Keynote: Made with love
Accessibility does not happen by accident. It takes empathy, thought, and understanding, and the Inclusive Design Principles can help you create accessible products and services with love.
Make it harder to use – why you shouldn’t always remove friction for the user
We live in a world where thing are becoming increasingly easier to use, but at what cost? There is a case for not removing difficulty and perhaps introducing difficulty for the user in order to build longer lasting relationships. I explore the space that exists for increasing the friction and finding the balance for product design.
Designing for connection
Dating apps are not just about the perfect matching algorithm. Many subtle design decisions go into creating the right kind of experience for the particular audience that you’re targeting, from the search mechanism through to the presentation of profiles and the interface language. In this talk, Maritza shares some experiences from the evolution of the Intentions dating app to illustrate the subtle choices that go into finding the right balance between teasing sex appeal, establishing trust and yielding results.
How to attract, nurture, and keep your diverse designers: start with an equitable creative process
Establishing equity within our creative teams starts with reevaluating our everyday design processes. In this talk, you will learn some of the pitfalls of diversity hiring within creative teams, why they haven’t worked, and ways to create a more equitable creative culture using safe spaces and mindful collaboration methods.
Adventures in Unicornism—should designers learn to code
Should designers learn to code? An age-old question, and everyone has their perspective. I believe this is a complex question with a simple summary: while it depends, probably not.
However, what if you are a UXer who already knows how to code—or is motivated to learn? I’ve worked on three projects in the last two years where coding skills turned out to be essential to their success. I have found that programming your own designs can be a real game changer for doing quality work efficiently with tight budgets and schedules, plus keeping technical and design debt low. For some projects, delivering working code is much more productive than delivering pixels.
Join me and we will explore the pros and cons of being a UX designer coding in the context of real projects, plus how having coding skills might affect your career path.
PS: In case you are worried, I never refer to myself as a Unicorn. Ever.
UX in the physical world
Have you ever felt a disconnect from your users (especially during COVID and lockdown)? Working with digital products, it’s not always easy to connect with your users or understand how they’re interacting with your digital product. With physical products, it’s a lot easier to read customer reactions and sentiment.
I worked in the private label packaging design department at Massmart for several years and I’d like to showcase some tangle, physical UX examples, touching on user testing, accessibility, prototyping and few other concepts we are familiar with in the digital world. (eg. getting people to blind test 2 different types of lemon cream biscuits or building umbrella box prototypes out of 50 pieces of A3 paper stuck together).
I would then draw comparisons between physical and digital product design and show that they’re not so different and how many things have shifted from physical to digital.
Finding flow in everything you do
The last year has been particularly difficult with all the distractions that come with working from home. Children have been attending school for only a few days a week and sharing a home-office with your partner can have its own challenges.
When last have you felt completely immersed in an experience, be it work or something you enjoy doing as a hobby? When last have you felt the sense of time vanish as you lose yourself in work you’re doing – much like playing a game.
Finding your flow is a key ingredient to living a life with more purpose. Flow comes from doing what you love, doing something you’re good at, doing something you can be paid for and doing what is good for the world.
This talk focuses on finding flow and enjoyment in all that you do and is inspired by the Japanese concept of IKIGAI
Web Accessibility: Improving Usability for all
In this talk, the audience will learn how to create an accessibility business case for business buy-in, identify common design and development accessibility issues as well as how to mitigate these issues by using automated accessibility tests.
UX Designers are evil
With great power comes great responsibility. As UX Designers, we have the power to shape the experiences of millions of people. Sometimes we may think we are using our powers for good, but unintended consequences amongst other factors can paint a very different picture to the people who really matter – our users. This talk will explore the darker side of UX, a side that exists right in front of our eyes whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Designing UX for future products
With all of the technological advances in the world, what will products and their UX look like in the near future? In this session, you will learn what will shape the UX landscape in coming years when every year brings new advances in technology and User Experience, changing the future for the better. It will provide the principles behind UX design and provide insights on redefining the user experience for users with the help of technology.