UX talks

UX, or user experience, covers everything a person encounters when using a product: whether they can find what they need, understand what is happening, get their task done and feel good about it afterwards. It spans research, information architecture, interaction and interface design, content and the wider journey around a product.

For product and design teams, UX is where business goals meet human needs. A product that people find confusing or frustrating will struggle however strong its features, while a clear, considerate experience builds trust and keeps people coming back. Good UX work also helps teams decide what not to build, by grounding decisions in how people actually behave.

This hub brings together several sub-topics. User experience in the broad sense runs through talks such as Peter Merholz’s The Experience is the Product and Jared Spool’s UX Strategy Means Business. Interaction design covers how people and products respond to each other, from Benjamin De Cock on motion and playfulness to Sebastian Deterding on designing social interaction. Interface design deals with the screens themselves, as in Joe Leech’s Forms are boring and Trine Falbe on designing web interfaces for kids. Usability is about whether people can use a product effectively, a theme in Giles Colborne’s Illusions of Efficiency in UX, while accessibility is about making products work for everyone, touched on in Andrew Zusman’s Designing Cognitive Engagement For Everyone.

With more than 50 talks recorded between 2007 and 2020, this is the broadest collection in the section. Speakers include Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski, Aaron Walter, Paul Adams, Stephen Anderson, Amy Jo Kim, Karen McGrane, Erika Hall, Peter Morville and Christina Wodtke, at events such as Northern User Experience, the Design and Content Conference, IxDA, TED, UX Poland and beyond tellerrand. Many of the interface ideas discussed are documented as patterns in the UI-Patterns.com library.