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.

Keynote: How social innovation and user experience strategy support our society

In this talk, we will use #Taiwan as a model of how the government collaborates with citizens to protect covid19 spreading out with user experience research, interview, design, remote testing, and quick delivery. User experience is everywhere and the core of value is empathy. UX is not only applying to digital products, it is all about how we feel and solve the real problem.

Workshop 2 – Fixing dashboard design

There are many dashboards in the world and many (if not most) are poorly designed. Why? Because they are made from the same playbook: determine what data is available and how to visualize that data (often using gratuitous automotive-inspired gauges), and, because they aren’t usable by default, make everything configurable. After all, if users don’t like it, they can just configure it, right?

A better approach: Design dashboards for the people who are actually using them, and deliver value by default.

In this workshop, we will start by reviewing the problems with traditional dashboard design and identify design principles and process along the way. Working in teams, we will then apply that process to design a new dashboard step-by-step, and evaluate it against our principles. Finally, we will explore why so many poorly designed dashboards exist (hint: execs love them because they demo well) and what to do about it.

Workshop 1 – User Story Mapping

This is an amazing collaborative workshop that gets the team into a room to identify the user journey, the task users need to take to accomplish their goals and all the actions and features that enables that task. This framework helps identify what could be a MVP / Release 1 and structure a bit of a release plan for your product / feature.