A talk that was highlighted in my program from the time that it was first posted, this presentation by Greg Tarnoff (@gregtarnoff) explored a side of user experience that often gets overlooked. Forget about mobile design or responsive design. How do you develop experiences when suddenly simply using a mouse becomes a hard task? With a thought provoking and heart felt presentation Greg opened the eyes of the Midwest UX crowd.
Read MoreMidwest UX 2014 Recap: The Internet of Skiing
With the recent snowfall it only seems fitting to recap a presentation that had caught my interest since I saw it on the schedule for Midwest UX months ago. Ken Leung (@moogbot) spent thirty minutes talking about a recent side project by Normative Design. Their goal? To do for skiing what Garmin and Nike have done for cycling, running, and other outdoor activities.
Read MoreMidwest UX 2014 Recap: Communicating Design to Others
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.
Read MoreMidwest UX 2014 Recap: Wayfinding on the Web
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.
Read MoreMidwest UX 2014 Recap: Data and Design
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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