Lab Zero’s design team is embarking this week to an experience designer’s dream: UX Week San Francisco! UX professionals from all over the world are giving talks and workshops about the latest ideas and research in our field. As a product design and development shop, we’re always eager to learn new ways to think about design and how to better serve our clients. We’re looking forward to exciting experiences ahead.

Keynotes and Talks

Many of the talks/keynotes on Tuesday and Friday seem to focus on the psychology of design. Here are some of the related talks:

• Keynote: Calm Technologies Explains the concept of making smarter humans, not smarter computers. We’re hoping to learn how we can respect user attention and privacy in more nuanced ways.
• Designing for Self This talk explores how a designer’s personality and point of view comes through in their work. We’re wondering if this will explore a tension between following best practices and letting your inner creativity guide design thinking.
• Extreme Empathy, What is it? Empathy skills are obviously important to design — it helps us ‘love the problem’ and imagine how to address our users’ needs. But we may not always have as much access to our users as we’d like. We’re hoping this talk sparks some ideas about how to piece together a user’s emotional journey from our sometimes limited access to them.
• How to Navigate Complexity with Liminal Thinking This talk explores how to create the change you want by changing the way you think. Clients sometimes seek our help to drive changes in their product development process and mindset, so they can continue to innovate long after we’re gone. We hope this talk gives us some tips on how to do this better!
• Great Minds Don't Always Think Alike We love the empowering, positive approach in this talk focusing on designing for the unique learning styles of people with conditions like autism & ADHD. We have some first-hand experience designing for the autism community, and look forward to learning about what’s new in this field of research.

Workshops

Wednesday and Thursday are workshop days at the conference. They have provided an interesting selection to choose from and it was difficult to narrow it down. Here’s what we’ve signed up for:

• Building Design Team Chemistry
• Human Content for Complicated Companies
• UX Strategy
• Motion Design & Prototyping Essentials
• Mapping Experiences
• The Visual Display of Information
• We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat: Vision Through Storytelling

UX Week provides an app for the conference. We'll follow-up with a post on our experience using it during the conference. Stay tuned!

We are looking forward to exploring new tools and design trends in the next year. Hoping the spirit and energy of the conference will create more excitement and momentum in the year to come!