Sessions at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon 2012 on Friday 18th May Conference

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.

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 drive design and innovation.

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 many of these bits of copy…here's how to write it well and make users confident they're on the right track.

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 they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.

After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.

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 journey through serious illness, based on recent work with PatientsLikeMe.com.

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. In this presentation, Jesse James Garrett looks at ways the designers of all kinds of products and services can maximize the human engagement of their work.

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 professionals can navigate the unfamiliar and fast-changing mobile landscape with grace and solid thinking.
In-depth information on advanced mobile design topics UX professionals will spend the next 10+ years pioneering
Tools and frameworks necessary to begin tackling mobile UX problems in this rapidly changing design space

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.

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 launched.

Lean UX aims to open up the user experience design process with a collaborative approach that involves the entire team. It's a hypothesis-based design approach that tests design ideas early and often and, along the way, builds a shared understanding with our team mates that eliminates the dependencies on heavy documentation and challenging communications. Lean UX is a solution for the challenge of Agile and UX integration while it also works effectively in traditional waterfall and other hybrid environments.

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-day lives. Furthermore, despite such large numbers, our interactions with these devices will be largely transparent to us due to their seamless integration into our environment.
This is a vision that I played a part in shaping, and one that I still believe in. But by the same token, we are now into the second decade of the 21st century, and such transparency and seamlessness is largely still wanting. The 5-10 minutes wasted at the start of almost every meeting while we struggle to hook our laptops up to the projector is just one example.

In this talk, I want to speak to this problem and how we might adjust our thinking and priorities in order to address it, and thereby accelerate the realization of Weiser's vision.

I will argue that a key part of this requires our focusing as much on machine-machine as we do on human-machine interaction. Stated a different way, I believe that social computing is at the core, but social computing amongst the society of appliances and services – perhaps even more than the society of people. (Obviously the two societies are interwoven.)

In sociological terms, this brings us to ask questions such as, "What are the social mores within the society of such devices?" How to they gracefully approach each other and connect, or take their leave and disconnect? How to they behave alone vs together? The point to emphasize here is that besides aggregation and disaggregation, it might be even more about the transitions between one and the other.

As with the society of people, appropriate behavior is largely driven by context: social, cultural, physical, intentional, etc. This helps tie in notions such as foreground/background interaction, sensor networks, ambient intelligence, etc.

In general, this talk is as much (or ore) about asking questions as it is about answering them. It's real intent is to say that we need to go beyond our current focus on individual devices or services, and look at things from an ecological perspective. The accumulated complexity of a large number of easy to use elegant devices still surpasses the user's threshold of frustration. Our current path of focusing on individual gadgets, apps and services, just transfers where the complexity lies, and increases it, rather than reduces it overall.

My hope is to frame and stimulate a conversation around a different path – one where more of the right technology reduces overall complexity while geometrically increasing the value to the community of users.