Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending Ignite UX Michigan 2016, an evening of five-minute talks about user experience by local professionals and students.
Organized by Mike Beasley, Whitney Ferdon, Andrea Neuhoff and their team of volunteers, over 160 people attending the March 15 event in Ann Arbor.
It was an inspiring evening of usability-focused presentations! For many UX professionals and students, it was a reunion to see former colleagues. I had a great time catching up with friends.
Here are my notes from some of the Ignite UX Michigan talks, along with social conversation and photos from the event:
Creating Experience by Telling Stories
Presented by Alina Bochkacheva
- Design with stories in your mind. No one wants to retell a bad story.
- By collecting the evidence and analyzing it, you’ll know what visualization to use
- Storytelling brings humanity to data; stories create relationships and connections
- Clickable prototypes are not only great for usability testing, they’re great to check the storytelling
Moments of Joy
Presented by Christina York
- Augmented reality (AR) is technology that combines what is real with what is imaginary
- With AR, we’re creating moments of joy and escape for children in a hospital by changing perception of the moment, perception of the environment, and their engagement with treatment
- AR can transform a hospital room into a scene from a book for kids, taking away their fear. Example: paper books come to 3D life.
Moments of Joy slides by Christina York
Feedback. The Skill You Need.
Presented by Tonya McCarley
- Feedback is hard. We need to get to the why.
- “We need to get out of the business of mind-reading.” Ask for clarification.
- Ask “Can you tell me more?” when you get feedback
- Is your time best spent micromanaging design?
Feedback. The Skill You Need. slides by Tonya McCarley
One Woman’s Heuristic Evaluation of Healthcare
Presented by Josie Scott
- Josie has battled cancer for 20 years, and shared her humorous look at some of the UX issues of dealing with healthcare
- Insurance payments and medical records of services don’t match; what a frustrating UX to deal with!
- Ever been to the doctor and they won’t show you the screen with results of your test? Frustrating. Demand to see the screen.
A Dive into Data to Understand Your Customer Journey
Presented by Diane Bowen
- A customer journey map is like a movie, sharing a powerful story
- How do you start a customer journey map? Start with your goals.
- How can you better understand your user? Talk with your data analysts; get the user’s database, marketing, customer service points.
A Dive into Data to Understand Your Customer Journey slides by Diane Bowen
Style Guide
Presented by Kavitha Krishnan
- Users move between four core digital devices to accomplish a single goal
- Style guides can help your users avoid having to relearn how to interact with your service or product
- By using style guides, you can create a consistent, continuous experience for your users
- Style guides are a living document, constantly evolving
You Are Most Certainly, Definitely Not, Your User
Presented by Erik Wesslen
- When you have little in common with users, perhaps they live 10,000 miles away, where do you start?
- Your background, experience, and technology use are not your users’ background, experience or technology use
- Though you may feel you are like your user, you’re not! Do the user research.
https://twitter.com/UXmikebeasley/status/709920848929492992
Shoutout to my friend Mike Wojan for allowing me to include his great photos from Ignite UX Michigan!
