A summary of the key themes that I uncovered at the UX London conference 2013.

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