UX design and usability conference
5-7 June 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Holiday Inn Sofia Hotel
June 5, 6th - Four interactive workshops
June 7th - Seminar: presentations and panel discussion
June 8-9th - An optional 2-day tour around Bulgaria
Registrations are open
WORKSHOPS, JUNE 5 AND 6
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JUNE 5, 14:00-18:00
Usable usability
Eric Reiss, Partner at FatDUX Group
Eric Reiss is CEO of the Copenhagen-based FatDUX Group, which designs interactive experiences, both online and off. The company maintains offices throughout Europe and North America.
If people cannot use something you make, then you have a serious problem. Usability is the science of ensuring that websites, applications, physical products and even offline services, do what they are supposed to do and that people can succeed with whatever tasks your “stuff” has been designed to help them with.
For me, usability builds on three E’s – Ease, Elegance, Empathy.
This half-day workshop introduces you to an alternative way to cut the usability cake – a method for evaluating and improving products and services that has proven successful with clients, business students, and seasoned usability professionals. And it includes a hands-on way for individuals within a large organization to carry out guerilla-style usability hacks that can be used to show the value of usability to the people in charge of the budgets.
Here’s a quick rundown of the topics we’ll be covering.
Ease of use – the product does what I want it to do. This deals with physical properties. Hence, the interactive elements should be:
- Functional (the buttons work, the speed is acceptable)
- Responsive (the application reacts to your input, the application provides cognitive feedback)
- Ergonomic (Fitt’s Law, keyboard shortcuts, field tabbing, etc.)
- Convenient (content and interactive objects are there where I need them and elements that are needed simultaneously are visible simultaneously)
- Foolproof (less risk of error through RAF – Remind, Alert, Force. Less reliance on instructions)
Elegance and clarity – the product does what I expect it to do. This deals with psychological properties. Hence, interactive elements should be:
- Visible (controls that can’t be seen don’t exist. Cut down the visual noise. Think feng shui)
- Understandable (clear and concise, no unexplained icons, colors and physical groupings for related functions and to improve scent)
- Logical (don’t make me think, build sensible flows)
- Consistent (always the same name for the same function, no reuse of icons for different functions, no behavioral changes as objects open or close)
- Predictable (functions and navigation always in same place, elements don’t suddenly change behavior)
Empathy – understanding and addressing the needs of the users. After all, you can’t practice user-centered or user-driven design if you don’t care about these folks.
Register for this workshop -
JUNE 6, 09:00-13:00
Seductive Interaction Design
Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas.
He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive Interaction Design, which answers the question: "How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?” Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops and training to help organizations manage creative teams, create interactive visualizations, and design better customer experiences.
As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.
In this fun-filled, interactive workshop, Stephen P. Anderson will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.
Using the Mental Notes card deck, participants will start with an application that is perfectly “usable,” and take it to the next level by exploring how things like feedback loops curiosity and social proof could make a site more seductive.
Who is this workshop for?
Designers, developers, marketers and product managers– anyone involved with the design of website and applications. The focus of this workshop is on how to design for behaviors, which is one thing diverse product teams can align around!
What will you learn?
By the e nd of this workshop you will:- Discover practical ways to apply ideas from psychology to interaction design
- Learn 15 principles from psychology (such as Curiosity, Set Completion and Sequencing)
- Understand why making things usable isn’t enough
- Understand how our design decisions influence behavior
- Be able translate business goals directly into behavioral goals (allowing us to measure UX decisions)
- Learn how even business apps could benefit from a little playfulness
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JUNE 6, 14:00-18:00
People & Process
Birgit is a freelance Creative Director UX.
She is enthusiastic about creating harmony between functionality and aesthetics, finding the perfect balance between business and user goals. During her 16 years of professional experience in the US & Europe, Birgit used her strong interpersonal skills and proven leadership ability to help cross-functional and cross-cultural teams in creating a respectful and enjoyable team environments.
