This track explores the mindset and skills needed for effectively placing users and their needs at the center of the design process. You will acquire the methods and techniques to give focused attention to usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and the workflow of a product/service/process at each stage of the design lifecycle. More importantly, you will learn to remove biases from the design flow - identifying real-world problems to be addressed before envisioning, planning, and testing design solutions on the very individuals to whom the problem to be solved is afflicting. The involvement of users throughout the design process ensures the creation of highly usable and accessible products for them.
Target Audience
User Experience (UX) professionals, Product Owners, Product Marketing Specialists, Entrepreneurs, Front-End Developers, and anyone working on the usability of products (be them new, existing or being updated) or wanting more experience in the design mindset.
User Experience (UX)
UX is how your customers interact with your product. In the case of digital products (apps, websites), how the interactions between the app and the user are happening, how many steps a user has to take to get something done, how easy or difficult it is to find something or navigate somewhere in the app. All these crucial anecdotes are built and improved on in UX. As a PM, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and figure out if you find any difficulties using the product.
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Show Summaries
How the Nordstrom Innovation Lab created, tested and built an iPad app in just one week.
See how the Nordstrom Innovation Lab led by JB the lab manager and the development team created, tested, and built an iPad app in just one week. Their main focus was to leverage customer feedback through the process to develop an iPad App with the right customer features. On the first day, they created a user story map, then a prototype of the App in slides, and later implementation started. On the fifth day, a sunglasses selling App enabling salespeople to take customer pictures when buying sunglasses was rolled out. Customers would look at the images to choose the sunglasses that fascinate them and also features like renaming and zooming had been added using their feedback. Let's view the presentation to learn more about the power of customer feedback and teamwork.
Explaining how to develop an idealized conception of the redesign of any system.
Find out how Russell Ackoff and his team employed system redesigning and thinking to craft a mobile telecommunication system from scratch. Being led their the team lead, they are tasked to create a telephone system that is technologically feasible and operationally viable.
Providing you with a way to engage with the problem space and create a starting point for your vision of the thing you want to build.
An explanation of IDEO's Design Thinking process, to ensure we approach design in a human-centered way.
A well-detailed design thinking guide, briefly all the stages of designing a user-centered product that is important to them. The Institute of Design at Stanford takes us through these stages explaining what each step means, why it is important, and how to execute it as a design thinker. Open the article to learn about what, why, and how to Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and finally Test a product when designing.
Driving better designed products and services by leveraging experience visions to create deep awareness of what the user actually experiences.
As companies grow and positions become more specialized, employees no longer get exposed to the users' current experience with the product or service. This is what Jared M. Spool calls the "buildup of experience insulation". In this article, he shares how to bust through the insulation and make awareness a habit. He will convince you why deep awareness is the secret to growing enterprise design capability.
Step-by-step guide to the 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with customers.
Focus on the job, and all else will follow.
Creating personas helps team members understand the story and the relevant context of the users. They should assist the team make decisions and innovate faster. Nikki Anderson shares how to create JTBD Personas - from the initial research, the definition of a goal, choosing which information should be included, outlining, and designing the persona.
Prototyping
Teams build prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test on users. With prototypes, you can refine and validate your designs so your brand can release the right products.
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A look at the thinking behind Rapid Prototyping (which allows accelerated innovation), and how it was used to create Google Glass.
Watch Tom Chi ex-lead of the user experience team of the Google X division teach about rapid prototyping and how it accelerates innovation. Tom explains how they were able to create a prototype of the digital overlay google glass in just one day following certain rapid prototyping rules like finding the quickest path to experience, thinking outside the box, and using the most available and applicable basic materials. He also adds that rapid prototyping is key to expansion learning, which is fundamental for creating new things for humanity across diverse fields.
Choosing the most effective method of prototyping — minimizing work and maximizing learning — based on your product’s need.
Prototyping plays a vital role in the process of creating successful UX, but for many product teams, prototyping is still one of the most confusing parts of the UX design process. In this article, Nick Babich shares why a prototype is needed, what it is and the different types of fidelity it could have, and techniques that can be used to build prototypes.
User Interface Design (UI)
User interface is the the actual interface (with buttons, colors, sliders, etc.) with which the user interacts while using your product. This is easily confused with UX. In UX, we decide interactions, such as if it should be an animation on the same page, or if it should be a new page in itself. Once the decisions on UX have been made, the UI team adds the actual interfaces, i.e., the actual colors, the actual animations, buttons, sliders and text boxes with which the user is going to interact.
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Comparing the structured and open canvas methods of design.
In a light-hearted article Jeff Gothelf compares existing corporate redesign with taking out the Christmas lights from last year, first untangling the existing situation. During the untangling one discover's what works and what can be salvaged. One the other hand, design in a fresh startup process comes with a blank slate - a clean box of lights.
Practical suggestions to improve your UI micro-interactions.
How UI trends reach for inspiration into the real world and what problems do we have to solve to make those trends work.
Fighting the urge to innovate for its own sake by strengthening one’s creative muscles and ability to think outside of the box.
Information Design
Information design can be used for broad audiences (such as signs in airports) or specific audiences (such as personalized telephone bills). In this sense, information design is intricately linked to the audience it is aimed at. To the recipient, it explains facts of the universe and leads to knowledge and informed action - and thus selling organizations also use it in an effort to improve a user's trust of a product. The broad applications of information design along with its close connections to other fields of design and communication practices have created some overlap in the definitions of communication design, data visualization, and information architecture.
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Written by Ada Rafalowicz and Havana Nguyen
Graphic Design
Graphic designers create and combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas and messages. They use typography, visual arts, and page layout techniques to create visual compositions. Common applications of graphic design include corporate design (logos and branding), editorial design (magazines, newspapers and books), wayfinding or environmental design, advertising, web design, communication design, product packaging, and signage.
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All the main principles & rules in one place, so you don’t have to search for additional information.
Gamification
Gamification involves the application of game-design elements and game principles (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to non-game contexts. It can also be defined as a set of activities and processes to solve problems by using or applying the characteristics of game elements. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, knowledge retention, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. It is often used as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.
Inclusive Design
Inclusive design is a design process in which a product, service, or environment is designed to be usable for as many people as possible, particularly groups who are traditionally excluded from being able to use an interface or navigate an environment. Its focus is on fulfilling as many user needs as possible, not just as many users as possible. Historically, inclusive design has been linked to designing for people with physical disabilities, and accessibility is one of the key outcomes of inclusive design. However, rather than focusing on designing for disabilities, inclusive design is a methodology that considers many aspects of human diversity that could affect a person's ability to use a product, service, or environment, such as ability, language, culture, gender, and age.