Ignite UX Michigan 2014 was a great success, with over 150 user experience professionals gathering in downtown Ann Arbor on October 22 for five-minute presentations focused on usability.
Organized by Mike Beasley and Whitney Ferdon, it was an evening of inspiring talks and a reunion for UX professionals and students, with people traveling from Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Toledo, Ohio to attend the event.
Here are my notes from some of the Ignite UX Michigan talks, along with social conversation and photos from the event:
https://twitter.com/crfarnum/status/524697443313922048
User Interface Design is Magic. No, Really
- Magic influences the world with rituals and symbols
- Symbols stand for what you want to manipulate
- Our interfaces consist of symbols; icons start apps, hamburgers give us choices
- Keep iterating to find symbols
The Future of UX: Less is Enough in 25 Years
- As UX designers we need to educate users to build their own experiences
- UX practitioners need to embrace our role as meta designers and educators
Unlocking LATCH
- Information can be organized by LATCH – Location, Alphabet, Category, Time, or Hierarchy
- The structures that build our reality aren’t real, except that we keep using them
Web Accessibility and Disability
- Wide range of disabilities to consider in our web designs: visual, hard-of-hearing, cognitive, and dexterity issues
- Create better user experiences for people who are color blind—use a color blindness simulator and color contrast tester
- Improve accessibility by eliminating unnecessary clicks, avoiding large blocks of text, and using plain language
The UX of Project Management
- How employees experience the workplace affects outcomes
- We spend time creating great user experience for our clients. We need to extend that to our work environment.
- Adaptive, responsive workplaces begin with empathy for employees
Understanding High School Girls in a Learning Environment
- As instructor at Girls Who Code, Jeff Stern, who creates technology for the classroom, learned what it was like to be a classroom teacher of high school girls learning computer science
- There’s no secret formula, but four items that worked for their curriculum: legitimate exposure, interest-driven, community-building, and technical skills
- As UX professionals, Stern proposes we become embedded in the community we’re researching
How to Effectively Collaborate with a Visual Designer
Five tips for UX professionals working with a visual designer:
- Collaborate early in the design process
- Get feedback from the visual designer. Good example: Starbucks.
- Provide feedback to the visual designer. Example: a design may be beautiful, but not usable.
- Include the visual designer in user testing
- Include the visual designer when iterating
Never Look for Another UX Job Again
- Go to UX events. Get involved in the UX community, World Usability Days, local UX meetups, happy hours, conferences.
- Make friends when you attend events. Connect with recruiters.
- Use LinkedIn. Connect with people you know, give recommendations, build good will in your network.
- Have a great portfolio that tells what you did, the methods you used, how you completed the project, and what you learned about your users.
- Be known for something. Are you an event organizer, speaker, or researcher?
The Naked Persona: Creating Stripped-Down, Useful Personas That Work
- Focus on needs, pain points and common questions
- Get rid of the bullet points
- https://twitter.com/IgniteUXmi/status/524721400880570368
- Use persona creation template to get everyone involved in the process, not just user experience people
