Things I’ve been saying for a long time: I need to blog more. I haven’t been very good at achieving that.

So, recently I was at UX Design Day – a one-day conference focused on UX and design. It’s the only conference of it’s kind in NZ, and it started here in Dunedin. Working remotely and not really part of the design community, I don’t often get a chance to sit down and talk UX/design in-person with people. This year the conference was back in Dunedin, so I jumped at the chance to attend.

I was impressed by the diverse turnout this year. Interaction design, visual design, content strategy, marketing, education, user research, and software development were all represented. I had tried to drum up support from the local developer community to attend, and that seemed to have worked well. Too often do I see developers ignoring UX/design issues – either being very dismissive, or claiming it’s another person’s job; so this felt like a good sign.

Alone those lines, one of the things that stuck with me was the talk around not having UX teams separate from everything else. The largest example talked about was UX and content strategy, but I think it applies equally to software development teams too. Having these two groups work closely together, not segregated, helps bring so much context to both teams.

The other important take-away for me was the importance of not accepting crap. That is, experiences or systems that are, intentionally or not, lacking in design forethought and therefore lead to an unnecessarily difficult experiences, or a design that by default leads to harm. The primary concrete example here was physical safety in various workplaces, where people were put at needless risk due to the lack of safety by default design. I think this is a very relevant point for those of us building software, given that we so often experience design in software that feels broken, but too often don’t do anything constructive to help fix it.

On the whole, I enjoyed the conference. However, since the talks covered such a wide corpus, I feel it didn’t provide enough time for any one area. Diversity is an asset, but I would have liked time for more in-depth explorations of topics.

http://theunfocused.net/2014/12/12/ux-deisgn-day-dunedin-2014/