The rich program made it difficult for us to pick out some talks. First of all it is to mention that the congress was focused on UX rather than usability, so accordingly most of this report will be about UX contents. Subsequently you will find a summary of the Speakers and their topics we watched:
Stefan Bauer \ Innovation School Director, Talent Garden Austria
» Eight learnings from institutionalizing UX in an organization from scratch «
Stefan Bauer talked about how he supported BAWAG P.S.K. during their modernization of the bawag online banking app. In the end he pointed out 13 learnings for institutionalizing UX in an organization. The conclusion as far as we can see is to appoint UX Designers as informal key players as well as in lead positions to empower UX and establish UX processes through the whole organization.
Joe Lanzisero \ Former Disney Creative Senior Vice President, Lanzisero
Joe Lanzisero talked about projects he did for The Walt Disney Company. He presented a case about user research on miniature golf at Disney resorts to make the design of the challenges exciting and masterable particularly for Children.
Astrid Weiss \ senior scientist, TU Vienna
» Creating meaningful service robots: What we have learned from first-wave social robots «
Astrid Weiss talked about service robots, especially about a noticeable project where a robot has had to find its way through the city only by asking and interacting with random passersby. Their finding was that after some initial wow-effect you only hold somebody’s interest if the robots get useful. Due to this they improved Hobbit, a service robot specially for older people.
Bruce Horn \ ex-Principal Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Corp.
Bruce Horn had a very sophisticated talk about artificial intelligence. In his holistic view he sees the next big steps not in deep learning but in memory-based learning. The advantage of this approach is that memory-based learning handles dynamic information without consuming a lot of processing power and storage capacity. His prediction was that in the future systems will mostly learn from environment and act on their own.
Vandhana Bhaskaran \ Head of Technology Experience, Emirates Group
» Creating a movement with Design: a practical guide from a design leader «
Vandhana Bhaskaran talked about 5 key principles for creating movement with Design.
- Start with a clear mission
- Create momentum through outcomes
- Shared understanding of individual goals
- Building champions of change
- Continuous enablement tools, processes and methods
A nice side issue was to see a short clip from Derek Sivers TED talk “How to make a movement”
Leland Hepler \ UX/UI Design, Boston Dynamics
» UX for Up Close and Personal Robots «
Everybody already knows the doggish robots from boston dynamics. Leland Hepler talked about how to create clear and meaningful robot experiences for users with these advanced systems.