MUXL Conference 2019

The road to integrating augmented reality and artificial intelligence on mobile has been far from easy, despite the popularity and rise of both technologies. Marco will explore the challenges and opportunities of creating applications that combine AR and AI, whilst always having the user in mind.

Josh will share best practices and approaches to designing for Mixed Reality, learned during his work with Magic Leap.  As a new medium, he will reveal key considerations and insights from recent case studies. His talk will focus on the accessibility of this new technology and how MR can have a real impact for many users.

There will also be opportunities for hands-on demos with Magic Leap throughout the conference.

More than 10 years ago, as audiences bought their first smartphones, online publishers were incentivised to make their desktop website more mobile friendly. In the meantime, their strategies shifted to a mobile-first approach.

With the upcoming launch of the open WebXR standard, websites featuring VR and AR capabilities will be available on desktop, mobile but also in Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). This impending device shift to wearables brings new challenges in UI/UX design as we move from 2D or flat experiences to experiences in 360° or 3D, in the browser.

In this session, LucidWeb’s UI/UX lead, Eliana Meija, will discuss two recent WebVR experiences the company produced. SENS VR is a co-production between Arte France and Red Corner. It is a virtual reality game inspired by a graphic novel that was presented at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival where it received rave reviews. Kuba 360° is an interactive travel story which takes place in Cuba and was developed in collaboration with the Berlin-based VR studio Into.VR. LucidWeb brought both experiences to the browser and they are now one click away for everyone who has access to a desktop, smartphone, or a VR headset.

During this talk Quirine and Andrea will cover how a business can benefit from creating a conversational assistant tailored to their brand, personalized to their users, and made available across a broad range of canvases and devices. They will cover their design process; from the ideation to the delivery of conversational design. Also, bringing along case studies and learnings from their Enterprise customers at Microsoft.

As a leader in ridesharing, Uber has built a platform that powers mobility in more than 700 cities around the world. As Uber’s product suite has diversified into food, freight, and new mobility systems like bikes and scooters, so too have the people and communities riding and driving with Uber around the world. This presentation will introduce UX research and design case studies that explore:

– Mobility platforms for transportation in the 21st century: ridesharing’s past, present and future

– UX research and the built environment: contributing to shifting urban landscapes by incorporating human geographies

– Universal access that recognizes uneven development: designing a platform to serve local needs

In 2016, India overtook the US in internet users. With the next billion users coming online for the first time in emerging markets, PMs, Engineers, and Designers are tackling new constraints and opportunities to meet the needs of mobile-only users. Cost, connectivity, relevance, and literacy are key themes.

In her talk, Rachel will speak about designing for these users on Google Chrome, and will tell the story of Google Go: a startup Internet App within the company, launched specifically for these users.

She’ll discuss the unique constraints users in these markets face, and share the compelling solutions they have catalyzed within Chrome, Google Go, and other startup products within the company.

Working in cross-functional product teams is not without challenges. If we believe that good product teams dream in years, plan in months, discover weekly and release daily,  it becomes obvious that we need to work in a cross-functional way across all levels. So let’s have a look at some of these challenges and discuss ways to mitigate them.

As we weave computers into the fabric of our environment and being; we must create inclusive, delightful and trustworthy solutions that dissolve effortlessly into our systems and our everyday life, where technology works alongside us bridging the gap between our abilities and what we want to achieve. So that everyone is included in moving forwards, through the inevitable together.

Umesh will share the story behind Wayfindr which set out to do just that and how they designed and validated the worlds first open standard for audio navigation to assist blind and vision-impaired people to navigate the world independently. Umesh will talk about the tools, techniques and methodologies they used and briefly touching on themes such as AR (Augmented Reality), AI (Assistive Intelligence) and Inclusive smart cities.

While many organisations are investing in data and design capabilities, only those that tightly weave these disciplines together will unlock their full benefits. Data is often prized for its indifference to an organisation and can lead to a powerful relationship when put into the hands of decision makers.

With recent advances in AI and other analytics, this new technology is increasing human intelligence where new decision making capabilities can be made i.e. why is this happening and should we explore these ideas with AI? Separately, design thinking is spreading like wildfire across industries with born-digital companies (Apple and Google) demonstrating how qualitative insights can be harnessed in a creative way, with a relentless focus on end-to-end human needs.

Tim Daines talks about three key shifts emerging with how organisations knit data and design together where they operate more effectively – taking product innovation to operation wide use.

Humanly recently worked with Macmillan Cancer Support to design and prototype future services and support for people living with cancer.

During this time 27 prototypes were designed, created and tested with over 70 people living with cancer in 12 locations around the UK.

This talk will share the story of one of these concepts, the methods used for prototyping interactions with AI for good and the pivots in the design that were enabled by the prototyping process, and the final concept app demonstrating how AI could be used to support people living with and beyond cancer in the future.

The current deployments of 5G, IoT and edge computing are driving profound changes in the capacity and capabilities of networks.

