UXLx 2020 (Online) Wrap Up
Towards the end of last year, when UXLx 2020 started being planned, the dates and first speaker confirmations announced, little did we know that our plans to meet in sunny Lisbon for a week of learning and networking would be completely turned upside down.
In March, with the event dates approaching and with many of us being affect by restrictions in travel, it became impossible to safely proceed with a physical event. Then, there were two options on the table: postponing the event (😢) or go ahead by turning it into a fully online event (🤔). Although we knew it was not going to be an easy challenge, the second option won and ultimately lead us to the first-ever online edition of UXLx.
UXLx was always a great place to learn and get together with peers from all over the world so this year’s goal was translating that amazing experience into a virtual setting.
From 19 to 22 of May attendees from 30 different countries got together from the comfort of their homes or offices in the same Zoom Meeting for four days of online learning, inspiration and sharing new ideas.
With a total of 18 intensive workshops (2 of them full-day) covering topics such as content, research, service design and strategy, every attendee had the chance to build a customised training plan to best suit their career needs. Then 10 talks from world-renowned experts inspired and sparked debates.
Not meeting in person this year couldn’t stop us from getting to know each other, share new ideas and grow our UX network. We we’re able to do all that, only virtually — whether in the UXLx Slack Channel and the Slack Channels dedicated to each workshop or in networking coffee breaks through Zoom.
After a full day of learning everyone was invited to grab their favourite beverage and some snacks and join UXLx Virtual Drinks 🍻. Our fabulous speakers were also willing to join in or have a quick one-on-one chat.
The ultimate proof that online doesn’t have to be boring at all was our closing party with The Great UX Quiz but will get to that later.
If you didn’t have the opportunity to join us online or if you did but want to get a glimpse of the workshops you couldn’t attend, here’s a summary of what happened on the four amazing days of UXLx 2020 Online.
19 May
As usual, the first day of UXLx was dedicated to two full-day workshops — Systemic Design by Sabrina Tarquini and Dashboard Design with Nicholas Kelly.
Systemic Design by Sabrina Tarquini
What is Systemic Design? — well, that’s exactly the main question Sabrina tried to answer at her workshop. The short answer to it? Systemic Design integrates design thinking and systems thinking, with the intention of helping designers cope with “wicked” design projects. While design thinking focuses on the parts and systems thinking focuses on the whole, Systemic Design brings them together. It helps understand how the parts of the system influence each other and by co-designing with the stakeholders in the system, the parts can leverage the systems change. The systemic design methodology can be applied to a wide range of projects from climate change to poverty, public services and business.
After a brief introduction to the subject, Sabrina introduced the Systemic Design Toolkit, a set of design tools and techniques meant to be used in participatory workshops. In small groups we were able to cover the seven steps of the systemic design methodology, simulating a real case.
She also presented a few real-life cases where the toolkit was put into practice to improve access to healthcare for pregnant women in vulnerable conditions or improve air quality in schools.
Dashboard Design by Nicholas Kelly
At 1PM (Lisbon Time) Nicholas Kelly joined us for his Dashboard Design workshop, all the way from Seattle. This time the premisse question was — how can you ensure your dashboards & reports have business value and increase user adoption?
Analytics managers and dashboard creators can miss the opportunity to leverage user motivations to drive success. Nicholas presented the primary causes of failed analytics and the reasons affecting poor dashboard design and adoption. He also covered the elements of good dashboard design and what an actionable dashboard looks like.
20 May
On the second day of UXLx Online, attendees had 8 different workshops to choose from.
Designing an Onboarding Compass by Krystal Higgins
Krystal started by showing us that onboarding isn’t just a single event in the user’s experience, like the “benefits tour”, the “UI pointer” or the “commitment walls”. Rather, onboarding is a process linking many events, in different ways, over time, to acclimate people to a new product or service.
Onboarding should be done throughout interaction and it should be build around key actions. To identify key actions you should work backwards from core use.
To apply this you have to break down key actions into 3 parts: trigger (what initiates the action), activity (what makes up the action)and follow-up (what closes out the action). Apply guidance to each part and use guidance to lead from the follow-up of one key action to triggers of another.
Diverse guidance methods make onboarding better for more users. The methods should be appropriate for your user and product situations.
