A little bit of everything...
Last Tuesday, 6th March, I headed over to City University to attend the first Lightning UX event of the year. There was five speakers in total and each person spoke about a topic of their choice.
Sophie Freiermuth began by talking about the many job titles that we hear in our industry ranging from UX Designer to Dev-igner(?!) and how this ambiguity can cause confusion for people who want to employ us.
Francis Norton then spoke about using business strategy as a driver for UCD and suggested that we use metrics to communicate how the services we offer can add real value in terms of the things that businesses care about and can relate to such as risk reduction and return on investment.
Next up Mike Atherton talked about domain modelling. I really enjoyed Mike's presentation at UX Brighton last year so I was looking forward to hearing more. According to Mike, domain modelling is where IA meets Content Strategy. Rather than classifying content by document type, domain modelling breaks down a subject into it's component parts and allows for abstract connections to be made. Content is aggregated and the subsequent cross-linking adds value both for users and SEO. Data is enriched by creating journeys across domains e.g. music can be broken apart into subjects like artist, genre and releases which leads to related topics like tours, venues, set lists and promoters. Through natural, social or editorial curation we can add context that makes information structures meaningful and easy to navigate. My favourite quote from Mike's presentation (and the evening) was "Curation brings human love to a cold, robot heart."
Tim Caynes shared his personal experiences about the UX challenges in designing a mobile wallet and the limitations regarding the framework and infrastructure that is already in place. There are also other matters to consider such as understanding the complex and varied contexts of use and how we can overcome the lack of confidence that users have when they don't yet fully understand how a service actually works.
Lastly, Daniel Soltis talked about designing unfamiliar interfaces and how designers can improve usability and understanding by using clear explanations and familiar patterns, allowing for accidental inputs and providing feedback. Challenges for users include understanding the cause and effect of their actions, physical dexterity (can I actually use this thing?) and determining how much time and effort they are willing to invest in order to overcome the learning curves associated with using novel interfaces. People must be willing and able to learn a new system and this in itself is a challenge for designers.
Thanks to Lee McIvor for organising and to Propel London for sponsoring. Looking forward to next time!
For more information about future events check out the LightningUX website.
All of the presentations have kindly been made available on SlideShare.