creating meaningful innovations, she deeply cares about people and their purposeful (inter)actions.
As a trained industrial & strategic designer, Nihan holds a M.Sc. degree in Strategic Product Design with highest distinction from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.
Creuna Norway has helped connect the citizens and government of Oslo, with a new visual identity. Oslo is a thousand years old, yet thoroughly modern with world class municipal services. Over time, clutter had built up in the city’s identity, and about 250 logos were in use. As a result, Oslo’s residents didn’t recognize much of the good work that their government actually did.
So, we worked with the city to clarify its identity. We made a new logo, by simplifying the city’s seal; and a flexible system inspired by shapes from Oslo’s streetscapes and architectural details. Infinitely reconfigurable, the shapes can also spell “Oslo” as a word picture. Our new custom typeface, Oslo Sans, inspired by generations of city street signs, supports universal design requirements.
The new identity is unified yet flexible, allowing all communication styles and tones - from authoritative to playful. The design works as well in 2D and 3D, has defined motion and fulfils universal design requirements. Our Digital Design Assistant reduces the barriers and costs to good design: any of the city’s 53,000 employees can choose from one of several templates, input information, upload photos, and receive automatically designed and exportable layouts.
John is a strategic advisor for Creuna, a leading customer experience agency in the Nordics. He has more than 15 years of experience in brand building, design management, communications and market research. In Creuna he has managed a range of successful and award winning branding and identity projects, including a new identity for the City of Oslo. Previously he worked for Visit Norway promoting Norway as a tourist destination. He has also worked as a market researcher in London. He holds a MSc in Sociology from London School of Economics (LSE) and a BSc in International Marketing from Norwegian Business School (BI).
Today, when we hear about augmented reality, we think about Pokémon Go, Snapchat filters, and the inevitable Ikea app. In other words: 3D models on top of video feeds. Let's be honest: this is far from the disruptive and revolutionary technology we've been promised. What if there was more to it?
In this talk, we'll explore why this definition of AR is overly narrow and constraining. The first part covers the lessons learned from designing mixed-reality experiences at Osmo. I present some of Osmo's early prototypes and explain why they failed. I also cover the key early design decisions that made Osmo successful in retrospect.
In the second part, we expand our definition of AR to 'technology that — quite literally — augment our reality.' I explain how this simple change in perspective opens the door to unforeseen innovation. Beyond screens and Snapchat filters, we'll see how AR will bring us into an era of ubiquitous computing, where the line between the digital and the physical fades away.
Tony is a designer specializing in AR and AI. Originally from Quebec, Canada, Tony has been living and working in Silicon Valley for the past 5 years. He was the first designer at Osmo, a mixed-reality education platform for kids. After Osmo was acquired, Tony joined Google, where he’s building the next generation of AI-powered products. In his free time, Tony write and give lectures on design and technology. He has published for several media such as The Next Web, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Dark patterns misuse design principles to intentionally lead users to make unintended and potentially harmful choices. This talk raises awareness about what defines a dark pattern and why they are harmful for our users and our products in the long run.
Melissa Smith is a Sr. UX Researcher at Google, working on YouTube’s creator product team between Zurich, Switzerland and San Francisco, California. Prior to creator products, Melissa worked on the YouTube video watching experience, seeking to continue her lifelong interest in human-computer interaction and seamless product development. Outside of work, Melissa actively volunteers with FIRST Robotics, a global nonprofit aimed at getting kids interested in science and tech through annual robotics competitions.
Melissa holds a PhD in Human Factors & Applied Cognitive Psychology from George Mason University.
When global company Booking.com decided to take things down to a local scale, they had no idea how challenging it would be to tackle a market across the world. Indonesia is one of the fastest growing markets in 2019, and by deciding to target that market, the team quickly learned that there was no way to be successful without help from the locals. In the talk, designer Camille Gribbons will share UX learnings and funny anecdotes about the unique challenges of designing for a brand new market and just how much cultural perspectives matter to design.
Camille Gribbons is a product and user experience designer with a passion for new product development and design thinking. She currently works on the "Next Billion Travelers" track at Booking.com where she has handled all design for a new product called "BookingLokal" - a brand new, localized travel app for Indonesia.
Human conversation is imperfect. We mishear each other, ask for clarification, stumble over words, and sometimes start over. These imperfections are not unusual. They're a natural part of dialogue. Because of these challenges, conversational technologies need to go beyond simple 'error handling' and embrace the rocky paths to task completion. This talk will discuss the challenges inherent in conversational interfaces and review graceful, humane ways to circumvent them, both from a design and research perspective.
Jon Bloom is a Senior Conversation Designer for Google, focusing on the Google Assistant. Jon was previously the UX Research Lead for Jibo, Inc., creators of the social robot of the same name. Jon was also Senior Voice User Interface Manager for Nuance Communications, where he sat on Nuance’s Innovation Steering Committee.
Over his 20-year career, Jon has designed graphic, speech, and multimodal user interfaces for robots, IVR’s, dictation software, cars, and mobile applications. Jon holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research.
Tom Illmensee is a music-maker, improviser, experience designer, truth-seeker, and community organizer based in Richmond, Virginia. Tom is co-founder and CEO of Orbital Music Park, an inclusive community and creative space for music-makers. He's also founder and principal at Song X Studio, a digital user experience design agency. Tom served as Amuse emcee in 2015, 2016, and 2017.