Onboarding is a process linking many events, in different ways, over time.
Strategic Design by Majid Iqbal
Majid’s workshop was probably one of the most challenging ones of this edition. It introduced the concepts of promises and patterns: the building blocks for developing value prepositions that are solid, substancial, and sustainable in the face of competition, politics, and climate change.
He started off by stating that “Design is the ultimate expression of strategy”. Strategic design is about expressing strategy through a progressive elaboration of designs, from ideas and concepts to models and scripts.
What are we truly designing when we’re designing services? Why do some service fail where others succeed? Where lies the difficulty? To answer these questions Majid explained that services are performances and affordances, producing outcomes that satisfy a set of customer needs. Performances and affordances are the two aspects of every service. They happen at once or in the same moment, or in sequence separated by time and space.
As designers we must be able to construct and deconstruct the strategic intent our designs encode and express. We should know what exactly we are designing, for whom and why. So we design systems that attain the condition of harmonious, orderly interactions, to produce superior sets of outcomes and experiences.
During the workshop we also had the chance to learn the concepts by solving a simple puzzle.
Design is the ultimate expression of strategy.
Running Effective Workshops by Alison Coward
In this half-day workshop we learned how to design and facilitate impactful and productive collaborative workshops for your users, clients and team.
Alison explained us that effective workshops have a before, a during and an after. Before the workshop you should ask yourself ‘why are you running the workshop?’, set the purpose and the expected outcomes and then prepare it accordingly. During you should make sure your workshop is productive and participated by everyone in the room. After the workshop you should ensure there’s some kind of progress.
We talked about the role of the facilitator, the different types of group dynamics, the ideal environment for creativity and collaboration.
We covered how the workshop design process should look like. You should start with the end in mind and define the workshop purpose (whether gather information, generate ideas or make decisions). Since questions are a workshop facilitator’s main communication tool, we talked about what makes a good question. In the second part of the workshop design process you should build a narrative, choose and redefine activities and decide on materials and space. We also covered the levels, skills and styles of facilitation.
Then in small groups we had the opportunity to design a workshop.
“Collaboration is at the centre of workshops.”
Build Better Products with Collaborative Teams by Austin Govella
In Austin’s workshop we learned how to quickly align our team around the product vision and the customer’s needs and how to help our team iterate more quickly and effectively.
Through a series of activities on a Mural board we learned how to improve collaboration among team members, how to align teams around project goal, product vision and the right customer needs, and how to iterate to the right interface more quickly and effectively.
Information Architecture of Artificial Intelligence by Marianne Sweeny
Marianne Sweeny joined us online for a workshop on one of the hottest topics these days: artificial intelligence. As she stated right at the start, her goal was not to teach us about AI, but to change our thinking about AI instead, and direct our focus to include intencional design choices that direct smart applications to produce the outcome our users and stakeholders intend.
We learned about what is AI, and how it’s capable of perception and self-learning. We explored the intersections between AI, information architecture, design, user experience and content strategy.
UX for machine intelligence is an experience that is calculated, not observed. It is predicted based on past behaviour rather than informed by human understanding. It is determined by machine intelligence rather than guided by empathetic, collaborative design thinking.
How to design for machine behaviour and what are the consequential choice of using AI?
We are the representatives of the qualitative self that is more authentic that the quantitive self represented by AI.
Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky
Torrey started off by explaining what is UX content and when and why do we measure UX content.
We can measure content when research discovers opportunities (from feedback, something is not working), when UX isn’t achieving goals or is causing problems, when there’s a brand, design, or engineering overhaul or when there’s leadership or organisational interest. We learned how to use usability principles and a voice chart to find where the words in an experience are getting in the way of meeting its own goals.
Through a series of hands-on exercises, we learned how to apply voice and usability criteria to heuristically score existing UX text, rewrite it and how to prepare to build stakeholder enthusiasm for UX text improvements.
Don’t tell them your value. Show them your value.
Business Thinking for Designers by Carolyn Hou
This workshop was meant to give us the business acumen we need to amplify our impact within our own organization or our clients’ organizations. Carolyn covered the fundamentals of finance, organisational structure, and strategy and taught us the tools and frameworks that drive business thinking and decision making. We learned to be a better interlocutor between traditional business functions and our own function or department.
