My notes on all the talks UXLondon 2016

1. Venue & Notes
by daryl meier fahrni

2. Trinity Laban, Greenwich London
Great truck-food, superb coffee served with a huge smile, Interactive Games (arcade goes laser)

3. Day One - Design Strategy
Intersection of Design Thinking and Business Strategy. Inspirations by
leaders and strategic thinkers who are tackling big problems and
delivering meaningful experiences at scale.

4. Org Design for Design Orgs
PETER MERHOLZ
Experience Design & Product Consultant, Co-
founder of Adaptive Path
Companies are establishing and growing in-
house design teams like never before. But
they're not getting the most out of them,
because it turns out design should not be
treated like other functions. Drawing on
personal experience and interviews with
industry leaders, Peter will reveal the qualities
that make for the most effective design teams,
and unorthodox strategies for shaping such
organisations. When you take care of the team,
the output takes care of itself.

7. The Modern Design Organisation
LEAH BULEY
Analyst at Forrester Research
Companies from IBM to GE and Capital One are
finally making serious investments in design as
a strategic differentiator. Does that mean we’re
done? Has UX finally arrived? If only it were
that simple. With the ascent of UX comes new
questions. Today, companies struggle to
understand the relationship between user
experience, customer experience, service
design, and innovation—what Jesse James
Garrett called “the great convergence.” The
reality is that many UX teams are still stymied
by questions about what experience design
professionals are empowered to do, and
what’s somebody else’s job. In this talk, Leah
Buley will share her research into the
differences between a ho hum UX organisation,
and world class one. She’ll also discuss what
work still remains to be done for all user
experience professionals to step up to the
opportunity that’s now in front of them.

8. Radical Focus: Using OKRs to
Accomplish Your Most Important
Goals
CHRISTINA WODTKE
Start-up coach and author of the forthcoming
'Radical Focus'
Christina Wodtke has devoted her career to
tackling monumental tasks. She’s helped grow
companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the New
York Times. Nowadays she works with startups
and entrepreneurs, sharing her strategies for
success and inspiring them to pursue big goals
and outlandish dreams.
Christina knows how to inspire diverse teams
to work together, going all out in pursuit of a
single, ultra-challenging goal. Hint: It’s not
about to-do lists and accountability charts.
How do you get your team to commit to bold
goals? How do you stay motivated despite
setbacks and disappointments? And is failure
ever a viable option?
Christina Wodtke will demonstrate how she
uses _objectives and key results_ to help teams
tackle and realize big goals in a methodical
way, leaving nothing to chance. You’ll learn the
beauty of a good fail and how regular check-ins
can keep you on track to success.

9. Redesigning Government for the
21st Century
LOUISE DOWNE
Head of Design for the UK Government,
GDS
Public services account for approximately
1/5th of UK GDP. That's about 80% of the
cost of central government. Of that though,
up to 60% is spent on the cost of service
failure - calls and casework that could be
avoided by better designed services.
Since the founding of GDS, we’ve created
and built one consistent user experience
for government, saving £1.7 billion pounds
for the UK taxpayer, and beating the
Olympic cauldron to the Designs of the
Year award with a ‘black and white website’
that means users don’t need to know how
government works to make it work for
them.
But our work has only just started. The
Autumn spending review announced £1.8
billion of spending on making digital
services better (and cheaper to deliver)
over the next 4 years. But how do we make
sure that these changes meet the needs of
users? and how do we scale user centred
design in the UK's largest single
organisation?

10. A frontier for designers: cultures
of creativity
MARC RETTIG
Managing Principal at Fit Associates
It’s one thing to hire more designers, but
how do we put in place the conditions
necessary for the design process to come
to life in our teams and organisations? It’s
one thing to be a good designer, but how
do we equip ourselves to affect the way
our organisation sees and conducts its
work? Do we need design-driven
organisations, or profoundly creative
organisations? What’s the difference? To
shed light on these questions and invite
you to consider how they relate to your
work and your career, Marc Rettig will draw
on current efforts in large companies,
trends in social innovation and leadership,
and return to an old and profoundly deep
view of the creative process.

