Fav talks from UXNZ 2017

Water Cooler
#1

I’m back from last week’s venture down to UXNZ. Once again Optimal Workshop did an amazing job of putting together the event.

A few standout speakers for me were Kah Chan who talked about using words wisely in our work. Some of his thoughts here.

Mark Wyner did a highly entertaining (and thought provoking) talk on voice interfaces. Here are some of his thoughts on designing automotive interfaces (which is tangentially related to the talk he gave at the conference).

Lastly, Serena Chen’s talk on designing for security was really interesting.

I’m going to contact Kah and Serena to find out if they’d be keen to do an ATU with us.

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#2

+1 to Kah, Serena and Mark. In addition to his thinking, I really loved Mark Wyner’s stage presence too—strikingly unpretentious, warm and humorous. Great bloke to talk with.

Krispian Evert’s talk about Becoming a More Valuable UX Professional and the potential for us to help stakeholders in “making the right thing” had some great takeaways. She’s hoping to share some more thoughts as an article with us soon.

I’ve stolen some ideas from Lucy Denton’s talk about working with developers to seek user feedback.

It was great to hear from Jon Bell a little about how they handle social media abuse behind-the-scenes at Twitter. The thinking they seem to have done is beyond the level I expected. Maybe that makes me cynical. :wink:

And still untangling a bunch of thoughts after chatting with Michael Palmyre at the afterparty. His talk on “Are We Using Design to Make the World a Better Place?” was a step up on the same one he delivered before Mike Montiero’s closing keynote at UX Australia this year. Michael is hoping to share some thoughts on the UX Mastery blog soon too.

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#3

Another +1 for Kah and Mark. I missed Serena’s talk unfortunately. Mark was an absolute delight- he was so lovely to me! He came to say hi to me at my booth and my hands were covered in sticky afternoon tea-ness and he still shook my hand without blinking. He’s such a beautiful human - we should try and get him in for an ATU.

Jon was really nice too. He visited my booth early on day 1 and started putting UX Agony Aunt questions up on my wall because he wanted to see if that would encourage other people to put questions up. I was surprised at the work they’ve done too!

Michael’s talk made for a very strong finish and I missed his talk at UX Australia this year- it was right after mine and I was in some kind of post talk haze - so I was really glad to catch him again at UXNZ. It was an amazing talk!

I also really liked this talk by Helena Beckert and Andrea Bates about mental health and UX. I’m always interested in content that looks at the other sides of accessibility.

Looking forward to reading those blogs!

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#4

Good plan. I actually just locked Kah in for one!

1 Like
#5

Nice one!