Learning to Love Tension, Disruption & Chaos (UX Design)

Learning to Love Tension, Disruption & Chaos

Your project is clicking along, and everyone on the team is accepting your design decisions with little to no pushback. Everything is orderly and everyone is completely agreeable. Sound like a dream?

Be careful about saying “yes” too quickly. This situation may seem an ideal one for your day-to-day life, but it rarely leads to solid design. After all, without chaos there would be no need for someone to bring order. Without disruption, old ideas would go unchallenged by new ones. And without tension, one viewpoint will inevitably dominate—leading to a smaller—and often poorer—set of design options. As frustrating as they can be, these three forces often provide opportunities for innovation or act as signals that you don’t want to miss.

In this session, Russ and Carolyn, co-authors of A Project Guide to UX Design, discuss some of the ways you can use tension, disruption, and chaos to improve the quality of your work. Learn how facilitating sessions, managing design reviews, and gathering outside viewpoints through research and discussion can help you achieve better designs—and greater influence on project teams.

RUSS UNGER BIO

Russ is the Director of Experience Planning for Draftfcb, the largest advertising/marketing agency in Chicago and the Midwest. He has been working on websites since 1993—when there was only Notepad to code with and Mosaic was the only browser around. That was when he found his interest in User Experience Design and Information Architecture began to flourish.
Since then, he has worked with a number of major brands, including Hewlett-Packard, Gatorade, Propel, Quaker and Celebrity Cruise Lines, as well as on large scale Intranet and Extranet applications for such companies as Volkswagen Credit, Audi Financial Services, Information Resources, Inc. and Marsh. He has been involved in the Information Architecture for large scale public-facing sites for such companies as Metromix, Oprah.com, United Airlines and Hewlett-Packard. He has also worked off-line, creating unique biometric (fingerprint reader) applications and has worked as the Design Lead for Motorola’s Connectivity domain where he was responsible for creating user interfaces for mobile applications in Motorola's Consumer Experience Design group. Russ worked closely with such major carriers as T-Mobile, Cingular/AT&T and Vodafone to design features for Bluetooth, WiFi and over-the-air updates. He has also taught courses in Web and Interactive/Flash Design.
In his spare time, he is an author and editor for Boxes and Arrows (www.boxesandarrows.com). In addition to being a mentor for the Information Architecture Institute (www.iainstitute.org), Russ also serves on the 2200+ member organization’s Board of Directors as the Director of Events and Marketing. As if that is not enough, he tries to actively blog on topics in User Experience Design at UserGlue UserBlog (www.userglue.com/blog). He lives in West Chicago with his wife, Nicolle, and 2 daughters.
Russ is co-author of the recently published book “A Project Guide to User Experience Design” with Carolyn Chandler for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter).

You can find Russ online in the following locations:
* Book – A Project Guide to UX Design
http://www.peachpit.c...
* LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.c...
* The Information Architecture Institute
http://iainstitute.or...
* Boxes & Arrows
http://www.boxesandar...
* Twitter
http://www.twitter.co...
* Blog
http://blog.userglue....