A Design Conference Retrospective
It’s the start of BER months already, which means the days will fly by so fast, until the year 2020 will be over, a few days after Christmas. So, I’m playing catching up with sharing my thoughts. If you’ve noticed, I’ve been silent for the past 2 months, despite my promise to write something at least twice a month. Promises are indeed made to be broken I guess. Nonetheless, I’m here to write again, because I have something to share.
This weekend, I spent my days off on a 2-day online design conference . Its my first time to attend a design-related conference online. The first one I went was way back 2008 when I was still in college (and when going to college was still a thing.) I still remember feeling inspired by Simone Legno’s creativity manifested through Tokidoki products. Though I’m not here to talk about the past, but the present. So, here we go! (in the tune of Valeera’s attack on Hearthstone)
When I saw the UX+ conference ad online, I was excited to attend a conference that is UX related, even if its online, that I paid the early bird ticket last July. The array of speakers were great, yet I didn’t really expect much about their topics, because it didn’t sound so appealing to me. I think the only topic I find interesting is Dan Mall’s Design System topic, since I feel the need to make this a part of my work process in my next projects. But, I was so wrong! My judgement is clearly incorrect. There are lot of useful takeaways that I learn, and find interesting and new. And I’m here to list them down, as far as I can remember, and as far as my notes (and other attendee’s notes) contain.
I like having things in a list, so here’s my short list of what I find useful from other speaker’s words (written in my own context)
- The One-Week Design Sprint (by John Zeratsky)
- The Importance of Design Systems (by Dan Mall)
- Building Rapport Through UX Writing (by Niaw De Leon)
- Knowing your Users on A Deep Level (presented by various speakers)
- How our brains makes design decisions (by Kylie Timpani)
Now, I’d like to elaborate on the above list.
According to John Zeratsky, a Design Sprint can be done in one week, with the following suggested activities.
- Monday — Team Meeting
- Tuesday — Sketch Alone, Together
- Wednesday — Decide & Move On
- Thursday — Prototype (Build it) — Fake app (using prototyping tools)
- Friday — Get Customer Feedback (through interviews)
This is no different than the sprint we have on development teams. The 1-week sprint is not a one-time task, of course. Its an iteration. This 1-week long set of activities will be repeated, until the desired product/ service is almost perfect. (I say almost perfect, because there is always a room for improvement, always.) What I like about his approach is that the things-to-do are clearly defined. So, gone are the days where a designer needs to take some time to think and come up with an idea, which may take a few days to weeks. As we can see, collaboration is really the key to making good products. From day 1, collaboration happens within the internal team, and on the last day, it extends to include the customers / potential users of the product / service.
Using this one-week design iteration, and with the power of the new design & prototyping tools, product creation flow will be more time efficient.
Next on the list is about Design Systems. Dan Mall talked about the need to create a design system to be consistent and efficient in product creation in the long term. I can relate to what he means, and I certainly agree with him. The trick is that there is no one ultimate design system that we should follow. A design system is dependent on what is valuable to your team and company. Hence there are different design systems created, and each one is different. Dan also mentioned that not all systems need a design system, especially on legacy software. (There was a chart showed, but I lost my screenshot. I’ll paste it here later once I found it.) For now, let’s ponder on below guideline by the design system guru himself.
The third on my list is about UX Writing or Microcopy. What Niaw De Leon talked about is not so new to me, as I’ve read about this topic some time before, while I was still exploring things about design, and UX (I’m still exploring up until now.) The main essence of her talk revolves around building rapport to the users through writing. What I’ve learned about building rapport, through the various psychology-related books I stumbled and read before, is that we, humans, respond to something similar / familiar to us. So, in order to build rapport to someone in the context of writing, the choice of words and tone matters in such a way that it is the same with what your users / audience are used to. And that was what Niaw shared in her talk.
I really enjoy playing with words, that I make some of the text parts in the app I’m working on playfully informative, yet meaningful, of course. What fascinates me, is that what I’m doing is actually UX Writing, which is also valuable in terms of digital product creation.
The fourth on my list is about Knowing your Users on A Deep Level. A portion of this was mentioned by Femke van Schoonhoven. She showed examples on how an app can connect to your users on a language and cultural level. What I can apprehend in her examples, is creating a way that the app is understandable to the user’s perspective and comprehension level.
Femke also mentioned about creating “friction” on the app flow, so users will actually read what’s on the screen. That screen has 2 buttons, making the user think of which button to click. If that screen only has one button, the user will automatically think its the only button to click (like a “Next” or “Done” button). Having 2 buttons creates “friction”, where the user actually pauses, to read, and think what to do next. This “friction” think is a new concept for me, and I find it pretty interesting.
The next portion of Knowing your Users on A Deep Level came from Google’s Julie Schiller. Her talk is about tips on growing your user base, and it all boils down to the same thing — knowing your users (on a cultural and language level), what their use cases / problems are, etc. She mentioned about the diversity of the current, and future Internet users (who may happen to be the users of our digital creations soon), and that we should take those into account when designing our next app.
What Femke and Julie talked about concludes what I think makes a product successful. (Some speakers may have mentioned about this as well, and I may have missed it.)
The last on my bullet list is How our brains makes design decisions. This is not the title of Kylie Timpani’s talk, but I think its the best description on how I understand what she said. Kylie mentioned about how our brain makes its next decision based on a history of past experiences. Sometimes when we unconsciously know the reason why we think something is right, and decide to do what our gut tells us, but can’t find a logical reason behind it — its just our precious brain trying to solve problems for us, and its using our past life experiences as a reference guide. These experiences are stored as tiny habit loops, as mentioned in The Power of Habit book by Charles Duhigg, and our brain is using these loops as a reference. Think of those tiny habit loops in your brain as a database, and whenever you need to decide on something, you brain searches through those list of loops, and tries to make sense of which of those loops is more appropriate to use. If none are found, it will create a new one, so a new habit loop is formed, pretty much like adding a new entry in a database table.Those new entries will then be added to the list of habit loop references that your brain will use for future decision making.
I don’t want to go deep on Kylie’s topic, as I’m currently reading a book by Ken Robinson, called “The Element”, and its somewhat related to finding your Ikigai, and something more about the human condition (like learning, and our natural aptitude). I would be writing a different story about that once I’m done with the book. It’s just somewhat related to what Kylie mentioned, yet I can’t verbalize it yet as of now.
Going back to the retrospective of the recent Design Conference brought to us by UX+, what I can say is their line-up of speakers are great, and their topics are diverse. I really didn’t expect much from the specified topics from various speakers, yet I learned something new. Seeing how these great designers and leaders think, speak, and them sharing a glimpse of their work is just priceless. You also get to see the real humanity in them. I didn’t expect an online event to be enjoyable, despite just being at home — the slack chat really helped in connecting with people on the event. It feels like watching a movie at home with your folks, where you can dance too, the difference is you’ve learned something in the end, and made professional connections with great people.
Wait, there’s more! Here are other additional cool stuff mentioned at the conference as well.
- Designer plugin in Figma (that creates a design using text instructions)
- Adobe XD’s cool new features (related to prototyping and animation)
How about you? How did you spend your weekend amid this pandemic? Did you attend this design conference also? Feel free to share what you’ve learned as well. I Just documented the stuff I learned before I quickly forget them. :) Hope you enjoy reading this. Thanks!
