UX Week Day 4, 8/26

How Our Social Circles Influence What We Do, Where We Go, and How We Decide | Paul Adams
Facebook ad dude talks about how our personal networks are constructed and who are the people that get you to make purchasing decisions (hint: it’s not Roger Federer).

Intentional Environments: Designing a Culture of Co-creation | Teresa Brazen & Kate Rutter
Aligning your environment with intent makes everyone more productive. It’s all about principles and practices people.

UX as Product Strategy: Differentiation in a Crowded Market | Adam Goldstein
The founder of Hipmunk talks about how he found a niche in a crowded market by avoiding the mistakes of his more entrenched competition. Best line: “Good UX is an unfair advantage.”

Emerging Technologies in UX: Promise to Practice | Darren David
Interested in making some multi-touch or light projection installations? Then this is your guy.

Making Software or Making A Movie? | Murat Konar
Pixar software UX lead explains how tying the launch of a new movie to the launch of their custom animation software has the surprising effect of focusing the mind.

Playful Models for Understanding | Ben Cerveny
Listen, I’m not gonna lie and tell you that I understood everything that the founder of Bloom.io talked about. But I will say that it sounded pretty damn smart.

Effective Creative Leadership | Sarah B. Nelson
Wonderful session about learning to know yourself, your team and how to make everyone more effective and happy.

Lessons from a UX Driven Startup | Alexa Andrzejewski
Founder of Foodspotting passes along some tips and insights for those looking to make the transition from UX pro to startup CEO.

Whoa, Google Has Designers! | Jon Wiley
Awesome talk from the design lead on Google search that shines a light on the latest (and possibly upcoming) Google platform redesign.

Tomorrowland is Today | Rob Maigret
How is Disney so successful in the social media space? They tell great stories, spread great content and don’t beat people over the head with sales-speak.

Critical Thinking for UX Designers (or Anyone) | Russ Unger and Stephen Anderson

Thinking critically requires little more than the willingness to have fun while thinking. Sure sometimes thinking is serious business but that doesn’t mean that the process has to be rote. Change the parameters. Turn thinking on its head. Look at problems from a different angle. If you really want to develop some groundbreaking ideas you had better stop thinking in the same old ways. Fortunately there are some simple methods that anyone can use to expand the scope of their creative and critical thought processes. And interestingly enough most of these tools require nothing more than changing everything about the way in which you currently flex your creative muscles. It’s almost too easy…

Better Meetings By Design | Kevin Hoffman

Meetings suck. Period. The end.

But they don’t have to. All it takes is a little bit of imagination and the ability to run traditional meeting procedures through the garbage disposal. Meetings are not about getting the maximum number of people in a room for the maximum amount of time until they have all been beaten into submission and agree to anything you put before them. No, meetings should be productive and efficient collaboration sessions that everyone walks out of feeling as though progress has been made. Crazy, huh?

Gamestorming Your Workplace (A.K.A., How to Design Using Words AND Pictures) | Sunni Brown

Do your meetings suck? Well, really, whose don’t? Unless you practice Gamestorming of course. What’s gamestorming you ask? Great question. It is the act of leveraging gaming mechanics to foster collaboration and creativity within the construct of a business meeting. Or to put it another way: start having fun at your meetings and everyone will be more productive and happier. I know what you’re saying: “Pshaw! Happy at meetings? Never.” But seriously, I’m for the realz.

Think about the things that are not effective about meetings: lack of structure, marginal participation, distractions, inefficiency, lack of positive outcome. Now think about the games you like to play. Odds are almost none of those things that make some meetings so pointless ever infect your game playing, for one very simple reason: games are fun and people want to engage with them. In that case, what can we learn from and borrow from the realm of play and gaming to make meetings suck just a little bit less?

One of the most important aspects of gamestorming is the highly visual nature of it’s mechanics. Visual thinking allows us to expand the collaboration toolset that most people use in meetings beyond mere words. Sure you have to talk in any meeting, but when you put pen to paper and ideate in shape and form and diagram, you expand the available vocabulary many times over and open up the potential avenues of exploration exponentially.

So the next time someone asks you to schedule a meeting, tell them you’d rather arrange a gamestorming session instead…

Welcome | Jesse James Garrett
We are going to the Academy of Sciences on Thursday to see a dinosaur burlesque show. I can’t wait.

Keynote | Jaron Lanier
A tour de force of user experience from the perspective of the user interface of avatars to the business side of technology. We are all not rich and happy because technology has not been implemented to the equivalent of its potential.

When Left Meets Right | Todd Walthall
Insurance agency executive talks about how UX is changing his business and the expectations of his customers.

Designing People-powered Products | Chad Jennings
As we shift from mass production to mass customization to people powered products to – eventually – people powered business, our stories are going to increasingly become our stock in trade.

The Computer as Extended Phenotype | Steven Pemberton
Evolutionary biology and technology intersect at the human level. Ideas are our children and allow us to survive beyond this earthly coil.

HunchWorks: Applying Human-centric -Design to Complex Global Problems | Chris van der Walt & P.J. Onori
How can design fix the world? By connecting the right people at the right time to minimize risk and maximize response time.

Stop Watching and Start Experiencing: Web Enabled TV | R. Brian Stone
The UX of TV is subpar because it has essentially been ignored by UX designers. For an artifact as important to lives of most people as the TV, it is time that we updated it and used it as a platform for creation, not just consumption.

Educating the Next Generation of Interaction Designers | Kristian Simsarian
Most contemporary UX designers have found their way into the profession accidentally. The good news is that there are now schools and students going native in the interaction design space. The future of UX looks bright.

Video as User Experience | Adam Lisagor
When creating a linear interpretation of a product story there are a whole host of tricks that one can use to make the tale more compelling. Plus he talked about “skeuomorphism”, which is awesome.

Creating Engagement on Twitter | Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett
How do you increase registration rates in the Twitter sign up process? Make it longer. Treating content strategy as the basis for your engagement plans.

Keynote | Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky
An intellectual sampling of a wide range of ideas ranging from Antarctic escapism, snowflakes as metaphors for memory, the ethics of music sampling and a whole host of interconnected philosophies and experiences.