It’s that time of year again, SXSW PanelPicker voting time! I know how annoying it can be to receive endless requests for votes, so I apologize in advance for contributing to the bombardment. The fact is, though, that with the public’s vote contributing 30% to the final speaker decision, and with 2,347 panels to choose from in the voting, posts like these help draw your attention to proposals that may get lost in the crowd.
Note that in order to vote, you will need to create an account. It only takes a few minutes.
My SXSW Presentation Proposal
This is my first time submitting a proposal to SXSW. I decided to submit a proposal based on a recent blog post (“Challenging Conventional Assumptions about User Experience Design“). Below is a short description of the presentation. If the topic intrigues you, click on the thumb to vote, or the title to view more details.
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“As designers of interactions broaden their perspective and take a higher level view of the problem, they simultaneously make another transition: they stop solving interaction design problems and begin solving problems with design… In this capacity designers of interactions bring their design skills to bear on truly complex, systemic problems—broad in scale and scope—and have the opportunity to affect truly profound and lasting change.” – Steve Baty
This quote is from Steve’s Core77 article “The Strategic Arc of Interaction Design: Moving Towards Holistic System Design.“
“Most people believe that User Experience is just about finding the best solution for your users — but it’s not. UX is about defining the problem that needs to be solved (the why), defining the types of people who need it to be solved (the who), and defining the way in which it should be solved to be relevant to those people (the how).” – Whitney Hess
Read more in Whitney’s great 52 Weeks of UX article “StartUXs.“
There are many resources available for beginner UX designers to learn about the field on their own. In particular, Whitney Hess’ blog post series “So you wanna be a User Experience Designer” (part 1) (part 2) outlines a fantastic list of books, blogs, events, organizations, lists, workshops, conferences, and education references that can help those new to the field learn the ropes.
While being a self-starter and educating yourself is a huge step in the right direction, beginner UX Designers need support from their organizations in order to be most successful. There are several steps organizations can take to guide and encourage those new to the field.
Read the full article »
“Writing for your website shouldn’t be an extracurricular activity appended to anyone’s work description. Your content deserves better as it is the hardest working part of your website. Your content sells your services, captures the interest of potential customers, guides users through your site to achieve the goal they set out to do, instructs them on how to purchase from you, collects their information, lets people know the terms and conditions for a transaction with you, describes the unique collection you have for sale, rewards them for their brand loyalty, and introduces customers to the positive experience they get shopping with you.” – Relly Annett-Baker
Read more in Relly’s article “Why you need a content strategist.”
(Remember you can always click on the quote image thumbnails to download the full sized image)
“In design one makes-to-think and thinks-to-make. There’s no hard line between wondering about something and making that thing in the machine shop. The two go together without a hard distinction between thinking it up and making it up. In a design studio… the making is also the thinking. We don’t figure everything out and then just build it. Both of these materialization rituals are the same and interweave in a simple, clarifying way.” – Julian Bleecker
This quote is from Kicker Studio’s interview with Julian: “Six Questions from Kicker: Julian Bleecker.“
Catriona Cornett
