UXPA Boston 2017 Conference

One of the questions I get most when chatting with people who want to break into the UX field is: how did you get here? Over the years of telling my own career story and listening to many others, I realized most of us found this field rather serendipitously. Some happened to be a participant in a usability study, others went to grad school for one career and discovered another. In this brief keynote, I’ll chat about my own & others’ serendipitous moments and how we as practitioners can and should help others have their own.

The Wallflower’s Guide to Networking IRL (In Real Life) is the next installation in the Wallflower Guide Series. The Wallflower Guides Jacqueline Stetson, the Wallflower and Kelly Moeller, her Off-Her-Rocker Spirit Animal, are back this year to continue teaching career soft skills for the UX nerd. Last year, we talked about presentation skills in our highly successful workshop “The Wallflower’s Guide to Rocking a Presentation” in which we gave tips and tricks to boost your confidence before your next presentation.

This year, we’re taking those skills to the next level by practicing micro interactions IRL (In Real Life). If you groan at the word “networking” this talk is for you. If you are a fabulous networker already, come and demonstrate your schmoozing skillz during this fun, high octane interactive workshop. You’ll get some new tools to conquer the UXPA Boston after-conference networking event and beyond. We’ll see you there!

• Effective accessibility evaluation techniques
• APIs and better developer tools for automating aspects of accessibility
• Coping with legal realities and the threat of lawsuits
• Forthcoming changes in ADA and “Section 508” federal standards 
• Collaborating with designers, advocates, thought leaders, and other internal business stakeholders

• Are you looking for a way to re-tool your skill set? 
• Are you trying to break into the field of user experience? 
• Maybe you’re dealing with a difficult boss, colleague, employer, client, or company. 

• The basic syntax and best practices of behavioral scenarios
• Engaging a multidisciplinary team in the writing & review process
• Bringing order and reliability to sometimes-messy iterative development
• How developers use automated testing to bring your scenarios to life

• Starting and Running a Customer Design Advisory Board by Mary Beth Raven: A customer design advisory board is a group of customers/users who agree to provide early feedback on your UX designs.  This talk explains the benefits of forming a board compared to other customer groups like user groups or beta testers. It covers how to recruit participants, level of commitment to ask for from your partners, how to get past legal and confidentiality hurdles, and types of feedback sessions to organize. It also provides some techniques for running and maintaining such a program. 

• Featherweight Design Sprint: How to tame a feature-sized problem in 4 hours by Nathalie Baudrand: Not inventing a new product, but have a small tricky problem that needs to be solved? Me too! Rather than spending 5 days or even 8 full hours in a design sprint, as recommended by the books Sprint and Design Sprint, it is possible to rework the design sprint model to accommodate a smaller problem in 4 short meetings and still get the benefits and outcomes of a full design sprint without the cost. In this short talk, I’ll talk about how to run an abbreviated design sprint that takes only ~4 hours of stakeholder time to get to the outcomes you need and move your design forward. 
• Extraordinary Connections: 5 Ways To Leverage Relationships To Build Better User Research by Kristen Arakelian: Kristen Arakelian of EBSCO Information Services will share her 5 top tips for leveraging relationships to curate high-quality samples. She will share tips on which social media sites are worth investing time in to find recruits, and how her work to “understand the ask” led EBSCO Information Services to new understanding of their users, higher study pickup rates, and better-curated participant samples. Kristen will also provide insight about how to recruit for confidential studies, and disclose the key to finding your own “secret weapon” when it comes to recruiting for your own institution’s studies. Information and tips about how to recruit participants for accessibility testing will also be shared.  

For as long as I’ve been doing usability testing, it’s been generally assumed that displaying video of the participant to the observers--usually in a small picture-in-picture window--is a good thing. This participant picture-in-picture (PPIP) video theoretically increases observer empathy and helps convince even the most stubborn executive that their product makes users miserable. And as generating PPIP became easier--thanks to ubiquitous webcams and slick screen sharing software--it’s become more or less standard practice.

