Posted on 7 September 2010 by Hurol 2 Comments

User Experience (UX) Week 2010

Billed as the premier user experience conference – promising fun times, inspiring sessions and roll-up-your-sleeves workshops – UX Week 2010 was an event that everyone serious about the customer experience should attend.

So we shipped our resident Senior Experience Architect, Zafer Bilda, off to San Fransisco for the last week of August – where he would pick up some valuable ideas whilst rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of the design and UX world.

Here, he shares his experience.

Who went to UX Week 2010?

The week attracted more than 500 people – mostly designers and UX practitioners from different industries. There were in-house design/UX teams, independent designers/consultants and UX practitioners from design consultancies.

What were the main themes of the week?

1. Game design is becoming an inspiration for interface and interaction design – the psychology of play informs how people interact with websites and applications. The future of UX is play, with websites becoming more fun and apps more engaging.

2. Good design can change and drive online behaviour – we should practice designing for behaviour change.

3. Service design is becoming a popular field – informed by the UX methods, it involves improving the customer experience at different touch points e.g. mobile, emails, call centre, face-to-face and, of course, online.

4. Digital magazines and books are becoming more popular, and paper-based publications will need to find a way for digital re-birth, to support the changing needs of future online users.

What went on in the workshops?

There were two days dedicated to workshops, with a choice of topics around UX methods and techniques. Collaboration was abundant, and people willingly shared ideas and worked together.

Zafer attended three workshops:

• Gamestorming (using game approach to brainstorm) – covered collaborative idea generation techniques in fun ways, learning how to express, discuss, draw, visualise, structure and represent ideas.
• Designing smart phone applications – introduced design principles to create mobile apps, emphasising the interface, gesture and platform differences between iPhone and Android. It covered User Centred Design methods such as working on personas, scenarios, storyboards and design concepts.
• Service design crash course – introduced basic principles of service design and how to create service blueprints.

Zafer’s own research into UX design

Zafer is perennially interested in how design shapes the user experience – and in particular, the direction in which the industry is headed.

On the back of this interest, Zafer is currently completing a significant research project. The outcome from this project will be an understanding of different views around the globe on UX as a concept, as a practice, its level of acceptance and its future direction.

Whilst in San Francisco, he was fortunate enough to speak to some of the movers and shakers in the industry, including:

• In-house teams at Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco
• A Service Design practitioner from Adaptive Path
• Indi Young, the author of the influential book “Mental Models”
• A UX Director in a mid-size consulting agency.

Having presented them with 12 controversial questions about the hot topics around UX, he now plans to speak to their Australian counterparts and ask the same questions. We will keep you up to date with the outcomes of this research.

Learn about Bienalto’s Experience Architecture services