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Stepping into the streets of London, I found myself immediately immersed in the eccentric, rapidly evolving world of UX (User Experience). Join me on this thrilling journey as we unravel the future trajectory of UX, why it is important and many other lessons that transcend design which anyone can learn from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For you video enjoyers, I have created 2 videos (one shorter and one longer) exploring the UX Live Experience through our perspective! I highly, highly recommend going through them to really get deeper into the insights and all the learning that we achieved, this blog only covers a few highlights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Video 1 (19 minutes) <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Video 2 (7 minutes)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Before heading off to London, I truly didn\u2019t know what to expect. What will the talks be like? What will the people be like? Will I learn things I can actually apply? Will the food be good? (spoiler alert: yes it was!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n With all of this in mind, I grabbed all of my equipment and headed off to the York train station, eager to arrive in London and plunge myself into a whirlwind of ideas, diverse perspectives, and the contagious energy of a city that simply breathes innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sitting at the heart of Kensington, our hotel was like paradise; flamboyant and vibrant, it really put us in the right mindset for the upcoming days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, <\/p>\n\n\n\n Shall we crack on with the exciting stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so the fun begins. We have a bit of difficulty finding the venue as it\u2019s tucked away, but we finally arrive at 9:15am, grab a few snacks and have a little chat with people around us as we wait for the first talks to begin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPlease enter the hall\u201d we hear shouted across the room, and with anticipation bubbling, we make our way inside, ready to finally get learning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So\u2026 what were the talks like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Really fascinating!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Surprisingly to me, a lot of the talks today were more about you as an individual, how you work, how you manage your team and other important skills. One interesting technique is something called an \u201cOKR\u201d meaning Objectives, Key Results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Source: Liz Llewellyn-Maxwell)<\/p>\n\n\n\n What this does is essentially clearly define an objective, and set a clear set of results you need to achieve in order to reach this objective. It seems simple on the surface, because it is! And that\u2019s the beauty of it, why would we overcomplicate our aims when we can clearly set them out in a concise and efficient manner. OKRs allow us to keep objectives:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d highly recommend this article for further reading<\/a> into OKRs and how it can help any team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another fascinating concept I learnt about, was the concept of Psychological Safety. This can essentially be boiled down to having an open and safe environment where team members can take risks, speak up without any worry of being punished or humiliated for their ideas. According to a Harvard study<\/a>, Psychological safety is the single most important factor when it comes to productivity within a team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But where\u2019s all the design talk? You may be asking, and don\u2019t worry there\u2019s plenty of that coming up. But first I want to go over fundamentally, what is UX?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n UX is an ever-evolving term as we learn more about later, but in its current state it can be defined as \u201cAn area specialised in understanding the needs, behaviours, and preferences of users to inform the design and improvements of services or systems. Ultimately, we want end-users to have a positive and effective experience when interacting with a product or a service\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With this in mind, I\u2019d love to wrap up Day 2 with some really nice quotes from some talks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlways design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.\u201d – Eliel Saarinen<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need to be a novelist to talk, You don\u2019t need to be an artist to be visual.\u201d – Dan Roam<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDon\u2019t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don\u2019t want to look<\/strong> like your heroes, you want to see<\/strong> like your heroes.\u201d – Austin Kleon<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think these three quotes really encapsulate the essence of what makes great design and I will definitely incorporate these mindsets into my own work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reflecting back on yesterday, there were so many inspiring and thought provoking talks to digest which really challenged a lot of my personal views. Another highlight was definitely the networking opportunities as this allowed me to get actual insight into the daily lives of other UX Researchers, Designers, Product Managers and everything in between across different sectors. I found it really fascinating learning about the differences between a commercial environment and that of higher education for example, what tools are industry standard, what are the best practices and so many more great chats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Also got to meet a cute(?) \u201cdog\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Day 3 is all about the future, where is this industry heading? What will our job titles even be called? Should we be scared of AI? Should we embrace it? What are others doing that will revolutionise this world? Yep\u2026 It\u2019s quite an action packed day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where do I even begin? I guess I can start with a fun fact for you all:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chat GPT achieved 100 million active users within just two months. Just two months. To put that in perspective, It took Instagram 2.5 years, Spotify 4.7 years and it took Uber nearly 6 years! <\/p>\n\n\n\n So it\u2019s no surprise that AI is becoming such a point of interest within every industry and how we can utilise its capabilities. There is of course a caveat to this with lots of misinformation going around and promised impossibilities with the current state of the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An interesting insight I gathered from one speaker, is the idea of not designing for AI but designing for Human Centred design. Here\u2019s a screenshot showing some ideas related around that: I really like the idea of identifying and recovering from mistakes AI makes, as it\u2019s not a superhero but a model built by humans based on human gathered data. That\u2019s essential to keep in mind, AI is only as good as the data we feed into it, it can\u2019t do miracles (even though it does appear to do so a lot of the time!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n One final topic on AI and UX is how this shapes the role of UX. There was a really fascinating talk by Roger Rohatgi (VP and Global head of Design at BP) about a new concept called \u201cAX\u201d or Artificial Experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This centres around solving problems and creating useful intuitive, engaging experiences that AI thinks are the best for humans. Throughout the talks today, ethical considerations were a hot topic which we could talk hours about. It was really interesting seeing both sides of the argument, and how we can build trust and encourage the development of this technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And with all of that, we come to a wrap. There is so much more I could talk about, especially with some interesting panel talks, more niche topics and so much more. I\u2019ve highlighted just a few topics here to get the ball rolling, but I do encourage you to check out the videos to really get the UX Live experience that we enjoyed and a plethora of things I couldn\u2019t have fit into this post!<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what will you apply to your daily work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Riko Puusepp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stepping into the streets of London, I found myself immediately immersed in the eccentric, rapidly evolving world of UX (User Experience). Join me on this thrilling journey as we unravel the future trajectory of UX, why it is important and many other lessons that transcend design which anyone can learn from. For you video enjoyers, … Continue reading Our two days at the UX Live Conference in London<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,7,4],"tags":[13,12,8,11],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-placements","category-research","category-ux","tag-londdon","tag-london","tag-ux","tag-uxlive"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"custom_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1706100566:236"],"_last_editor_used_jetpack":["block-editor"],"_edit_last":["236"],"footnotes":[""]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/digital-services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Day 1 – The Journey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Day 2 – Mastering UX: Skills and techniques for success<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Day 3 – Designing for tomorrow: Exploring the future of UX design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Conclusions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n