UXHK

2015

6 & 7 March 2015

Speakers : Jared M. Spool (UIE), Dana Chisnell (Usabilityworks), Matt Nish-Lapidus (Normative), Davide Casali (Automattic), Andrew Mayfield (Optimal Workshop), Ted Kilian (Brilliant Basics), Jennifer Fabrizi (Slalom Consulting)

User Experience Hong Kong (UXHK) is a learning event dedicated to bringing all product and service design disciplines together, from research, marketing, design, technology and the business to name a few, who are interested and passionate about designing great experiences for people and business for a better world for all.

Workshops : Choose workshops to brush up your UX skills.

Get Connected : Network with the invited speakers and with the local Asian UX community.

Stay Updated : Follow our online channels to stay in the loop. 

Program : 

• Day 1 – Presentations & Conversations
• Day 2 – Half day workshops

Day 1 – Presentations & Conversations 

1:00p.m. - Registration Opens at Reception

2:00p.m. - Welcome & Presentations

How do we design designers?

JARED M. SPOOL
Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and Computer Science grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation?

It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable. Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth. Doing just that takes a combination of practical education, soft-skill development, and a commitment to lifelong learning. In this talk, Jared Spool will dig into all three so you can be a part of developing the next generation of designers.

This vital topic was the focus of a multi-year research program Jared conducted with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman to identify how orgs educate, hire, train, and develop designers. Armed with huge amounts of data, the duo then designed and launched Center Centre, a bricks-and-mortar school that cultivates industry-ready UX designers.

So if you’ve ever wished there was a better system to support design thinkers like you, then this is your talk. After all, you could be part of defining the ideal solution.

When intention isn’t enough to delight users

DANA CHISNELL
This team wanted to do the right thing. They thought they were doing the right thing the right way. They tried to make planning for retirement simple and friendly. Visually, their app was inviting and warm. Navigating forward was simple and engaging. But the pleasures quickly faded as the flow was broken and the meaning was lost. Hear the story of this well-intentioned team and how they got close but not close enough to delighting their customers in their attempt to make saving for retirement fun.

Design foundations for the 21st century

MATT NISH-LAPIDUS
Amazing design results start with a solid design practice. Over the last hundred or so years designers and design educators have established a foundation of skills, theory, and principles that give us a way of thinking about, talking about, and doing design. What are design foundations? How can we apply them? And where are they going in the 21st century?

Grow your personal leadership by understanding your hybrid traits

DAVIDE CASALI
The knowledge of craft and processes does little to help in the day-to-day relationship with teams and clients. That’s because the actual practical skills are just part of the game: there are competences that go beyond that: soft skills, sensibility, empathy, relational abilities, proactivity, etc. All of these are rarely highlighted or taught, and even less often they are used in specific tasks such as team growth or hiring.

The Hybrid Traits is an effective model to frame these additional skills, allowing us to focus on them and embed them in our professional life. It’s not easy however, because everything starts from the individual’s desire to practice introspection.

Being a successful user-centred product manager

ANDREW MAYFIELD
Discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team-a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience. We’ll take you behind the scenes at Optimal Workshop to discuss what a Minimal Viable Product really is, and-the hard part-what to do once you’ve got one.

The art of the start: producing the right context for design

TED KILIAN
Designers have the difficult job of bringing meaningful and valuable products/services to life within a complex environment of competing needs, constraints, and expectations. Those contextual factors, more than probably anything else, drive the success or failure of a design project, but they are often treated as irrelevant to the designer’s role.

How can we as designers and design leaders create the space where great design can flourish? As a way of exploring this question, we will zoom in on that moment at the beginning of a project when direction is established and the tone is set.

Creativity, imagination and innovation

JENNIFER FABRIZI
The time for technology-lead, business-focused innovation is past. The cultures of Six Sigma and process optimization will only give us incremental improvements, not break-through disruptions that will be needed to sustain our companies and our work. It’s time to disrupt our work practices and design ourselves anew. In this presentation, we will explore some of the specific ingredients in the broad landscape of innovation necessary for creative problem solving. We will go on a journey to play with our roles as facilitators and participants in collaborative innovation. We will use what we know from human-centered design, as well as new findings from neuroscience, to understand a new context for designing mind spaces for creativity by focusing on people rather than processes and practices.

Panel

Future of work (by Heathwallace – Matt Webb, Calvin Yau and Keilin Olsen)

Centuries of industrialisation have given shape to what an efficient organisation should look and work like. Today, we are living with that legacy, organisational silos divided by function or skill along with defined processes designed to maximise efficiency and scale. As an industry, we need to question what needs to evolve to enable people to work more collaboratively across different disciplines, divisions and organisations. To start defining and shaping the Future of Work, HeathWallace’s global panel will discuss how we can revisit our current approach to work and how we can break down barriers that are stopping us from creating more value. 

