Review Uxcamp+ 2015
On 17th of April the UXCamp+ took place in Vienna. This time it had two barcamp tracks, an education track with talks about studies and trainings and a business track which targeted companies that are interested in User Experience.
The day started with a keynote for all tracks:
Keynote - Rolf Molich, DialogDesign.
The testament of a usability professional – Key lessons from 32 years with usability
What I took away:
- Master the basics - know how to do interviews, usability tests and heuristic evaluations
- Design for errors - somehow also basics (at least for me - it's an underlying principles of interface design)
- Set a good example - make your presentations and documents useable!
- Include positive findings - it motivates the team (they did something right) and ensures that these things will not be changed again
- sell your results well - for example show your team a video of users failing
Rolf Molich also included two characteristics for usability professionals: Stay curious - question why people act like they act - and keep your humility - be the one who learns from users.
Claudia Oster @usabilitytalks
UX in action - challenges & Learnings
Claudia talked about an ongoing agile e-government project, she is working on at techtalk. A few aspects I found very interesting:
- There have to be trade-offs - the new system will not be able to support all different ways of working, that exist now. Her client is aware of this. In the beginning the different departments worked out on what they can all settle on. Although employees were included in workshops, there will be for sure some employees that are not happy with the new system.
- It's hard to keep the design consistent while working agile in a big project - sometimes she would like to do a refactoring of the design.
In the afternoon I hopped between talks, I want to mention these two:
Alex Kucera, way2stage.com
UX and the necessity for start-ups
Alex Kucera talked about his story of finding out how important user experience is. He started his first start-up with his own idea, working on it for a long time and then finding out that people don't need it. So he changed his approach: talk to a lot of people what they need, start with a small product (minimal viable product) and care a lot about customer support and be highly available for questions.
Michael Heiß, SSI Schäfer
UX crash course for developers
Michael a developer from the logistic software company SSI Schäfer hosted a very interesting discussion about how developers in an industrial company can gain knowledge in UX and bring it into their daily work. Some of his questions were: what are the most important things to know, is it useful to do a certification, how to keep consistent with 10 development teams, do we need a designer...
The discussion centered around the access to real users - it's very hard for them at the moment due to fears of their customers regarding competitiveness. It was very interesting to get insights to "real world" problems and I think it helps both UX professionals and companies/developers to talk about this problems and so change their perspectives.
I also saw the end of "Design Heroic Experiences" by @DamjanObal. Unfortunately I came too late for the whole story, but you can read more in the blogpost by usabilitytalks
I really enjoyed this UXcamp, the mix of professionals and companies was really inspiring and it was - like always - nice to meet people not only from Austria but also from neighboring countries. Big thanks to the organization team!
