Missed Connections

Subtitled “A look at history, bureaucracy, ecosystems, and execution”, this talk by Josh Payton, who has worked at Huge, Amazon, Yahoo, The Washington Post and Microsoft, was given at UX Poland in 2015.

The digital revolution is only about 40 years old, but the landscape keeps getting more sophisticated, nuanced, personal and complex. With the rapid pace of innovation, attention goes to the newest products on the market, and what is often overlooked is how a digital ecosystem feels to a single user moving through it. Digital products don’t stand alone: they are experienced sequentially, simultaneously or as extensions of one another. Best-of-breed businesses offer seamless digital worlds, but there are far more examples of flawed or broken systems.

Payton explores our changing relationship with digital products and why broken ecosystems exist, from the speed of progress in general to how team structures affect products as they evolve. In a world of digital natives, startups and older companies working through digital transformation, he argues it is more important than ever to create delightful, extensible products built to scale and endure.