Cennydd Bowles on user experience.

Speaking

Undercover user experience

A passion for UX is a harmless infection but once you catch it, the world instantly changes. Doors open the wrong way. Websites don’t make sense. Products don’t work and, unbelievably, businesses don’t seem to care.

Once you’ve caught the disease, you want to change the world. You quickly devour the basics – what usability testing is, what a wireframe is for and why a persona might be useful – but putting it into practice isn’t always easy. Your friends soon tire of you going on about it, and your business has its way of doing things. There’s no mention of user experience in your job description and you’re not sure where to start. It’s frustrating.

It means UX folk often have to sneak user experience into companies by stealth and make enthusiasts of people who’ve never cared about design. It takes excellent communication, persistence and diplomacy – but it can be done, if you’re prepared to make the effort. Here’s how.

Beauty in web design

Great web design is all around us, but how do we go beyond ‘cool’, ‘usable’ and ‘fun’ to create something truly beautiful? How can we create sites that stand as rivals to classic design pieces from other fields? This talk looks at our changing attitudes to beauty, art and meaning, and why the web is ideally suited to become a vehicle for true beauty in the Information Age.

The future of wayfinding

As the boundaries between the abstract digital world and the real physical world blur, the way we find our way around our environment is starting to change. We’ve got pretty good at helping people find their way through today’s digital world. Information architecture, taking cues from physical architecture, has built a toolkit of wayfinding aids including menus, breadcrumbs, signage. But things are about to get a lot more interesting. Credits and further reading material.

The music of interaction design

While both music and design have theoretical underpinnings, they also share a certain ineffability. A musical masterpiece and an exceptionally crafted experience demand more than the simple application of theory. They also demand virtuosity.

Designers must skilfully bring together clicks and gestures – the building blocks of interaction design – to form a meaningful experience. Although simple to describe these components, we often resort to vague shorthands like ‘look & feel’ to explain what happens at the experiential layer. Similarly, composers rely on formalised technique to write music; yet ask what makes a piece remarkable and the answer will be similarly nebulous.

In this session, we will examine parallels between music and interaction design, including harmony, genre, rhythm, fashion and emotion. Along the way, we will learn how that which defies easy definition can elevate digital and musical works from good to miraculous.

Workshop: Getting real about Agile design

The world’s recent economic woes have put the final nail in the coffin of waterfall methods. Long requirements phases and up-front documentation won’t be funded: Agile methods are firmly in the ascendancy. This causes well-documented difficulties for IAs and UX professionals and, while ‘best practice’ suggestions abound, they range from the useful to the obvious, via the unrealistic. This workshop presents practical advice how user experience practitioners can remain relevant in Agile times.

Workshop: Universal Principles of UX

The best design decisions are those based on on user evidence. That means research and testing, the bread and butter of user experience design. However, limited as we are by time, budget and sanity, we can never have all the data we need. It means we designers are asked to make bold stabs in the dark, for which we rely on the safety of the principles that underlie good design.

We’re all familiar with the universal principles that guide user experience work, but do we truly understand them? What actually comprises a mental model? Would we know information scent when we smelled it? What do the gestalt principles mean for user experience designers? Can we really explain cognitive bias?

This workshop grabs the bull by the affordance, deconstructing the principles we take for granted to see how they can help our daily UX work. We’ll explore how they can be seen in action across all design disciplines, and learn how best to talk about them without sounding like ivory tower elitists.

Workshop: UX Fundamentals

User experience is rightly seen as a critical way to stand out on today’s competitive web. But how does one go about shaping something as vague and personal as someone’s enjoyment of a website? What does it mean in practical terms?

This workshop gives an outstanding introduction to the world of web user experience design. By learning both the basic theory and practical applications of usability, information architecture and interaction design, you’ll learn how to make websites your users love and your company will profit from.

The workshop covers the entire design process. We begin with the fundamentals of both user and business research, including how to draw out unspoken requirements from both groups. We move on to discuss ways to turn your research into design concepts, and tools that will help you structure the site and pin down its major elements. Finally, we look at how to make effective wireframes and prototypes, test them with users and improve your designs through iteration.

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