Archives

Designing for Instinct Why are some products “loved” by their users, while others barely make an impression? Designing products that people love is one of the goals of emotional design. But just like love, emotional design functions on many levels.  In this presentation, we’ll focus on the visceral or instinctive level, where we attract users to our products, […]

The Sprint Method: Case Studies of Implementation in a Corporate Environment The Sprint Method, popularized by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures, is a five-day process for answering critical business questions and solving tough problems through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Our case study explores the application of the method on various projects and […]

Design Leadership, a career path for brave souls When designers are presented with the opportunity to play a strategic role inside a corporation, a whole world of uncertainties lies ahead. Executive MBA programs for creative leaders are not very common. Lack of corporate training is almost the norm. Generic management principles are not quite applicable. […]

Practical Accessibility: Advice from the front lines Accessibility evaluation and design can be daunting, even for those who believe that designing for inclusion is a moral and legal imperative. The practical steps to ensure product and service accessibility can appear complicated. There are formal and informal sets of accessibility guidelines which require interpretation to apply. […]

Is Ethnography Possible without Field Research? Here’s what to do if you can’t visit your target users You’ve finally got approval to do B2B field research, and you want to study future customers as well as current ones. But when you try to visit your target users—IT staffers, customer support people, purchasing agents, product managers—their […]

Rethinking the Opportunities Presented by Industry-Academic Partnerships In User Experience, practitioner-academic divides sometimes exist for practical and/or logistical reasons. However, these divides represent missed opportunities to create pathways for student training and enhanced research capacity. This session illustrates relevant stories of formal and grassroots industry-academic partnerships and how they can be assembled and managed to […]

How we (sort of) made UX and agile work – A case study I have not heard of anybody who managed to make agile and UX work perfectly. Many companies nowadays work agile, and UXers struggle to keep up. In this talk I will discuss our agile process, how we try to make it work, […]

Evaluating Complex Systems: Strategies for Testing Systems You Can’t Understand Are you working with extremely advanced system, or highly trained and experienced users? In these situations, it can be impossible to fully understand the users’ goals, tasks, and strategies in the time available. Since this understanding is an important component of most usability testing, it […]

Experience Streams in Cross-Channel Service Design: Leveraging Stats and Insights Surveys, interviews, analytics, user behaviour: the data keeps rolling in, from several sources and across products, and it becomes increasingly difficult to create a unified holistic perspective of what your users are actually about and how to tap into their needs directly. Combining quantitative and qualitative […]

Get Out of the Rut and Back in Your Groove Using popular movie themes to illustrate real-life burnout factors, Danielle Cooley and Dixie Gillaspie walk the audience through a living case study of going from Stuck in a Rut to Back in the Groove. This lively presentation draws from the burnout experience of Danielle, a […]