Digital Visions 2015

The conference Digital Visions with the topics UX and frontend development took place in Vienna and was organized by the agency Liechtenecker. The friendly first floor of Impact Hub was a nice surrounding for the following talks.

Ux of Speed

Stefan Baumgartner - ruxit, fettblog.eu

Stefan Baumgartner talked about how the speed of a website influences the experience of users and therefore the success of a company.
Amazon for example calculated in a study that if their website would be 1 second slower they would loose 1.6 billions of turnover.

To optimize for speed the first step should be defining metrics.
A common metric is "page weight" or the "page speed insights score" of Google. They are good indicators and the "page speed insights score" shows you if you have used best practice.

But these metrics alone are not always helpful, because they don't tell you something about the experience of a real user.

The metric "speed index" does give an impression of the experience of the user - it shows the average time when pixels on the screen have been painted. So it measures how quickly the user sees the content on your page (but only for content above the fold). The result is a number which should ideally be beneath 1000 and a series of screenshots that show the progress of loading the page in time.

You can try it yourself at webpagetest.org.

So for what goal should we optimize:

Important information should be visible in under 1sec
Speed index below 1000
Page weight below 1,5 MB

To optimize

take care that important content comes first
everything else is an enhancement, also Webfonts
load critical css first, rest of css later

Slides of the talk

Best UX Designer

David Höller - Illustree

This talk was about skills a UX Designer should have to stay on top and it was illustrated by the ÖBB ticketing project.

The ÖBB wanted to sell other ticket types in their shop, so there would be more options and more complexity, but Illustree wanted to make it easier anyway.

A good UX Designer should be able to identify the root problem with research. In this case the method for doing this wasn't observing people using the existing app, but talk to people how they travel with the train - what are their goals in daily life while traveling. These interviews then resulted in personas.

People don't want to type their start and end point every time - so this was one important improvement:

suggestions depending on geolocation
frequent routes are suggested - depending on when the route was last traveled and how often it is traveled
offers ÖBB wants to push

So what skills should a UX Designer have:

do the maths for algorithms like this
generate ideas that don't make new problems
think in rules and recognize patterns
know his tools.

Which corporate culture is needed to have good UX designers?

the work should have meaning
aesthetic is important and therefore details (and fighting for the budget for details)
a culture of learning - from challenges and good colleagues
teamplayer spirit (designers could learn from developers)
error culture - making no errors means the solution wasn't innovative enough or it took too long

Gender Experience

Marc Busch - AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology)

This talk discussed the influence of gender on using technologies and services. Gender means the cultural and social implications of sex. Men and women take different roles, they behave the way it is expected from their sex and have different expectations of themselves - this is called "Doing gender". For example studies show that women perform better in spatial sense tests when they are told that they are tested on empathy.

In a project the AIT researched the implications of gender on games. Gender is part of the personality of a user and influences preferences - therefore gender also influences the preferences of games.

There are different types of gamers that like some game mechanics more than others. These types are not equally distributed among men and women. If your audience isn't clearly defined, it's possible to choose game mechanisms according to the types of gamers that are equally distributed in both sexes.

Types of Gamers according to AIT:

This research was used in the project GEMPLAY (GEndered games Motivating PhysicaL ActivitY). You can read more on the project's website: gemplay.at

AI is the new UI

Jeremy Abbett - Google, jeremy.abbett.net

The creative evangelist of google and founder of Stuffle, talked about the implications of machine learning and AI on user experience.

Due to the fact that the growing internet access will mostly be on mobile devices, it's influence on our life is and will be big...

Now Mobile is between people and their life - people stare into their devices instead of communicating to the persons around them. The fear of missing out (fomo) is common.

AI makes it possible to focus on you and your life - one product that shows that would be Amazon echo.

The user experience of these new products and services is defined by the "personality" of the AI - in which way does it talk to a human, is it funny or serious, how long does it let people talk, how nice is the interface to a human?

These are some of the new affordances of these interfaces.

Modular Frontend Development

Jens Grochtdreis - grochtdreis.de

In this talk the advantages of modular front end development was the topic. Modules should be able to stand alone everywhere on the site. If small changes are necessary this can be done with modifiers.

This kind of development also fit's best with living style guides. There are a lot of living style guide tools, but in jens opinion it's easier to build his own with includes - that has the advantage that the actually used code and the style guide are always the same. For designers styletil.es are a good concept for designing.

All the slides from this talk can be found here.

Empathic Design

Andrea Egger - Liechtenecker

Starting with the example of the new established "empathy button" on facebook, Andrea talked about how ux designers can recognize unconscious needs in users. How can we identify the things that stress people and steal their time?

A designer should focus on his empathy not on his ego to see these "stressors".

Some best practice examples were the fitting of glasses in misterspex.de or the L'oreal make up app.

A bad example Andrea showed us was Lingscars.com - a very busy website, with lot's of animated .gif's.

Fun fact: Watch Ms. Ling's appearence at an investment show on BBC.

One method for bringing empathy in your design process would be the Persona empathy mapping. Therefore you map what your persona is thinging, feeling and doing while in a certain situation using your product or service.

Responsive by Design

Thomas Piribauer & Björn Ganslandt - intuio

In this talk intuio talked about the limits of Responsive Design with "heavy" frameworks like "Bootstrap", that bring in to much modules and make responsive designs look so similar.

Starting with the concept for desktop has it's problems - e.g performance, but the concept of mobile first also has it's flaws, because often the concept also starts with desktop, and only the development starts mobile first.

Therefore the best way would be doing the concept for both at the beginning - "Gleichzeitig first!"

After doing the concept mainly on paper, intuio then starts with wireframing directly in the browser. They calculated that wireframing in the browser is 89% more effective, because there will be so many different screens and states.

Working with style tiles (styletil.es) and a design pattern library is also part of their process. Design patterns should be defined with caution and not used for everything - a design pattern should be something that solves a certain problem but can be used in different contexts and with different contents.

Also the importance of performance to the user's experience was again a topic. During the loading process you can give the user an impression of what is coming, with "skeleton screen" instead of a loading bar, e.g. facebook and medium do this already. Also the concept of "offline First" helps here, wunderlist for example synchronises again when online.

posted at 11:13 vorm. on Oktober 21st, 2015