Sometimes we get so focused on winning small victories of the present – like sign-off on UX or design support – that we’re blindsided by larger issues from the overall business context. This case study tells the story of a team who experienced this first-hand and learned some lasting lessons as a result.
Like any good tale, the story features heroes, villains, and dramatic twists. Hear how product management and user experience joined forces to tackle a serious business problem. Learn how their field research with potential customers busted some big assumptions and uncovered an incredible opportunity. Then find out what happened when they presented that opportunity to an executive team wrestling with disruptive innovation.
This case study will illustrate:
Amazing design results start with a solid design practice. Over the last hundred or so years designers and design educators have established a foundation of skills, theory, and principles that give us a way of thinking about, talking about, and doing design.
Beginning with an overview of traditional design foundations from graphic design, industrial design, and architecture, this session will explore the evolution of the language of design as it tries to keep up with modern design practice and the types of things that designers are working on in the 21st century.
How can we describe the beauty, aesthetic values, and ethics of something that impacts the quality of our lives but we can’t see, like a social network. Design’s traditional critical language doesn’t adequately account for the aesthetic properties of these new kinds of design outputs and practices. We will explore a possible new framing and critical language that extends tradition and works to evolve how we think about, and do, design in the age of the network.
Attendees will learn:
Designing for digital products and other forms of interactions is becoming more about the optimal balance of the science behind the product (technology, connectivity and data computing) and the art of the actual experience (human cognition, logical flow, sensory experience, content and context).
Humanism in this regard is the use of measurable behavioral data, empirical analysis, dynamic mental models, and rational decision-making methodologies to solve problems that alleviate and improve human experiences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – as it involves creating computer models of “brains” based on how human beings consciously solve problems using step-by-step deductive reasoning and our growing knowledge of the world — will be an increasingly large part of the digital products we use every day at home and at work since it delivers the right balance of “art and science”.
In the next decade or sooner, technology and technology-abled products and experiences will be able to detect or predict each person’s mental, emotional and physical conditions, tailoring the interface design to adapt to each user’s specific goals, interests and needs. Interaction design will be triggered by humanistic data as it combines the optimal balance of artistic and scientific inquiries.
We know craft is important, but how does it fit into the ambiguity and complexity (or wickedness) of enterprise UX? What is the role and place for craft in designing enterprise software? There’s massive scales of objects, convoluted processes with buyers (not users), and politically charged organizational matters. Whew! My talk proposes shifting our notion of craft from “precious object” towards “facilitative anchor”, guiding crucial conversations about what matters most: goals, values, criteria. Thus, craft becomes a tool for the designer to achieve alignment and provoke useful dialogues.
To demonstrate, I will share 3 stories from my career at Oracle, Citrix, and CloudPhysics, of how I used craft to clarify issues and build relationships. Each offers slight variations on the “facilitative anchor.” The first is about a “reactive” model of craft. The second is what I call “interpretive” craft. And the final story involves “collaborative” making. Craft becomes a path to teamwork, and a model of design leadership through making.
Key takeaways:
Many stroke survivors lose use of one of their arms, requiring prolonged and costly physical therapy beyond what is covered by most health insurance plans. Through co-design with patients in their homes, our team continues to research and design a personalized system for patients’ homes that will cost under $500 when completed.
In this lightning talk, I will explain our methodology for building patients’ trust to design a customized system for and with them, using their input to design a system they’ll be proud to have in their home. The resulting system is a set of 3D-printed objects that are manipulated with the patient’s impaired arm in guided exercises, which are observed and assessed by a machine learning algorithm using an integrated Kinect camera. As the patient interacts with the system over time, the system’s targeted therapy for the patient will improve based upon the patient’s specific impairment.
This case study presents design research methodology to understand user experience and explore design in collaboration with users. I will present along with my teammate, Sapna Singh.
Description of issue/topic: Through a design studio at OSU, our team of graduate design, business and occupational therapy students undertook a 14-week class in which we worked with a group of five residents at a senior living facility to co-design a new shoe shopping experience.
How we will address the topic: The presentation will begin with background information into the growing 65+ demographic. Our presentation will provide supporting statistics as well as information about the needs and issues of this growing group.
Then we will discuss why our team selected the topic of clothing, and shoe shopping in particular. We will introduce the co-design process and discuss how we implemented this research method with the elder co-designers, challenges we faced with this new (to them/us) method, and recommendations for future work in this method.
Our presentation will summarize our insight into the elders’ current shoe-shopping experience and our learnings about their ideal experience.
Finally, we will share the process prototype we developed and recommendations for further research.
What attendees will learn:
We’re at the dawn of consumer virtual reality becoming real and mainstream. How do we go about designing for it? While we’re still struggling to master responsive design and the chaos of different sized screens, VR blows the lid off the whole problem by wrapping the screen around you. Now we have screens we’re inside of as well.
This new type of experience presents new problems and opportunities. I’ll discuss common problems including simulator sickness, the screen door effect, and the fragmentation of input devices. I’ll describe some good starting patterns and practices for great VR experiences. Lastly, I’ll cover what are the big exciting problems waiting to be solved.
Participants will leave with an understanding of:
The user is more than what’s in front of the screen. In this talk, I’ll show how tools can become natural extensions of the user and explain the neuroscience behind the process. But I’ll also show that tools change us, and in fact even change how we see the world. Some philosophers say that this is the most natural thing ever, and hence call us “natural-born cyborgs” (Andy Clark).
Attendees will learn:
The process behind making a blockbuster film is similar to creating a meaningful website or app. Through the lens of cinema, we’ll walk through practical ways that UX design teams can work together to deliver an award-winning final product. Whether you’re making a low-budget indie for a non-profit or the next summer smash for a Fortune 500, we can learn a thing or two from film.
We’ll take two approaches: (1) a deep look at the filmmaking process and the lessons learned from over a century of refining roles and (2) the challenged wrought by the independent and digital film revolution and its similarities to the commoditization of modern web and application design.
What we’ll cover:
You’ll come away with:
The world of startups and the speed of technology change creates new challenges for practitioners of interaction design. The shift of value creation “from atoms to bits” in our networked economy seems to make it more difficult to predict success; so many startups fail. Developing genuinely new ideas requires peer-to-peer collaboration across disparate domains of expertise. Teams morph quickly across the phases of development as well as the phases of maturity of an enterprise, as it evolves from startup to market entrant to major player. The rapid evolution of technology pressures designers as well as makers to constantly update their tactical skills. As a result, interaction designers must gain these pragmatic skills, which are the focus of this talk:
