The UX Conference

When solving problems, designers are good at imagining how solutions ought to be. But realities can be hard and constraints can be plentiful. The final product can be different from what you hoped it would be. It's almost never a question IF concessions should be made, but WHICH concessions should be made. Know which trade-offs you can make, and which ones you can't by knowing your user's goals and understanding the perspectives of the people in your team.

In 2017, you saw the leaps made by machines that can think, adapt and learn to perform tasks better than any human ever can. But what does any of this mean for you, your industry and the field of UX?

In the last UX Conference, Onwah called out the responsibility of the UX sector for ensuring it participates in the development of new and emerging technologies. Since then, he has been leading the work at LexisNexis on the practical application of cutting edge technologies to create new and engaging experiences in a sector that isn’t familiar with disruptive tech.

Find out how he overcame corporate traditions, industry attitude and technology hurdles and took an idea from concept to customers in weeks rather than years.

User testing is a great platform for collaboration and bringing stakeholders in the mix. In this talk Ben will share how his team went from testing in a coffee shop as a minimum version all the way up to the lab set up in British Gas. It doesn't take a lot of money and effort to get a lab in a company.

Natalia will be taking us through the different ways we can articulate our ideas through storytelling – turning often complex messages in pitches and campaigns into simple visual narratives in an easy to understand, memorable way, to truly engage an audience and ensure our brand is more memorable and unique.

She’ll be showing us how we can come up with better ideas more quickly, using these key messages in pictures to share useful content and add ROE to the mix (Return on Engagement), which follows the always needed ROI.

How to balance the user needs and the business needs when building products for an ever more savvy user base.

As UXers, we face conflict often. What we do is not always understood across organisations, and our roles involve plenty of collaboration across business units. What is best for the user doesn’t always match what is most appealing to Finance or what is easiest to implement for Tech.

But conflict can be both good and bad – how you respond to it is what counts. Sometimes, it’s our instinctive, unconscious reactions to conflict that turn it into something negative. In this talk, I’m going to explain simple, concrete habits you can start to cultivate today that will help ensure more positive outcomes when conflict strikes.

The real designers in the room are the ones who make the decisions. How you facilitate discussions and support your solutions may be more important than the design itself.

I’ll walk through cases where analytics and stories came together to offer deeper, more compelling narratives. I’ll demonstrate how our team of designers and analysts communicate the process in ways that reach intuitive and rational stakeholders alike.

Why you should always be using your own products in real-world scenarios to broaden your perspective.

How might we design a product/service for a population in which stigma is inherently part of the experience? Understanding how to address this problem will enable us to create solutions for some of the largest challenges humans face today – in healthcare, finance, government, etc.

As Designers we are comfortable with the concept that design is about communicating content or intent in the easiest way possible for the audience.

Yet, as Design Professionals we often find it hard to communicate with the Non-Design Professionals we work with… and it gets harder the further up the ladder we go and often when Designers reach leadership level, we are ill equipped to have the most optimised, most constructive conversation with other leaders.

In this talk I will explore some of the challenges I’ve faced working across agencies, consultancies and software companies.