UX CAMP 2016 ZURICH, MY TAKEOVERS

I attended the UX Camp in Zurich and will share what I learned and discovered and all my takeovers. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll share my perspective on the value of attending design conferences and highlight how attending conferences can unlock business value.

What happened at the UX Camp 2016 Zurich, what I learned, what I discovered, and all my takeovers. Attending the Zurich UX Camp is always a great experience. The people who attend are so inspired and excited to be part of the event. The organisation is able to make you feel comfortable within a warm context. The venue is awesome, and the food is great!

This is the third time I have attended the UX Camp in Zurich, and as usual, it has met all my expectations. Here are the talks that I attended and found very interesting:

THE TALK ABOUT “UX MICRO FEEDBACK”

Digital and physical product builders need user feedback to better understand how their deliverables are used by people. I had already the chance to have some idea about Micro feedback by reading a post by Sarah Doody

Luc Schomer (@juliusdietz) gave us a great overview of the feedback systems of many products.

In this scenario, Microfeedback is a good way to start a relationship with customers because they are provided on the go and, in many cases, do not interrupt or disturb the user journey.

some examples we saw during the talk:

• email sent at the end of a specific task, to ask users to describe how they found the task itself
• overlay components (ex dialogues) after a specific time without any action from users
• instant feedback (rating) at the end of posts and media content (ex after the Skype calls)
• onboarding users on another channel after a process, for instance, the sms after booking a flight ticket

Adding value to such a list was interesting, as well, as the way how to define a rating grid to measure the results:

• who votes from 0 to 6 is a detractor
• who votes from 7 to 8 is a passive
• who votes from 9 to 10 is a promoter

Based on these values, as a provider, we can address specific content to boost the engagement process between users and products.

THE TALK ABOUT “DESIGN FOR CONVERSATION”

It was really interesting to observe user interfaces (UIs) and interaction patterns in the conversation apps made by @thepian.

The logic of such apps is based on:

• each message can be interactive because the ping-pong can be done with several options (text, media content, emoji etc)
• the chat itself is part of a larger context
• the most important thing is that the main interaction is with a counterpart, a human being

Honestly, I was never focused on analyzing the conversation app interfaces.

It was a surprise during the talk discover that:

• all the main interactions are placed at the bottom of the UI
• the newest piece of information is at the bottom of the UI as well
• back navigation button is not needed for this user journey
• the full history is available by scrolling the content to the top

The talk about “Atomic Design”

I’ve been checking atomic design for almost one year, trying to figure out how to implement it in my projects.
Building a style guide in sync with the project shades (test environment, dev environment, show case environment, etc.) has always seemed like a holy grail to me.

Difficult to figure out hard to achieve.

Adrian Heydecker and Marcel Kessler from Netcetera gave us a great example of how to apply the atomic design approach to a real design case.

They used the approach designed by Brian Forst to define only the most important components to build web and mobile interfaces. Aimed to boost the relationship between designers and developers to share and develop one asset repository.

The main results are:

• The front end and back end are running in sync
• Bug fixing and new features are deployed once
• They can define dedicated duties

I do have a thing for such events because, as a designer, sharing and comparing ideas, techniques, approaches, and methodologies is like breathing. I would be keen to have the chance to do this on a daily basis, but it’s not possible, or at least not achievable, to myself. This is the reason why attending an event like the UX Camp in Zurich allows you to leap ahead in your designer tasks.