11. Design Thinking for Innovation
CHRISTINA WODTKE
Design is transforming business, powering
new companies like Nest and AirBnB, and
revitalising older ones like Google and
Intuit. Design thinking and practices are
tapped as a font of innovation by startups
in particular. But how can you adopt this
new approach effectively? Christina
Wodtke, Adjunct Professor at CCA and
Stanford Continuing Education, will take
you through the science behind design
thinking. In this workshop, participants will
apply six key design techniques to creating
a business. You will learn how to discover
hidden insights in data, sketch out
concepts, and co-create with customers an
early MVP. As well, we’ll use design thinking
to rapidly iterate on the business model
canvas to assure your business is viable.

13. Day Two - Product Design
The product world. As the network becomes more and more embedded
in our daily lives, learn how the worlds most progressive product teams
are facing the increasing complexity of design challenges.

14. Balanced Product Strategy
CENNYDD BOWLES
Digital Product Designer
Data rules with an iron fist. Every company
is unique in adopting the Lean Startup
philosophy; nothing’s going in that backlog
until it’s fully hypothesis-tested. The world
belongs to the numerate, and product
strategies are becoming evidence-based,
conservative, and sometimes plain robotic.
Designers know there's got to be more to it
than this. We know numbers are powerful
advisers but tyrannical masters. How can
we convince leaders of the limits of data-
driven decisions? How can we make the
case for product strategies that invest in
the intangibles — trust, loyalty, love — that
design engenders so well? How can we
reintroduce some humanity to the future
of our companies and products?

15. Three Star Product Experiences
MELISSA PERRI
Product Manager, UX Designer, CEO of
ProdUX Labs
El Bulli, Frantzen, Alinea, Aquavit - some of
the best restaurants in the world. They
didn’t achieve their Michelin Stars by doing
the same thing as everyone else. Let’s take
a cue from restaurants on how to take our
software products from good to great. We
need to forgo traditional methods of
building products and turn to product
management practices that deliver
exceptional value to the user. Focusing on
user experience, product experiments,
teamwork, and solving problems will get us
there.

16. Physical and Digital: finding the
balance that makes the ordinary
extraordinary
CLARA GAGGERO WESTAWAY
Co-founder and Creative Director, Special
Projects
Digital interfaces open up possibilities of
ubiquitous access and information sharing,
physical objects feel natural to people and
give them something tangible to relate to.
Today’s products can fuse both the
analogue and the digital to create a
frictionless and delightful experience for
people.
In this session, Clara will share her journey
in pursuing the perfect balance of analogue
and digital when designing a calendar, a
paper manual for smartphones and other
IoT devices.

17. Beyond Measure
ERIKA HALL
Co founder of Mule Design and author of
'Just Enough Research'
Site analytics. The quantified self. Big data.
We can track, measure, and store more
than ever before. This is naturally exciting
to designers and technologists who want to
make better informed decisions. But more
data doesn’t necessarily create more
meaning, and might even make it harder to
see what matters. Human experience does
not reduce to an engineering problem and
what we can’t count still counts in an
increasingly quantified world.

18. What Good Means
DAN KLYN
Information Architect
Designers are expected to do so many
things; the baseline expectation is that we
make products or services better as the
result of our work.
You don't even need to know what "good"
means in order to be working and
measuring in terms of "better." Simply take
some measurements now, then design and
launch some things, then re-measure.
When the numbers go up, you're doing
better than you did before.
"Better" is the tune that business calls
when it pays the UX piper to do his or her
work. And as you may remember, the piper
story has a funny ending.
Is there a way for UX designers to know
that we're doing it right that's not about
being "better?" Dan Klyn is certain there is,
and will share what he's learned about
what good means and a different model for
what it might mean, drawn from more than
nineteen years of professional practice.

19. Sketching with confidence,
clarity and imagination
EVA-LOTTA LAMM
User Experience Designer and Illustrator
Being able to sketch is like speaking an
additional language that enables you to
structure and express your thoughts and
ideas more clearly, quickly and in an
engaging way. For anyone working in UX,
design and product development in
general, sketching is a valuable technique
to feel comfortable with. Thinking through
complex problems on your own,
spontaneously pitching a design idea at the
whiteboard, bringing a user scenario to life
in a storyboard or creating sketchnotes
during a research interview: the ability to
sketch is as versatile and useful as the
ability to write. And like writing, it’s
daunting to learn at first, but with a bit of
instruction and a lot of practice it can
become second nature.

