SouthWiRED 2014

Discover the three most important usability (U/I) techniques you can use to create powerful test  hypothesis. This Deep Dive Session takes you beyond basic button and headline tests into site template and page design tests to create better user experiences, which in turn raise conversions.

Big box retailers are finding themselves behind the curve with bridging the gap between the digital world and the physical space. This presentation will take a look at the current state of retail and our approach to solving the challenges that plague their experiences.

A Fortune 50 Company's Insourcing Journey  As the number one auto insurer, State Farm has an obligation to its millions of policyholders to provide extraordinary customer service across multiple channels. The digital channel has experienced exponential growth in recent years, and State Farm decided it was time to own the digital experience rather than rely on various agencies to create that experience. Since outsourcing digital experience design had been the pattern for years, it was necessary to start from scratch. The digital effort had no resources, no tools, and not even a place to sit. This case study provides an overview of the journey, from what motivated the decision to selection of a location, and the vendor knowledge transfer. The journey taught many lessons about people, space, and operations that others may find useful when beginning a journey of their own.

Before the web became interactive, information architecture put UX designers on the map. All those "pages" of static content had to be bucketed, filed, and organized. Information Architecture was our main value-add on the web. Then the web started becoming interactive. People were transacting on the web.  Usability, user interfaces, and storyboarding became a new focus. Now projects are not broken down by sections of the IA, they are broken down by task flows (or user stories). But now, in a post-responsive-revolution world, we need to shift our focus again. We need a new paradigm to ensure that we create simple, efficient, and consistent modular systems of dynamic objects.

This is an introductory mini lecture and workshop designed to outline the basic tenets and approaches of user-centered design. This is intended for beginners.

This presentation explores the nature of our understanding of human behavior, the ways designers can influence their audience, provides a framework for understanding the key drivers of our decisions, how to turn behaviors into habits and practical tips on designing effective experiences to drive desired actions. 

True Detective was spoiled for me after the finale was inadvertently served in place of the opening episode. Listeners experienced completely different emotions when the lyrics “Would you hold my hand?” were sung in different songs. Context is vital and creating great UX takes context into account. We’ll take a look at what these stories mean to UX and how to use context in a way that creates great experiences for our users. 

Goal: We’ll talk about the importance of context in the UX design.

There are three types of context we’ll look at and examine stories from each to see how they affect our users and their experience. 
1.  Personal. I’m a diehard Atlanta sports fan and My ESPN profile helps me access information about my favorite teams quickly. However, their homepage also serves up an enormous amount of content, much of it about stories and teams that I don’t follow or care about. We’ll look at the purpose of pages and how we can use them to serve up deeply personal content when it’s possible and relevant to do so. 
2.  Placement. How upset would you be if you inadvertently watched the finale of True Detective before you watched any of the other episodes? A UX/UI issue caused that very thing. If Amazon required you to become a member before even letting you look at any products would you be a customer today? Some sites are doing that very thing. We’ll look at these issues of placement both within a page and within a site to discover their pitfalls and easy methods of addressing them. 
3. Prose. Platform  9 3/4 presented a conundrum for Harry Potter. He had no idea what would be on the other side and if it was worth him possibly running into a wall. That’s exactly what labels like “See More”, “Click Here”, and “Watch” do to users by providing no information about what they’re diving into. What would you do if a friend handed you a Black Pistol Fire album? What if they then told you that it’s a recommendation based on your Black Keys fandom? Clarity in our labeling can do so much to set up our users expectations and explain the reason for an interface element.  

This talk will go through these three types of context, provide stories and examples of each, and provide attendees with solutions on how to solve for these types of context within their UX. 

In this talk, attendees will be exposed to how a real Atlanta start-up came to be, by considering UX and business requirements first and letting the product narrative unfold, and shift (as needed), from there.

We’ve heard a lot about “Responsive” design, and we’ve developed wonderful technology that makes content consumable on any modern device. But what about addressing users’ needs before they even ask?  The best user experiences employ a strategic combination of content and context to make the most of a moment for consumers.  This discussion will highlight exemplary experiences as a platform for what may come next. 

Design and development are becoming increasingly tight-knit, and turning websites into unique viewing experiences increasingly requires a tighter integration between the design, UX and development team. If designers were more familiar with code, and if developers were more familiar with design, much of the  friction that arises from the knowledge gap can be eliminated. At Nurun we've taken many steps towards  decreasing this knowledge gap and increasing our efficiency, by slowly pushing our deliverables to be code-based and interactive, from style guides to full-fledged interactive prototypes. These deliverables not only help us cut down on deliverable time, but also increase fidelity and clarity, as clients can interact with our  deliverables and get a better sense of the final output earlier in the design process.

In this session, Andrew Heaton, author of Purposely Irregular and founder of Revinity Studios will discuss the future of branding as a UX specialty as experience is the new decider in brand preference.  Brand=Experience, which means we as UX professionals are poised to be the new brand leads, opening a  new world of possibility and interactions with a wider base of  "User."  This talk looks at the evolution of UX beyond the screen and into a state where all customer relations are digitally led.  This talk is based on an article I wrote for Johnny Holland in 2012: http://johnnyholland.org/2012/10/ux-the-new-brand-leaders/