We were able to understand how UX can be best positioned in relation to the larger organization and its cross-functional teams and gained a clear perspective and tactics for how UX can help define and meet business goals.
Defining Meaningful Requirements by Kathryn Campbell
Defining new product or service requirements is often treated as the tedious task of gathering miscellaneous ideas from a variety of internal stakeholders and documenting them so that the “real work” — design and development — may begin. Kathryn’s workshop main goal was to turn this idea around and make us re-think requirements gathering.
Most of the insights that will determine success happen during the discovery/requirements phase. She explained the four high level areas we should consider to build a solid base of requirements: business drivers, user needs, technology framework and impact. She mentioned that a perfect requirement clearly explains the what and the why, it does not dictate the how. Finally, she talked about the importance of establishing priorities and of user research to validate our assumptions.
To put it all into practice we did a series of exercises.
Think big! Consider major trends, your brand, your personas, your tech environment and your impact.
21 May
The third and final day of online workshops had once again 8 options to choose from.
Ends Canvas by Joe Macleod
After getting to know more about on-boarding the day before, it was now time to dive into off-boarding with Joe Macleod.
Joe started by making an introduction to the theme of Ends. Then we thought about the question “Where is the end?”, the customer lifecycle at our business and the importance of agreeing where the end is.
Joe explain the different type of ending (i.e. time out, credit out, task competition, etc.), the emotional triggers and techniques at the end, the different stages (descending engagement) and methods of measuring ends.
Throughout the workshop we did a series of exercises in small groups to discuss where we the end comes for the consumer experience. We also designed a process that used cognitive behaviour to improve the off-boarding of the product and discussed ideas for each stage of the descending engagement.
Endings add moral and social order to narratives. Do we need this in our consumer stories?
Shaping Design Leaders by Martina Hodges-Schell and Jason Mesut
How do we understand ourselves better to define our own path? That’s the question that everyone attending Martina and Jason’s workshop tried to get their heads around.
Using a series of self-reflection and profiling tools, they helped us better understand and articulate what we have to offer, what our organisation needs and where we can invest in our own self-development over the coming years.
What sort of impact do you want to have in the future? For whom?
Service Safari by Flaminia Del Conte
At the beginning of the workshop, Flaminia tried to shine a light on what service safari is. It consists in an experiential field trip for individuals/teams to understand and experience services from the customer’s perspective. It can be used when you are redesigning as it allows you to see the whole picture and you can experience it as a different person. Service safari allows teams to develop a 1st hand understanding, align teams and clients, validate assumptions and understand customer needs.
After Flaminia shared with us a case study that used Service Safari to identify opportunities for future services, we had the chance to do a virtual service safari ourselves. For the workshop exercise we had to walk in someone else’s shoes and experience a food related app while paying attention to aspects such as information, book experience, usability, customer care, etc. Then we worked together to map paint points, frame our problem as “how might we” and generate solutions.
The idea of experiencing a service first hand rather than letting someone else explain it to you.
Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products by John Whalen
John Whalen started with a chair purchasing experience to let us re-think the user experience and to make us realize that user experience doesn’t happen on a screen, it happens in the mind. UX is multi-dimensional and multi-sensory. UX happens in the six minds: wayfinding, vision/attention, memory, emotion, decision making and language. John guided us through each of them, their unique characteristics and their unique contributions to user experiences. Then, we talked about why contextual interviews are important to get the “why” behind behaviour.
In groups we had to work together and categorize notes of research observations into the six different minds.
Finally, John showed us some real life examples of the six minds.
User experience doesn’t happen on a screen, it happens in the mind.
The Hardest Part is Standing-Up: Whiteboards, Working Publicly, and Facilitation by Adam Polansky
Adam’s workshop might have been held remotely, but we didn’t just sat in front of a screen and watch it. We had to put our sleeves up, grab some paper and a black marker and draw along with the examples. The goal here was to realize how can we take full advantage of whiteboards. Like a piece of paper or a canvas, whiteboards are a medium that can be used to conceptualise, organize, facilitate, verify, and more.