Birgit supports the UX community by being IxDA's Regional Coordinator for Europe & Africa, the founder & local leader of the IxDA Hamburg chapter, and a founding team member for the inaugural interaction design awards as the Co-Chair Outreach EU 2012. She presented at national and international conferences, and taught many workshops on UX and communication topics.
Peter Boersma is Interaction Design Director and Process Design Consultant.
He has over 15 years of experience with designing for complex, interactive, digital systems. He can perform user research and usability evaluations, will identify business opportunities based on stakeholder interviews and competitive research, develops appropriate high-level concepts, and documents the resulting designs for user interfaces. At most of his former employers, he made himself responsible for documenting the design processes, optimizing and promoting them, both inside and outside the organization. Peter has given presentations and taught workshops at many national and international User Experience conferences, some of which he helped organize. Since 2001, he is the host of the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hours.
People in the field of User Experience are taught that empathy for the end-users is the holy grail. We believe that, by studying the way your fellow project team members work, what their needs are and what they deliver, you can develop another type of empathy, one that may prove to be more important for business success and fosters a pleasant work environment.
In the first half of this workshop, we want to walk you through the design process and the people you will meet on the way, mostly from outside of your design team's environment. We will show how your skills and contributions allow you to influence their work and, indirectly, the resulting end-user experience. Peter will explain that documenting your organization's design process allows you to sell your work better, to train new team members easier, to maintain consistency of vocabulary within your team, and to measure and improve your team’s effectiveness. Activities in this part will include sketching org charts and design process diagrams to identify the relevant people, as well as specifying deliverables and other input that will help the organization spot, design, and build successful user experiences.
In the second half, we will focus on how to successfully communicate your contributions to different stakeholders during the design process. We will explain the concept of communication styles, show how to identify your own style and that of co-workers. We will teach you how to adapt your own style to others to ensure you will be heard during the process and help you to overcome conflicts. Activities in this part will include working on a typical communication problem arising in everyday work life, finding a solution to overcome the challenge and gaining a common ground; a self evaluation exercise; applying the communication styles on the earlier introduced problem and finding more effective ways to solve this (and other) challenges.
We believe that paying attention to these two aspects, process and people, will help you develop that other kind of empathy, the kind that makes you a better participant in the process, helps you communicate your designs better, while enjoying your work more.
Who is this workshop for?
User Experience designers and people in the roles around the design process, from user researchers, via project managers and front-end developers to design department managers.
The focus of this workshop is on learning how to determine the best design process for your team and the importance of communication that is needed to successfully work within a team environment.
What will you learn?
- Understand the roles involved in the design process
- Document your work process
- Define your team's deliverables
- Communicate your process
- Learn about communication style theories
- Understand your own communication style and that of co-workers
- Learn methods to flex your style to others
- Become aware of - and overcome - communication pain-points in the design process
All seats are sold
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JUNE 5, 09:00-13:00
Responsive IA
Martin Belam, Founder of Emblem - user experience design, information architecture and training services
Martin Belam is the founder of Emblem, a digital consultancy offering user experience design, information architecture and training services. He has spent over a decade building digital and mobile products for brands like the Guardian, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC, and now works with clients in the publishing, media, arts, heritage and culture sectors. He writes about UX, journalism and digital media for The Guardian and on his blog currybet.net"Responsive design" and "mobile first" are the digital buzz phrases of the moment. Both suggest that you should show less content on devices with smaller screens – but how do you decide what to display, and what to hide?
During the workshop you'll learn how to apply the principles of information architecture to responsive design by uniting content, context, and user to underpin a satisfying and successful user experience.
This course is aimed at people who want to better understand making products that are "mobile first" or "responsive", based on evidence of how users interact with the increasing range of small-screen devices available to them. The workshop includes hands-on exercises, and real-world examples from projects Martin has delivered.