Panel

Future of work (by Heathwallace – Matt Webb, Calvin Yau and Keilin Olsen)

Centuries of industrialisation have given shape to what an efficient organisation should look and work like. Today, we are living with that legacy, organisational silos divided by function or skill along with defined processes designed to maximise efficiency and scale. As an industry, we need to question what needs to evolve to enable people to work more collaboratively across different disciplines, divisions and organisations. To start defining and shaping the Future of Work, HeathWallace’s global panel will discuss how we can revisit our current approach to work and how we can break down barriers that are stopping us from creating more value. 

6:00p.m. - Drinks, Fun, Networking

8:00p.m. - End of Day 1

Day 2 – Half day Workshops

(AM) Workshop 1 - Deconstructing delight

DANA CHISNELL
You will learn simple approaches to:

• Explore personality within designs
• Create flow for users through taking things away
• Identify the stories people want to tell about your design

But wait, there’s more!

Dana’s workshop features a special guest appearance from Jared Spool.

(AM) Workshop 2 - Design foundations for the 21st century

MATT NISH-LAPIDUS
You will:

(AM) Workshop 3 - Grow your personal leadership by understanding your hybrid traits

DAVIDE CASALI
You will:

• Learn the Hybrid Traits model to give you a framework for professional growth of you, your team and your company
• Participate in a co-design exercise to use the traits in your daily challenges
• Share techniques on how to foster a compassionate and proactive culture
• Learn how individual actions can lead to cultural change regardless of being in a leadership position or not

(PM) Workshop 4 - Being a successful user-centred product manager

ANDREW MAYFIELD
You will:

• Discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team.
• Explore a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience.
• Go behind the scenes at Optimal Workshop to discuss what a Minimal Viable Product really is, and – the hard part – what to do once you’ve got one.

(PM) Workshop 5 - The art of the start

TED KILIAN
You will:

• Explore how starting right can help you even if your approach is agile, lean and self-organizing
• Learn and practice some of the skills that help frame fruitful design questions and align people in a shared direction
• Learn and practice the skills of defining value in ways that connect with stakeholders
• Walk away with at least 2 specific actions to take in your next project start e.g. tomorrow morning.

(PM) Workshop 6 - Creativity, imagination and innovation

JENNIFER FABRIZI
You will:

• Learn techniques and methods to enhance your own creativity
• Learn techniques and methods to bring creative problem solving to your teams / organizations
• Get an understanding of the ingredients for creativity and innovation to occur
• Gain background knowledge about some of the recent research in the neuroscience of creativity
• Share stories of our experiences with innovation and creativity: how we feel when it works well & how we feel when it doesn’t

Speakers

Jared M. Spool - UIE

Twitter: @jmspool

Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering and a co-founder of Center Centre.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about user experience design, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and experience design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers…

Dana Chisnell - Usabilityworks

Twitter: @danachis

Dana strives to counter bad data every day. She’s a research nerd (her words) who just loves methodology, collaborating, and data – especially data she can help teams use to make design decisions. In fact, Dana loves applied research so much that just for fun, she sometimes organizes clients, friends, and other nerds to do flash research on the weekends…

Matt Nish-Lapidus - Normative

Twitter: @emenel

Matt Nish-Lapidus holds a degree in new media art, and has a rich background as a practicing musician and designer. His work has included everything from the digital library catalog in use by the New York Public Library, enterprise software for hospitals, video games, and large-scale public installations…

Davide Casali - Automattic

Twitter: @Folletto

Davide is an experience director and startup advisor with 11+ years of experience and a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. He led cross-disciplinary teams of designers and developers, created and advised successfully funded startups and has done coaching and training for global and local organizations (DHL, EY, Atos)

Andrew Mayfield - Optimal Workshop

Twitter: @andrewfantastic

Andrew is the CEO and Product Manager of online user research software provider Optimal Workshop. Their tools are used and loved by information architects, designers and user experience consultants around the world. Andrew’s background is in software design and development…

Ted Kilian - Brilliant Basics

Twitter: @EncouragingBhvr

Ted heads up the Asia Pacific arm of Brilliant Basics where he tries to make product and service experiences better for customers, brands and bottom lines. With over 15 years experience in UX strategy and design, his working approach combines curious observation, playful ideation and conceptual structure…

Jennifer Fabrizi - Slalom Consulting

Twitter: @jenniferfabrizi

Jennifer Fabrizi is Design Thinker with more than 15 years’ experience beginning with usability and progressing through contextual user research, human-centered design, conceptual and interaction design, and innovation. As an innovation catalyst, she makes mind-spaces in which co-creation can occur, transforming teams on their journey to becoming collaborative innovators.