In this workshop we were able to develop a set of basic skills unique to whiteboards that we can know use across projects to communicate clearly, quickly and successfully.
When Research Meets Reality by Katie Briggs
In this workshop Katie addressed the most common obstacles facing user research: biases due to organisational expertise or metrics, a lack of people who can or want to collaborate on research, and the perceptions that research takes too much money or time.
We got familiarised with the Super-Rapid User Research Framework that allows us to conduct high-quality research with significantly little time or effort.
This framework mainly consists of a week plan where you start by collaboratively generating assumptions (statements that explain what you think is true), then pick a goal depending if you want to discover, explore, test or listen and based on that goal pick a method, whether user interviews, card sorting, accessibility evaluation, surveys, and others. To choose a method and an activity we have to take into consideration our goals, key questions, assumptions and resources (people, time and money). When preparing for conducting the test we need to take in account recruiting, screening, scheduling as well as effective prototypes. Lastly we talked about what is a finding report like and what goes into it.
Embracing and understanding conflict is the first step to a healthy, collaborative environment.
Machine Learning for Designers by Scott Sullivan
In this remote workshop Scott made a brief overview of what’s currently possible with machine learning.
We explored essential machine learning and data science techniques, Experience Design’s role and relationship with machine learning, and delved into the ethics and pitfalls of machine learning and behavior change.
For our service design project, we went through simple data analysis , verifying that our service offers value and behaviour change.
Effective Human-Machine Conversation by Phillip Hunter
In Phillip’s workshop we deep dived into the new world of voice apps and chatbots. He focused on four main aspects: what conversational AI is, what is it made of, how do you create for it, and how do you know the conversation is good.
Conversation is the human interface, it’s how we exchange meaning, indicate desire for action and fill time. Conversation is detailed, complex, subtle, and its meaning requires multiple levels of context (culture, visual signals, etc.).
Conversational interfaces are powered and constrained by hard-wired psychological, linguistic, and environmental boundaries that make even state-of-the-art conversational technologies a challenge to implement successfully.
We talked about the differences in language-driven software, with a focus on AI systems, from web and mobile and the current limits of these systems and platforms and how they shape design.
Planning interactions with capabilities that exceed the complexities of the conversation.
22 May
The last day of UXLx Online was entirely dedicated to getting some inspiration and knowledge from an amazing group of top industry experts. All we had to do was sitting back comfortably in our office chair ou couch and listen the interesting insights they had to share with us.
User Onboarding for the Long Run by Krystal Higgins
It’s tempting to create one-size-fits-all onboarding experiences, constrained to a new user’s first day with your product, but onboarding can serve a much broader purpose. Products are constantly evolving. People are constantly learning. And everyone learns at different speeds.
In this session, Krystal shared how good new-user experiences can be effective throughout the entire customer journey. You could see why it’s important to design guidance that addresses a range of product and user situations, and how onboarding makes sense as part of a longer-term approach to in-product education.
Don’t design onboarding for the first run. You have to design onboarding so that it carries your users for the long run.
How to… end: Designing and delivering great closure experiences for products and business by Joe Macleod
Right after hearing about onboarding, it was time to hear Joe Macleod talk about off-boarding.
Improving the design of endings promises enormous opportunities. Endings improve the accuracy of deleting, reclaiming or removing materials. They raise brand perception through increased communication. Businesses with better endings surprisingly have higher consumer satisfaction. Product creators have an opportunity and responsibility to lead in this emerging field of design. With the world in need of responsible consumer experiences, endings will be a competitive differentiator.
Joe revealed how shards of the consumer experience break lacking a coherent ending and provided examples of how this can be avoided and the improvements people can make.
Ends bring opportunity to reflect, take responsibility, make actionable change to improve the ills of consumption.
Strategy and the Design of Services by Majid Iqbal
Majid joined us online to let us know a bit more about strategic design. It is process of translating game-changing decisions into clear, concise, and complete instructions for execution: the who, why, how, what, when and where of operations. Encoding them into the designs of systems and services allows us to “take more risk while avoiding it.”
Having it both ways requires dexterity in switching between the abstract and the concrete. It requires thinking and tooling that is at once simple and sophisticated, advanced and primitive.
