Web Directions Design 2019

We have arrived in an age of design. No longer relegated to a function of the marketing department or tacked on to an engineering process, designers are increasingly taking leadership positions in the top companies in tech.

But how do we manage creative teams to achieve their full potential? Jeff will share stories from my years of leading product development — both successful and not — to show that investing in culture might be the best competitive edge you can gain.

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A common misconception about Design Systems is that they prohibit designers from being creative. This is far from the truth. Jina Anne, a design systems practitioner and advocate, will share her thoughts and ideas on using design systems to empower and strengthen your creativity while still keeping its goals of scale, maintainability, and efficiency at heart.

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The reality of domestic violence doesn’t disappear when people enter the digital world. Abusers use technology to exploit and control their victims, meaning that technologists have a responsibility to ensure that users of our products are empowered to protect their safety. How can we prevent people with violent intentions from forms of abuse and control that are digital, such as browsing a victim’s computer, finding sensitive information about them online, or creating fake content in their name?

How can our products that involve real people, such as software for building managers, protect against an abuser talking their way past a building’s doorman whose uses software to track approved guests? While there’s no simple answer and ultimately no way to ensure our users’ safety in all situations, thoughtful considerations and small changes while designing and building products can and does result in meaningful contributions to people’s safety. This talk will explore how to think through a lens of safety, create those thoughtful considerations, and advocate for an emphasis on safety.

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Newer developments in CSS make it easier than ever to create robust, scalable, elegant typographic systems on the web and in apps. But the fun really starts when you add Variable Fonts. The design, technical, and performance benefits are really exciting, but when you combine them with other CSS capabilities like custom properties, calculations, and grid it’s a whole new way to think about design and development.

We’ll see how they work together by using some variable fonts in layouts that work across screen dimensions, accessibility needs, design requirements, and even network speeds—better than you thought possible.

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Citizens are in the middle of a global disinformation campaign. The attackers know all the legal loopholes, all the social engineering tricks, and all the blind spots they can exploit. Meanwhile, average citizens don’t understand how to protect themselves and just want software to be as simple as possible. It’s a recipe for disaster, which is what we got.

Jon Bell worked on Twitter’s Abuse team as the lead designer in 2016, and is haunted by his team’s inability to take the threat seriously and make significant progress towards addressing it. This talk is a behind-the-scenes look into all the complexity, the surprises, and the lessons learned on the front lines of one of the most challenging social and UX issues of our time.

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Over the last 5 or 6 years design systems have moved from exotic to common place. But now you have a design system, how do you keep it alive, and hopefully flourishing?

Your Design system itself is only one small part of that. It needs a community around it. A collaboration model. You need to track its success. And documentation, lots of documentation. And a good deal more besides.

Dominik Wilkowski has been involved in bringing several large scale design systems to life, and seen what it takes for them to survive and thrive (and the things that can harm them or worse).

In this session he'll draw on those years of experience to help you ensure your design system prospers.

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The difference between good or great design and research (or mid- to senior-level) often isn’t the execution of the work itself, but what you do before and after it. We'll focus on a few strategies and processes to elevate work, the product, and strategy, from opinionated product thinking to a framework for creating, executing, and landing projects.

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In tech in recent years, it feels a bit like everybody and their dog has hopped on the 'scientific method' bandwagon. Design Thinking, Agile and UX Research methodologies are all modeled on this approach. But science itself is in the grips of an existential crisis, as embodied by a series of failed attempts to reproduce existing research. (See 'The Reproducibility Project' for context). Against this backdrop, it's a prescient time to ask the question: should UX Research be reproducible?

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Faster is better. That much is obvious. How much better? That we can find out. For people preoccupied with performance, numbers can tell a clear story. But how can you determine success for design changes? "It just looks right" isn't going to be enough.

You can't embetter what you cannot measure. So let's look at how to make design measurable. Which metrics matter, and which can be ignored. A better looking hamburger won't improve your navigation, but there might still valid reasons to change it.

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Many industries operate on complex and idiosyncratic systems. As demand for better design grows, designers who may not have insight or understanding, are more and more likely to work on complex systems used by a small number of experts.

As designers, we are never the experts. The ability to leverage a SMEs insight and knowledge is invaluable. However, challenging the norm and popular opinion should be encouraged in order to obtain the best results.

• Putting ALL of your trust in a SME is a dangerous precedent to set.
• Sticking to your guns with a set of design methodologies in support can build your way to success

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Design is becoming fairly mainstream, a part of many projects, and frequently discussed in the business press. But still many people think it is all about making an interface look better. Why is this still happening?

Donna believes that there are many reasons this happens. One of the biggest contributors is the way designers use jargon. We also try to sell the idea of design instead of focusing on how it can be used to solve problems. And design really isn't one thing - it's a broad concept with a range of techniques and approaches.

She's in a new role where she has to teach her organisation what designers do, what problems they can help with and how they do it. And the organisation has to teach this to clients. So she's spent a lot of time working on how to make design concepts more concrete, less jargon-filled and ultimately more understandable.

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There’s no doubt we’ve entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era of intelligence-based technological change transforming the way we work, live and relate to each other as well as the companies we buy and engage with.

We can already see this through the wave of artificial intelligence-based technologies coming to the fore, impacting all aspects of engagement. Whether it’s servicing consumers through virtual assistants, for example, or pre-empting their choices and preferences through predictive analytics, AI is quickly pervading interactions and their outcomes. AI’s impact is also increasingly apparent via robotics and automated technologies creating a new type of organisation, shaking up ways we work and new forms of collaboration.

But even as we further embrace AI and the idea that machines will make increasingly autonomous decisions, what’s equally clear is how important the human element remains in the enterprise. Far from AI machines running the world, it’s organisations that harness both machines and human ingenuity that will be best positioned for success.

Katja Forbes will talk about how do we design for AI and also successfully balance the rise of the machine with human-centred values and intuition?

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Maps are everywhere. They are familiar, factual, and useful. But they also need to be designed: not by a professional cartographer who doesn't work on the web but by a visual designer. A designer who wants to create beautifully formed experiences but who has limited skills in dealing with geospatial files and what's possible technically. How do you go beyond tracing boundaries over static images of maps to get the vectors you're looking for?

This talk goes through all the nitty gritty details you never thought you needed to know about designing maps from shapefiles and QGIS to symbology and basemaps. We hope you leave with a better sense of the endless possibilities of how maps can look and function and how your design expertise can shape those experiences.

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At the heart of many products in the information age is 1 critical factor: relevance. A misguided recommendation can instantly shatter trust in your product. As a designer, how do you create a system to provide relevant information to your audience in the right place and at the right time? What is an ideal experience? In this talk, we'll look at data and design, building feedback into your system, and what you need to know about content and machine learning. We'll explore in depth case studies of designing recommendation systems and the role of "nudges" in changing behaviour and improving outcomes.

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More than 1 in 20 people experience difficulty with reading and learning, and those difficulties don’t just end at school. We’ll go through some common learning difficulties including dyslexia and discuss what impact they have on designing for the web.

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Let's learn practical tips to improve motion in user interfaces. We'll go over some principles, basic properties of what you can animate, how it can enhance or diminish the experience, and recommended tools to use.

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