All seats are sold
SEMINAR, JUNE 7
JUNE 7
Four ways the Bulgarian UX community can turn historic adversity into business advantage
Eric Reiss, Partner at FatDUX Group
Bulgaria has always found herself at historic crossroads - for centuries, caught between the Romans and the Byzantines, the Russians and the Ottomans. Yet, from Paissii to Levsky to Botev to Vazov and Yovkov, intellectual creativity has always helped Bulgaria surmount adversity and maintain both a unique perspective and build national identity. Today, Bulgaria is poised to show the world how new technologies can be used in innovative and beneficial ways - if she can avoid the mistakes that are being made throughout Western Europe and North America. I'd like to share four observations that I hope will make your country and your community stronger and more successful by turning historic adversity into a business advantage.
Register for the seminar
JUNE 7
Communicating in Style
Birgit is a freelance Creative Director UX.
Birgit supports the UX community by being IxDA's Regional Coordinator for Europe & Africa, the founder & local leader of the IxDA Hamburg chapter, and a founding team member for the inaugural interaction design awards as the Co-Chair Outreach EU 2012. She presented at national and international conferences, and taught many workshops on UX and communication topics.
In this presentation, Birgit introduces the topic of communication styles, while putting it into context of our profession. She will show how you can identify our own style and that of others and how that helps to be heard by various stakeholders during the process. She will explain the different communication and behavioural needs, and why you need to be able to flex our own style to that of others: this helps you to avoid conflicts, it increases your impact on projects, and it will also contribute to a prosperous work environment.
Register for the seminar
JUNE 7
Making the same mistakes twice
Martin Belam, Founder of Emblem - user experience design, information architecture and training services
Throughout our careers in UX, we are faced with the same sets of problems again and again. Convincing businesses that they should involve user research in product design, assembling deliverables and presenting them to stakeholders, and working with technical teams to deliver what we hope will be fantastic products. How do we stop ourselves falling into patterns of behaviour that lead us to making the same mistakes twice? Or three times? Or four times? In this talk, full of examples of projects he has worked on for organisations like the BBC, the Guardian and Sony, Martin Belam will explore how, as designers, we can avoid making the same mistakes twice.
Register for the seminar
JUNE 7
Stop Doing What You're Told!
Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas.
It's so easy to solve the wrong problems. Good design is about relentlessly questioning assumptions and reframing the problem to be solved. We know this, and yet, HOW to actually go about reframing a problem is something missing from many of our conversations. In this session, Stephen P. Anderson will share a dozen or more tips that have helped him cut through the noise of requests and requirements, to focus on the real problem(s) to be solved. Specifically, you'll pick up ways to see a problem from different perspectives, ways to ask why, how to draw upon seemingly unrelated experiences, how to separate real from perceived constraints, and most importantly, ways to keep yourself in check, so as not to solve the wrong problem (or if you do, you do so intentionally, for a strategic purpose!). Whether you're designing strategies or screens, you're sure to pick up a few new mental hacks that you'll no doubt use on a daily basis.
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JUNE 7
Design thinking vs user-centered design
Ina Ivanova is an inspiration seeker who believes you have to love what you do.
Dimiter Simov (Jimmy) believes that IT can be usable.
Design thinking brings together methods from engineering and design with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world. User-centered design is a process for designing interactive systems that balances the needs of users with the needs of the business. Design thinking is about inspiration and ideation in a non-conventional environment that leads to innovation.
It focuses on:
- Human values (desirability & usability): create something that fits your users’ needs;
- Technology (feasibility): otherwise it is just science fiction;
- Business (viability): we want to earn money with it.
User-centered design is about shaping the product around user abilities, needs, desires, and skills, instead of forcing users to adapt to the product by changing their behavior.
It focuses on:
- Explicit understanding of users,
- Involving users in design and development,
- Driving design by user-centered evaluation,
- Iterative process,
- Holistic view of the user experience,
- Multidisciplinary design team.
