I love attending events to learn about changes in the industry and meet others in the field. Below is a list of Events, Courses and Workshops that I have attended over the years for UX Design, Product Management, Entrepreneurship, Coding etc. I have included some of the notes taken during each event, where it was, the speakers and additional links that may be of use to others.
Whitney Quesenbery - Co—Director, Centre for Civic Design
Frank Spillers - CEO, Experience Dynamics, Course Instructor, Interaction Design Foundation
1. The story of the 300 million dollar button
https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button
2. How Expedia’s A/B Test Could Increase Your Leads by 25%
https://www.dealeron.com/blog/how-expedias-ab-test-could-increase-your-leads-by-25
3. CAPTCHAs Have an 8% Failure Rate, and 29% if Case Sensitive
https://baymard.com/blog/captchas-in-checkout
4. WebAIM Contrast checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
5. Designing Efficient Web Forms
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/06/designing-efficient-web-forms
6. Designing accessible forms
https://uxdesign.cc/10-tips-for-designing-accessible-forms-a016dae8e9aa
7. Dropdown alternatives for better forms
https://medium.com/@kollinz/dropdown-alternatives-for-better-mobile-forms-53e40d641b53
8. Book: Form Design Patterns by Adam Silver
https://shop.smashingmagazine.com/products/form-design-patterns-by-adam-silver
Mind the Product
with Mike Cohn from Mountain Goat Software
The challenges of being a designer within the technology industry are constantly changing. For this meetup Jay Heal shares his experiences of being a Service Designer within central government and how he had to adapt traditional user-centred design techniques to design services within a high-security prison environment.
Having previously worked with organisations that include the BBC, Just Eat, Ministry of Justice and Transport for London, Jay will also discuss the path he has taken from a Web Designer in the early 2000's through to User Experience / Service Designer and how he feels the role of design in technology is constantly evolving.
http://jayheal.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/jaymichaelheal
Tech Circus: UX Crunch, London
Heroic stories from deploying commercial machine learning applications.
An interesting talk from Leo Poll, the founder of Akendi, a UX agency based in Cambridge. His topic was on the use of chatbots - Garbage in, garbage out. In their testing, the chatbot was intelligent enough to know the 'what', but lost the 'who' in the process. Ultimately, this led to Akendi removing the AI feature from their website.
Rikke Rosenlind - borrowmydoggy.com
Karen Hanton MBE - Top Table
Tom Adeyoola - metail
Sara Murray OBE - Boohoo.com
How do I raise money for my company?
Use the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS).
Cash is King. Don’t run out of cash. Without cash all things fail. If you have an angel investor and you run out of cash, ask them for more. They don’t want to lose their initial investment. And they have cash.
Avoid a large number of share holders at the start of your business.
Build a generational business that you can take annual dividends from. If you sell, you may be troubled as to what to do with the money. Give to someone else to invest in businesses that you know nothing about (I think not)
Exit strategy: Have an eye on someone but don’t focus on it - Can be detrimental to your business.
GRAZE: https://www.graze.com
DISCONNECT BETWEEN SHOP AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
Omni-channel: Retail, Subscription, Online Shop
Rating system:
Disadvantage: Unusual to rate before trying
Crazy 8’s: 8 ideas in 10 minutes - Project mangers, developers, designers etc - everyone.
Question everything & challenge ideas
Reduction in rating system
KURT GEIGER: https://www.kurtgeiger.com
UX TEAM OF ONE - WORKING ON THINGS THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN DECIDED BY MARKETING. Worked closer with developers to show them what ux was. Asking why why why they were doing things. Liked by directors and a uxer was put into each product team.
Show user testing videos outside of ux. Show directors, show developers. Spreads empathy.
Encouraging the use of MVPs:
Get the developers seeing the users attempting to use the software
User testing does not need to be expensive:
Budget for testing tight - built own testing lab
Booked 2 meeting rooms:
One room for testing
One room for observation
Played back to stakeholders
The business friendly journey map:
Attach business goals to user goals - business likes retention, bounce rate, % AOV, % +sign ups. Measurable. (See photo)
Hypothesis, MVP
Get developers and marketing to buy in to the process.
Kurt Geiger built a multichannel app
Fast deployments - constantly iterating
Give customers a better experience by improving in-house systems
Build systems in-house - better say in how omni-channel works.
Q&A:
Interesting that they say that the marketing team often fail to embrace UX and they struggle to work with them (Kurt Geiger) however, I do not have that issue. Convincing stakeholders through numbers also isn’t an issue. It’s purely the development brick wall which is frustrating. The limitations of the platform and the development backlog prevents front-end development. Agreed, not having a rigid platform like Magento offers more flexibility, but only when the development can handle the workload.
Ensure your analytics is working from the start to ensure you can validate what you’re building.
A/B Testing - great tool for all UXers
How to cope with opinionated people (stakeholders):
Really question why to you want to do something. Find the problem or perhaps understand their issue in more detail. Get them to provide the proof for why the change is required. Provide data. It may be that by asking why they realise their issue isn’t really a problem.
Kurt Gieger: Work in team with UI designers who they’ll work with to produce pattern libraries etc. They do get involved with some UI but are keen to highlight the divide.
Kurt Geiger: 65% Mobile 20% Desktop 10% Tablet
Always show in mobile first to stakeholders
Guerrilla testing: Offer an incentive to customers - Kurt Geiger offered 20% off
Internally you might offer cakes/chocolate
UXers in Kurt Geiger haven’t yet got into the delivery, labels, delivery notes design, return labels etc. UX is slowly filtering through the company.
Meetup Event by UX Connect London
Meetup Event by Cambridge UX Labs
Meetup Event by UX Connect, London
Tutor: Amit Patel
Profession: Product Manager/Designer & MD of Experience Haus
Meetup Event by Sync Herts
2 evenings, 1 week apart.
Tutor: Chris Bradley
Profession: Founder, Publicate
Evening classes at Hills Road Sixth Form College.
Tutor: Anna Dahlström
Profession: IA and UX Designer, Founder of byflock
Tutor: Sophie Freiermuth
Profession: User Experience Consultant, Baguette UX
Tutor: Matt Isherwood
Profession: UX & Product Designer, onefinestay