But beyond faster networks, more bandwidth and increased connections what effects might these convergent technologies have on social, commercial or industrial environments? This talk will explore some of the emerging characteristics of ‘smart networks’ and their effect on work environments, and propose some ways for designers to evaluate their potential and explore potential solutions.

Phil will cover seminal works that span the range of projects and frameworks that are being used to understand the implications of the future and the impact of emerging technologies on culture, society, and humankind.

Also, as the founder of the nonprofit, The Design Futures Initiative, he’ll share work on programs they’ve created to address challenges of youth and how to bring design methodologies to improving their social pathways.

From this masterclass, you will learn how you can use the platform UXTesting.io, with AI technology to get users insight by data efficiently and effectively.

During the session you will learn how to set up testing tasks, and how the AI has been designed to achieve different cultural insights.

CEO and Co-Founder of UX Testing, Aldrich Huang will be delivering the class and will be on hand to answer any questions to help enhance your research process.

In this workshop, Jon will guide you through a review of many human design principles that can be applied across all of your projects and remain relevant regardless of the ‘next big thing’.

By attending this you will be able to evaluate and produce designs so that they work, engage and even delight.

The trick is that because they will be based on human needs, which essentially don’t change, you will be able to use them across all of your work no matter what the domain or technology… effective, efficient and satisfying or what!

Since we joined Aviva, we have been accessibility advocates. We have organised internal accessibility events (e.g. GAAD), internal training and workshops where we have promoted and shared accessibility knowledge.

During this masterclass, we will share some tips for you to convince your team that accessibility is important and to start embedding accessibility within your organisation. We will explain everything we did in the past at Aviva; so, you can use these examples to promote accessibility within your organisation.

Voice devices are taking over our homes, integrated into our cars and with us everywhere in our pockets and even headphones. It’s indisputable that Voice is the new brand frontier, but how can you ensure your brand has a meaningful presence in the ears of consumers?

In this masterclass, we’ll discuss the importance of defining a strategic approach to Voice and how this strategy can be executed in experiences that deeply connect with consumers. As an ‘invited guest’ in the homes of consumers, tolerance for brand intrusion is arguably at its lowest in voice, so how can this new platform be used to help solve problems, entertain and sell to audiences in 2019 and beyond?

The rise of voice assistants has opened up a whole new canvas for designers to work on. Many of our traditional screen-based approaches don’t apply to a medium with unbounded input: the rules are different. Come and learn about some of the ways in which you should think differently when designing a voice interaction.

What can we use Mixed Reality (MR) for and what can it measure? What doors does it open for user research?

Discover the answers to these and more at the hands-on, interactive workshop led by Sutherland Labs.

During the workshop you will learn what the practicalities are of setting up MR for testing, how far can MR go as a research methodology and where can MR take us that traditional research methodologies can’t.

Moving away a division between “normal UX” and “accessibility” to a single perspective that difference is the one guaranteed characteristic between each of our users. Not designing for difference in the way people perceive, move, understand, sense or problem solve will limit the value of our designs. This workshop will provide a hands on experience with a really useful and quite simple approach to understand experience variance and start to solve for it.

In the workshop we will create an opportunity in small groups for 2 short sprints designing for differing specific needs. Not single needs such as “blind” or “wheel-chair user” or even cardboard thin personas, but richly interesting intersectional characters with varying needs, preferences and approaches. We will introduce a range of tools and approaches that can help think about the problem through these different perspectives, making something that is not just better for their character, but also for many others. Having quickly developed some solutions for a specific problem at each table (5 tables of 5 people) we will look to extend this specific solution to provide mainstream additional functional and delightful value for many users.

AI is evolving in our lives at an exponential rate.  For AI to have impact in a human’s life, fostering and facilitating collaboration during creation of a product or service with both Designer and Data Scientists is crucial.

How do we foster this collaborative approach when to a designer seeking “truth” involves an understanding of how and why humans interact with data, and to a data scientist seeking “truth” is more about designing algorithms that make mathematical guesses over a period of time?

This workshop takes designers through a simple framework and toolkit to leverage the core strengths of both data scientist and designer insights when creating Human-Centred Data Science products or services.

Join Adobe XD Evangelist Stephanie Maier to find out how XD can help you design at the
speed of thought.

Learn more about key features that can save you time and make prototyping easier,
including:

Responsive Resize – easily resize groups of objects on your artboards for different size
screens while maintaining placement and scalability.

Repeat Grid – quickly replicate lists, visual cards, and other elements across your artboards while ensuring styles and spacing stay intact.

Auto-Animate – automatically animate changes between artboards to create micro-
interactions or interactive content in your prototype.

Assets panel – manage your colours, styles and components centrally.

Stephanie will be sharing the latest updates to Adobe XD just unveiled at Adobe MAX – The Creativity Conference in early November.

All attendees of the workshop will receive an exclusive copy of Hack the Design System, a collaboration between Idean and Adobe filled with tangible perspectives and recommendations around building design systems.

Please note you will need to bring your laptop to this workshop with Adobe XD installed. You can download Adobe XD for free from xd.adobe.com.