TABLE TOPIC LEADERS:

Career Networking: ClearPoint

Susan Mercer Healthcare Talk

Kavitha Krishnan Education Talk

Michael Hawley Financial Services Talk

Minmin Yang Enterprise UX

Margaret Jacobi Designer Talk

Sonya Mead  Physical Products & Devices

KD ARNEJA Agile / Lean UX Talk

Bob Thomas Manager Talk

Astrid Chow Research Talk 

Richard Wang Healthcare

Four Hewes Service Design

Elizabeth Rosenzweig Design for Social Change

Matt Belge Consulting and Solo Practitioners

Jen Strickland Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

Peter McNally Accessibility

Kevin Berni Management

Richard Beauregard UX Strategy

• lay out several “cognitive biases” that user experience researchers should note as they plan, conduct and analyze research
• detail strategies for countering those biases
• and present several case studies about places where researchers have fallen into (and successfully avoided cognitive biases)

As we collectively advance the field of UX research, 3 UX researchers present research techniques they have been tinkering with. Heather Wright Karlson is interested in the reactions of users at the conclusion of evaluation sessions when they reveal their feelings about their overall experience. Heather will share her emoji method to collect information about users’ emotions and engagement. Melanie St.James found inspiration in Journey Maps, typically used to summarize research. Turning the artifact on its head, Melanie used a journey map structure to conduct foundational research.  Erin Freeburger shares an alternative to a “shop along” where users interact with the FocusVision app “Revelation”, allowing the remote moderator to direct and respond as necessary.

• Step by step detail on our scrum practices, including a process flow diagram for how we integrate with the development lifecycle
• Our special blend of story patterns that fit varying needs that audience members can take home and mix into to their own working environments
• How we structure our UX Team, including the secret ingredients in our team’s success

Biometrics such as eye tracking, facial expression detection, Galvanic Skin Response, and EEG are becoming increasing popular across many fields of human behavior research, including those within user experience.

In this talk, we will cover the way the metrics and visualizations generated from biometric sensors are currently utilized for the purpose of UX research as well as the vision for how they can evolve further into this field of work.

We will do a live demonstration of eye tracking data collection with a couple of volunteers and do a live analysis of the data collected.

• Not all practitioners share an evidence-based understanding of how behavioral economics works, and therefore may misapply concepts;
• Users are more responsive to different behavioral economics concepts at different points in the behavior change experience, so an experience map must be layered into the design process;
• And individual differences also influence which behavioral economics concepts most affect behavior, so a deep understanding of the user is required.

• Strategies for evaluating longitudinal user needs in health interventions
• Options for better understanding a user’s psychographic profile
• Tactics to select the most effective behavioral economics technique(s) to effect change for specific users at specific timepoints
• Best practices to translate concepts to intervention features

• Are you looking for a way to re-tool your skill set? 
• Are you trying to break into the field of user experience? 
• Maybe you’re dealing with a difficult boss, colleague, employer, client, or company. 

• 3 Secrets of Accessibility by Calvin Arterberry & Sunish Gupta: Despite recent advances in electronics and mobile technology, independent living by seniors And people with disabilities have become very frustrating and sometimes Impossible due to inaccessibility of many modern interfaces, for example in thermostats, appliances and smart wrist bands.

• Push It Real Good: Pushing Our Team and Design With 3D Touch by Paul Sisler: This presentation tells the story of our design journey with 3D Touch and offers guidance for teams who want to take advantage of 3D Touch in their mobile apps. 3D Touch measures the level of pressure one applies when pressing an iPhone screen, and allows for a different response depending on how hard one presses. Apple offers some guidance for using 3D Touch in their iOS Human Interface Guidelines, but 3D Touch is still new (released with iPhone 6S in October 2015). Teams aren’t sure what to implement, and users aren’t sure what to expect. We’ll introduce 3D Touch, talk about designs we considered for improving our app, share observations from a study we ran, and offer guidelines for using 3D Touch in your mobile app.