21. Day Three - Design Practice
Exploration of the constantly evolving field of design to see what's on
the horizon. Double-down on fundamentals of our craft, leaving you
armed with a powerful new set of tools and techniques.

22. How to Make Sense of Any Mess
ABBY COVERT
Information Architect
In a world where everything is getting more
complex and we are all experiencing personal
information overload, there is a growing need
to understand the tools and processes that are
used to make sense of complex subjects and
situations. These tools aren’t hard to learn or
even tough to implement but they are also not
part of many people’s education. Information
Architecture is a practice of making sense. A
set of principles, lessons and tools to help
anyone make sense of anything. Whether you
are – a student or professional, a designer,
technologist or small business owner, an intern
or executive – learn how information
architecture can help you make sense of your
next endeavour.

24. The Principles of UX
Choreography
GLEN KEANE
Animator
REBECCA USSAI
Experience Design Director at R/GA
The Principles of UX Choreography is a new
paradigm developed by Rebecca Ussai of
R/GA and Legendary Animator, Glen Keane.
Influenced by Disney’s 12 Principles of
Animation and the most important
communication points of user experience
design, UX Choreography helps designers
think about how to design with motion in
order to craft experiences that are more
intuitive, realistic, emotional, and
enjoyable. Together, Rebecca and Glen will
illustrate these principles and help the
audience find a deeper story in all of their
work.

26. The Future of the Web: And How
to Prepare for it Now
PETER SMART
Director of UX and Strategy at Fantasy.co
Do you remember your first moment on the
web? The internet, as we know it, is less than
9,000 days old. What do the next 9,000 days
have in store?
Peter Smart, global director of user experience
at Fantasy Interactive, will offer insights into
some of the most astonishing developments at
the frontiers of our industry. Together, we’ll
explore how breakthroughs at the edge of
technology, science and design will transform
the way the web affects our daily lives – from
invisible interfaces, touchable websites and
adaptive ecosystems.
Drawing on leading research and experiments
across our industry, join us on a tour of the
next 9,000 days on the web – and how we can
prepare for them today.

27. Open the pod bay doors,
designer
BEN SAUER
Senior User Experience Designer at
Clearleft
Right now voice UIs like Siri are, well…. hit
and miss. But all the big players are heavily
investing in voice UI, let’s suppose it will be
much smarter, soon. What does that mean
for us designers? Will screen UI even be
required? Should we be changing our
workflow now? In this talk, Ben will look at
the current capabilities of Voice UIs, how
the APIs are connecting to apps, what’s
next, and how this might change our
design process and products.

28. Wicked Ambiguity and User
Experience
JONATHON COLMAN
Product UX & Content Strategy at Facebook
How do you solve the world’s hardest
problems? And how would you respond if
they’re unsolvable? As user experience
professionals, we’re focused on people who
live and work in the here and now. We dive
into research, define the problem, break down
silos, and focus on people’s intent to create
solutions.
But how does our UX work change when a
project lasts not for one year, or even 10 years,
but for 10,000 years or more? Enter the
“Wicked Problem,” or situations with so much
ambiguity, complexity, and interdependencies
that—by definition—they can’t be solved.
Using real-world examples from NASA’s
Voyager program, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear
Waste Repository, and other long-term UX
efforts, we’ll talk about the challenges of
creating solutions for people whom we’ll never
know in our lifetimes.
The ways we grapple with ambiguity give us a
new perspective on our work and on what it
means to build experiences that last.

29. Storytelling for multi-device design
ANNA DAHLSTRÖM
UX designer
As the number of devices we use on a daily basis
grows, considering each device's role at different
times, situations and contexts is becoming
increasingly important to ensure that we deliver
good experiences and stand out from the
competition. Our ability to control where a user is
coming from and how they get around the
experiences we design is fading. Yet our need to
ensure we understand where they are in their
journey, so that we can deliver the right content
and interactions at the right time, and on the right
device, is ever more important.
Drawing on tried and tested storytelling principles
from film, fiction, and music and applying them to
the context of UX design and business, this
workshop gives a practical walk through of why
storytelling matters. It further provides you with
hands on tools for how you can apply it to your
multi-device design projects and to your
organisation, to ensure we create better multi-
device experiences for our users and healthier
bottom lines for our businesses.