The summary provides an overview of the key themes and highlights from the UX London 2013 conference: - The conference covered product design, behaviour design, and design strategy over 3 days with inspiring talks and intensive workshops. - Key themes included the importance of observing user behavior and learning from both successes and failures through testing and iteration. Technology and user needs are changing rapidly so designers must be creative and adaptive. - Highlights included presentations on learning from "desire paths" in urban planning and user behavior, defining the right product through lean UX practices, and the challenges and successes of consolidating over 2000 UK government websites onto a single domain.

1. UX London 2013
Simon Pan · April 2013

2. Conference Overview
• 3 days covering Product Design, Behaviour Design
and Design Strategy
• Inspiring talks and intensive workshops
• Awesome atmosphere

9. Key Themes

10. We don’t know what will work
• Observe people & learn from emergent behaviour
• It won’t be perfect first go. Test and iterate.
• Learn from failure AND success

11. Technology is moving FAST
• Computing power doubles every 18 months
• Robots are replacing human labour
• Our lives are littered with crap that doesn’t work
• Change favours the creative

12. There is no perfect process
• ...only process for the circumstance
• Good work doesn’t come from the “5 D’s”
• It’s important to be honest with ourselves and our
clients
• Change favours the creative

13. Design beyond the interface
• We need to work differently if we want to deliver
meaningful experience that deal real value
• The challenge is designing organisations, not UI

14. Presentation Highlights

15. Tom Hulme
IDEO
Design
Disrupted

16. Key Outtakes
• How can we learn from Urban Design?
• No matter how we design cities, people take their
own paths - “Desire Paths”

18. As Designers...
• We have the vision
• BUT The truth is in how
!
• Our responsibility is ALSO to react

19. How do we do it?
• Human needs rarely change
• We need to find ways to meet them more
meaningfully and delightfully

20. 1. Launch to learn
• Need vision. Need purpose.
• Pick something to launch, we’ll learn far more
• Don’t be precious
• Small 2 pizza teams - line of sight with customer
• Build and learn as you go

21. 2. Don’t fight desire
• Look for desire paths and remove friction
• Accept that we will be wrong
• Whatever users are doing is the truth
• Plenty of good tools to find desire paths

22. 3. Neither open nor closed
• Think of products as a jar
• API’s are your best friend
• Think about ways to open things up. Good for
business, good for community.

23. 4. You’re not alone
• Consider the bigger journey
• Work harder to design for how people leave

24. Jeff Gothelf
Neo
Better product definition
with Lean UX

25. Key Outtakes
• Startups fail because they don’t test their
hypotheses
• Defining the right product reduces time spent
building the wrong product
• You have to fail to learn

26. Product

27. Manager

28. Rethinking Requirements
• Requirements are actually assumptions we are
making about:
• the audience and their needs
• our product and design

29. We need to shift our thinking
• Requirements =
• We know =
• Let’s build it =
• Build this feature =

30. On Lean UX
Bring the true nature (experience) of a product to
light as quickly as possible, in a collaborative, cross-
functional way with less emphasis on deliverables and
a greater focus on a shared vision and understanding
of the experience being designed.
“

31. On Design Thinking
• Empathy
• Creativity
• Rationality

32. Design Thinking + Lean UX
• Prioritise

33. Product Definition
• Who is our customer?
• What pain-points do they experience?
• What is our differentiation?
• What’s our business model?
• What business problem are we trying to solve?

34. Requirements as Hypotheses
• We believe that [building this feature] for [these
people] will achieve [this outcome] is our customer?
• We know we are successful when we see [this
quantifiable signal from the market]

35. Measure progress by outcome
• Companies currently measure output e.g ‘Did you
build this sign-up page?’
• Need to refocus teams on outcomes
• ...outcomes they can actually affect e.g not NPS

36. Measure progress by outcome
• McDonalds analogy:
• Fries = output
• Fat kid = outcome
• Obese population = impact

37. Make decisions with data
• Quantitative + Qualitative (objective observation)
• If it’s a bad idea, kill it before it kills you!
• If it’s a step in the right direction - change tactics
• If you’re getting there - double down and scale

38. Lean UX isn’t just for Designers
• Small, cross-functional “2 pizza teams”
• Bring perspective from all disciplines
• Everyone should understand the “why”
• Learn more, faster by sharing in discovery and
creation

39. Ben Terrett
Gov.UK
Building a consistent UX
across gov digital services

40. GOV.UK Vision 2013
Single place for all government services and
information online.
“

41. Challenges
• 2000+ websites to consolidate
• Single government domain
• Public sector - large number of stakeholder
• Complex approval process

42. How they got there
• Creating an environment that keeps learnings
within team
• Prioritising ‘good idea’ to ‘actually live’
• Advocating and changing the culture

43. typical

44. approach

45. to

46. public

47. sector

48. massive

49. achievement!

50. Guiding Principles
• Gov should only do what gov does:
• Design in the environment that it’s going to be used
• Designing information not pushing around pixels -
Technology changes, content is forever

51. Key Learnings
• Gov.uk isn’t a story about Interface Design, it’s a
story about organisational design
• To enable design like this, we need to change how
we work and how we think
• Need a working culture that values its people,
embraces experimentation

52. What we can learn from the
GOV.UK case study

53. Designing a better team
• Centralised, multi-disciplinary, close proximity
• Better spaces, intimate, focussed, wall space!
• Clearly defined roles within teams
• Specialisms are great, but using ‘UX Designer’
labels - everyone else is off the hook

54. Designing a better team
• The UX isn’t just the interface, it’s how fast the
servers are, the structure of the URL, how the
copy is written
• Products are a team sport

55. Designing better leadership
• Need vocal and consistent support from the
highest parts of the organisation
• Continually evangelise for the team higher up and
be the battering rams driving change
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benterrett/8576183560/

56. Designing better learning
• Spend time creating artefacts.
• Maintain a shared vision about the way we should
approach challenges and define solutions
• Be open to improving methodologies through
learning and workspace hacks
• Don’t be dogmatic

57. Designing a better process
• Focus on delivering small chunks of work
• Visible deadlines and visible progress
• Test driven development (browser and accessibility
baked into each sprint) + real people
• Continually deliver...avoid the big reveal

58. Thanks