Designing Teamwork by Alison Coward
Team work is changing. In fact, 95% of us are working across multiple teams. But effective collaboration is still a challenge for many. How can we make the most of the collective expertise in a team, whilst ensuring that each person can work in a way that enables them to do their best work?
Alison walked us through a designing teamwork framework mainly comprised in 4 different areas. The bigger picture (purpose), individual ways of working (knowing our own working style), designing new ways of working (routines and rituals we can create to support teamwork), and how you meet (making meetings more like workshops).
How we work together has more of an impact on the success of a team than who is in it and what they are working on.
Growing Your Design Practice by Martina Hodges-Schell
Being a design leader herself and having grown a design practice, Martina shared with us her experience, including all the mistakes and challenges.
She explained how she started from zero, to a distributed team in one location, to a design practice in cross-functional teams across 20 locations.
Who do you need to hire next? How do you create a destination? What’s your North Star? How do you build a great reputation in the community? How do you find the right person to add to the team? How to you create alignment? That’s some of the questions she prompted and enlightened us about.
Treat your practice like your product. Identify needs, design experiments, gather feedback, iterate, together.
Nobody Knows What’s Going On: The dumb human’s guide to dumb humans by Scott Sullivan
Scott joined us online with the most out-of-the-box setup, no doubt, to talk about research and how figuring out our odd and mysterious motivations is what makes experience design work or not.
In this talk, we looked at many examples of teasing out weird motivations, looked at specific tools to help us, and went through a step-by-step process to conduct research that actually explains why people do things.
Remote Discovery: Creating Understanding Together Separately by Adam Polansky
In his talk, Adam shared with us his recent experience in doing discovery remotely. On the same day his company made the decision to have everyone work from home, he was told that he had a new client and that he would have to run a discovery session within days, entirely remotely. How the hell do you do discovery remotely?! That was only his first question.
He talked about translating physical exercises to digital and what software can be used, mirroring the effects of working together in the same room, and the advantages and disadvantages of doing remote discovery.
Lesson #1: The more you try to match the real world, the more complicated you make things.
Strategies for Conversational Product Experiences by Phillip Hunter
As conversation-driven products are on an upwards trajectory to be more disruptive that mobile products, talking about strategies for conversational product experiences could be more relevant. And that’s exactly what Phillip talked about, with a little help from his assistant Alexa.
He talked about a set of strategies for conversational AI, broke down the anatomies of conversational products and interfaces and outlined the design opportunities we have and how to aim for success that includes both people and business.
To be a good machine, be a good person.
Prioritizing UX Content Work by Torrey Podmajersky
In this talk Torrey lead us through the prioritisation matrix to sort common UX content tasks by importance and urgency. She focused on explaining four major topics: what UX content is, why you need to prioritise it, how you can do that and who’s responsible for it.
She explained how content is fundamental to creating usability (as is should be accessible, purposeful, concise, conversational and clear), to conveying brand (as it demonstrates product principles) and to managing liability (as it protects the organization and the person).
Content is fundamental to what design is for.
Design in Crisis: What can UX designers learn from the world’s greatest experiment in behavior change? by Robert Fabricant
And for the final talk we had the pleasure of listening to the award-winning product designer, Robert Fabricant.
Over the last two months we have seen a global shift in behaviour that would have seemed previously unthinkable. So, what can UX designers learn from the greatest experiment in behavior change in our lifetimes? That’s what Robert made us think about, while he shared an historical perspective and practical examples from the pandemic response.
Why should we believe in the role of design? Why should we believe in the relevance of design in health, in crisis or for vulnerability? What are the new stakes for design?
Is UX a fundamental right or the privilege of only a chosen few?
And what a fun way to end this online edition with The Great UX Quiz. The challenge was answering correctly to 15 questions made by 15 UX experts.
We even had the pleasure of having a few of them joining us online too. Cyd Harrell, Kate Rutter, Steve Krug, Jesse James Garrett and Louis Rosenfeld didn’t miss the chance to join in the fun.
This was certainly an edition to remember.
Thank you all who trusted UXLx (once again or for the first time) to get new ideas, to be inspired, to meet with the community, even in this new online format.
We hope to see everyone again next year, only this time in-person and in such a beautiful setting like Lisbon! 🙏 🤗
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