Lightning - Moving the UX Check from “No” to “Required”

A talk by Oana Secara

The title refers to a procedure we use in our company in which all tasks are reviewed and decided if a user experience specialist needs to be involved or not. Even more then this, the talk will be focused on teaching the importance of user experience in a technical/programming heavy organisation.

As this is intended for a lighting talk, I will be focusing on tips and tricks that I learned in my time working with developers and introducing user experience in organisations that either did not know much about the concept, or did not value it enough to put a lot of effort into it. There will be small actionable things that everybody could take into account and use them, some will just be fun, but they will all follow the narrative of teaching. All of us, as user experience specialists, information architects, professionals, we all need to teach the people around us, take the time to explain, help them get some ownership of the experience we are creating, so that they will want to get involved. Because as with many big companies, especially in countries where UX is only a slowly emerging practice, a good user experience is taking everything a step further, and you cannot take that step without the help of the developers. Of course if all else fails, cookies always work; very hard to say no to a person that is coming to you with cookies.