• The UX of Virtual Reality: A Practical Guide to Immersive Experience Design by Jon Ericson: The field of user experience is rapidly expanding to encompass new ways of interacting with people, data, and things. With companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, and Google leading the way, experiences per se are becoming products in their own right, and the cost of high quality virtual reality (VR) technologies and experiences has plummeted. The result? VR is being incorporated into the design process across many industries, and is altering not only the UX field, but the technological, economic, and social landscape of our world. This talk introduces fundamental design principles for VR. While many principles for designing 2D experiences still apply, new principles are needed when designing immersive 3D experiences. As with 2D interfaces, relatively minor UX blunders merely interrupt “flow” or lead to confusion. For example, a prominent app for Google Cardboard forces users to temporarily remove and rotate the headset in order to navigate between environments, thereby breaking the immersion. But because VR is so much more immersive than other mediums, more serious UX blunders or unethical design decisions can potentially lead to psychological distress, fatigue, nausea, pain, or physical injury. In order to design high-quality, effective, safe and ethical VR experiences, UX practitioners need to account for the subtleties of human sensory systems and perceptual processes. This talk provides an overview of virtual reality, and then outlines a variety of practical UX design principles and application areas for this emerging technology. Topics covered include visual perception, affordances, ergonomics, depth and motion cues, and designing for wayfinding. Practitioners will leave with fresh ideas for applying the unique advantages of this 3D medium to their existing 2D design processes. Audience members will also be directed to helpful resources including software tools, and low-cost VR solutions.

• Our initial user research, design, and testing.
• Lessons from customer support staff helping users in high-stress situations
• Increasing empathy for our users through Live Action Role Playing (LARP)
• Our takeaways, and how the experience impacted both our current design and our process for future work

• The Importance of UX Design in Design Education Research by Martina Moyne: Design processes are inherently open-ended and requires alternative methods to teach in comparison to methods used for teaching engineering science fundamentals resulting in a paucity of research aimed at aligning engineering design educational practice with learning theories. Our goal of this research is to contribute substantially to the understanding of design education processes and to develop a web-based educational framework and supporting tools for use in teaching design in undergraduate classes. What has proven to be key to achieving results in this research is the use of UX design within the project. The unprecedented approach of gathering data on design through sourcing and analyzing it in “Big Data” style has resulted in developing a unique, web-based, data-collection tool, specific to engineering and product design education. The tool will passively collect data on real-life design educational processes across various project-based design programs worldwide. In order to passively collect data, the tool must provide tangible benefits for the users and be designed to enable the users to interact with it correctly to obtain relevant data. This has proven to be rather challenging, however the agile implementation of UX design methods has driven the project forward, bringing us closer to an end-product that addresses the needs of instructors and researchers globally. Ultimately, UX design will play a significant role in the development of both research tools and education tools, impacting the next generation of designers. 

• Title TBD by Flavia Stoian: On March 2016, I arrived in Alexandra, the largest and most famous slum of Johannesburg, together with my peers in the MBA program. Our agenda was to meet a local entrepreneur - a metal worker - and help him grow his business by extending his reach into the digital space. We listened to him, speaking of his values and future ambitions, we toured his workshop and his neighborhood, looked at this products and asked questions about his supply chain and clients. Having only a few days to deliver a product, we sped through empathizing, defining, ideating and prototyping, while applying our academic learnings, with little to no time for testing. We presented him with a website, a branding strategy, and a business plan and wrapped up with a two-hour meeting to detail on how he should use our solutions. During this talk, we will examine what made our experience a successful failure on cross-cultural design and what I would do differently after a year in a Human-Computer Interaction program. Against the backdrop of my Southern African experience, we will go through a few ways of working with the needs of developing communities, and why fast and convincing solutions may often prove unsustainable when we lack familiarity with the lay of the land.

• Design with Dice: What Can Tabletop Games Teach Us About UX? by Mack Cameron: People spend hours and hours in games, often working at difficult tasks and mastering skills. We spend time and effort in games, but it rarely feels like work. Watching a person set up and teach a board game, I often ponder what drives a person to such a herculean task, and how a box of cardboard can reward their efforts. Let's talk about why games are unique, what differentiates "players" from "users", and how you can use the principles of game design & storytelling to engage your customer base.