Can design thinking lead us to a user-centered result? Ina and Jimmy will try to show how design thinking fits into the overall concept of user-centered design.
Register for the seminar
JUNE 7
A 3 course meal for interaction designers
The VMware user experience team
User experience, user-centric design, usability, intuitiveness ...
We all know these buzz words and they sound so "familiar-but-distant" when it comes to building real products.
We have plenty of data, but often struggle to understand what our users value and how to fit the myriad of habits and behavior without creating a mess.
We are so smart and creative, but we often get lost in the mix of bright ideas constantly popping up.
We find ourselves spending all that time perfecting our designs just to hear "I think it is better...", "why didn't you..." or "this might not work for me".
We wish there was a more systematic way to build products ... Don't we?
The VMware user experience team would like to present a practical iterative approach to be used by interaction designers and together we will evolve a rough idea into a product that actually suits user needs. We will show you what interaction designers do, how they do it and what we've learned along the way.
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EVENT VENUE, HOTEL HOLIDAY INN SOFIA
Accommodation for participants:
- Single: €70 per night and upon availability (Breakfast included)
- Double: €70 per night and upon availability (Breakfast included)
- Accommodation: reservation info
CULTURAL TOUR AROUND BULGARIA, 8 & 9 JUNE
The hidden treasures of Rodopi Mountains, 2 days/ 1 night
- Mystic sanctuaries: Bachkovo monastery founded in 1083 and the thracian sanctuary Belintash
- Natural phenomena: sacred spring Aiazmo and the rock phenomenon Chudnite Mostove (the Wonderful Bridges)
- Cultural tour at Ancient town of Plovdiv: Amphitheatre, the Ethnographic Museum, art galleries, beautifully restored Baroque houses
Kosovo Houses
REGISTRATION
SCHEDULE, 5th JUNE 2013, INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS
- 8:30 - 9:00
Registration
- 9:00 - 13:00
Responsive IA (Vitosha)
Martin Belam
- 13:00 - 14:00
Lunch
- 14:00 - 18:00
Usable usability (Vitosha)
Eric Reiss
SCHEDULE, 6th JUNE 2013, INTERACTIVE TRAININGS
- 8:30 - 9:00
Registration
- 9:00 - 13:00
Seductive Interaction Design (Vitosha)
Stephen Anderson
- 13:00 - 14:00
Lunch
- 14:00 - 18:00
People & Process (Vitosha)
Birgit Geiberger & Peter Boersma
SCHEDULE, 7th JUNE 2013, SEMINAR (Vitosha)
- 8:30 - 9:00
Registration
- 9:00 - 9:30
Opening
- 9:30 - 10:00
Four ways the Bulgarian UX community can turn historic adversity into business advantage
Eric Reiss
- 10:30 - 11:30
A 3 course meal for interaction designers
Konstantin Ivanov, George Daloukov, VMware
- 11:30 - 12:00
Coffee break
- 12:00 - 13:00
Communicating in Style
Birgit Geiberger
- 13:00 - 14:00
Lunch
- 14:00 - 15:00
Design thinking vs user-centered design
Ina Ivanova & Dimiter Simov
- 15:00 - 16:00
Making the same mistakes twice
Martin Belam
- 16:00 - 16:30
Coffee break
- 16:30 - 17:30
Stop Doing What You're Told!
Stephen Anderson
SCHEDULE, 8th и 9th JUNE 2013, Cultural tour: The hidden treasures of Rodopi Mountains
- 9:00
Departure on June 8 at the Holiday inn Lobby
- 19:00
Arrival on June 9 at the Holiday inn Lobby
CONTACT US
This event is organized by Lucrat. If you would like to participate or to become a partner/sponsor contact:
Angelina Ivancheva+359 886 455 623 angelina@lucrat.net
Irina Gerdjikova+359 885 909 357 irina@lucrat.net
PARTNERS
