The first two presentations of Day Two at Midwest UX touched on a common theme - how design can be an agent of change within organizations. Both Lorna Ross and Tom Greever explored the topic in different ways. Drawing on her experiences at the Mayo Clinic, Lorna Ross demonstrated how design goes beyond the digital environment. Tom Greever's talk, Articulating Design Decisions, offered forty minutes of practical advice on how practitioners can clearly communicate their points of view without falling back on "but I am the designer!".
Continue on for video and sketchnotes.
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Both employed by Indiana University's Process eXperience Architecture (PXA) department, Tara Bazler and Chris Basham (@chrisbasham) cover many parallels between navigating forests and the wilderness of the web. Many of the theories will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken library science courses or practiced information architecture for a few years. For those who have not this talk offers the perfect gateway into Peter Morville's writings.
Read on to learn more about the parallels between physical wayfinding and the digital world.
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In a pair of back to back talks Jen Matson (@nstop) and Pamela Pavliscak (@paminthelab) explored different aspects of what data means to the user researcher. Jen Matson approached the problem from the perspective of working within a larger team while Pamela Pavliscaks talk focused more on how we can understand and decipher data without a master's degree in statistics.
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If you have had the opportunity to do any user research you know that it can be challenging. If this recap I look back over Veronica Erb's presentation from Midwest UX on how the tools that we use in the field can be turned inwards to help improve ourselves. An excellent and well organized list of actionable items should be provided to everyone as they begin their careers in user research. Continue on to learn how you can embrace your inner researcher.
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Ever used one of those smart faucets that seems to cut out exactly when you to rinse your hands? Ever experience a park bench or architecture that feels designed to prevent you from using it? Too often things get designed in ways that hinder a positive experience to account for infrequent edge cases. In this talk Edward Stojakovic presents ways that user experience can be used for good to prevent the proliferation of antipatterns and bad design.
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