UX-Mas Topic Brainstorm Thread

[treyroady]

Howdy, ya’ll.

I know people are studiously getting ready for UX-mas this year and I wanted to start a thread for anyone who wanted to discuss what they want to cover.

I posted this up in the Slack but got little play out of it, so I’m asking here.

I’ve got two different topic areas I’m considering. I was wondering what everyone would be most interested in me covering:

• Social Capitalism: I’ve done some workshop work and have been discussing potential projects over how to use our professional skills to create products and services that fill a societal need.

• Human Decision Making and Automaticity: I’ve got a lot of academic training on decision making and human automaticity. I could give a basic primer over how we approach these sorts of challenges from our research perspective with the goal of translating it for good application elsewhere.

[dougcollins]

Personally, I’m looking to make something a bit more accessible and fun.

I have a hip pocket full of business fails caused by poor UX design, either physical or online, and was contemplating putting together something on the five biggest UX disasters.

I’d also recently read an article about 14 Uncomfortable Habits That Will Make You a Better UX Designer. While I’m not in a position to try all 14 (#2 suggests quitting your job with nothing else lined up, which isn’t really practical with a family that depends on me), I had also considered putting together something where I do one each day over a 2-week stretch and discussing the results.

[treyroady]

The human guinea pig component of it sounds quite interesting. It lets you build a narrative. You can even make it a sort of graphical roadmap of your experience.

[BraydnDegraw]

Human Decision Making and Automaticity gets my vote.

For clarification, it sounds like a study on what’s already largely assumed when users interact with certain spheres of interaction - so that they automatically process through them (I agree to Terms and Conditions anyone?). Am I on the right track?

[treyroady]

It has something to do with that. It’s mainly along the lines of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”. The idea is that we use more automatic behaviors on our day-to-day tasks and try to save energy from having to think very carefully.

In that vein, agreeing to Terms & Conditions rather than detailed reading them, and the point that we do it before we even really consider reading them anymore, is especially accurate.

[AshleaMcKay]

I’m writing a short story for mine that explores how it actually feels to experience the holiday season when you’re autistic (like me!). It’s about sharing that different perspective and building a little more understanding around what life with an invisible permanent lifelong disability looks like for me. I didn’t find out until I was nearly 30 so there’s years and years of experiences for me to draw on where I was forced to experience situations that weren’t just a little uncomfortable- they actually completely trashed my wellbeing. I’m loading it up with humour and planning a little twist at the end that I’m going to let you read for yourselves when it comes out