Thomas Watkins is a thought leader, speaker and industry practitioner located in Houston TX. He is a life-long learner who has a passion for bringing greater clarity to the world. Thomas has made it his career’s focus to combine technology with design psychology in order to drive business success. He specializes in helping his business partners bring their own brilliant ideas to life, by translating complexity into simplicity. The scope of his work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.
Data visualization - when we consider its goals - arguably belongs within UX. Yet, it remains outside of what most people would list as part of the UX skillset. As the design profession has expanded over the past decade +, much of this growth has come alongside the absorption of new skills and methods from other areas (UX writing, animation, conversational design, etc.). Many of the tech roles adjacent to UX (marketing, software architecture, business strategy) have ceded at least some of their previous territory to UX in recent years, presumably because of the realization that skilled designers add great value to any creation process.
Despite these examples of progress, data visualization remains one of the few areas that UX designers have perhaps pursued less vigorously, and therefore gained less ground than in other areas. In this talk, we will look at examples of DVUX in practice. We will also discuss its body of knowledge, methods and tools, along with how to add the relevant skillsets to our collective tool belts as UX professionals.