UX in Virtual Reality, Remote Working, Experience Design Strategy

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(Drinks and light bites will be supplied)

6:30-7:00pm — A remote chat with Austin Knight (Senior Designer at HubSpot) about UX, VR, Remote working and more.

Austin Knight is a Senior UX Designer, speaker, and author based out of Boston and Rio de Janeiro. He currently oversees the UX for HubSpot.com, INBOUND.com, the HubSpot Blog, and a range of additional front-end web properties and tools, which are used by more than 8 million visitors per month. He mentors students and startup founders at Columbia University in New York, co-hosts the UX and Growth Podcast in Boston, leads a study on South American design in Rio de Janeiro, and speaks at events all around the world. His latest work and in-depth design essays are published at AustinKnight.com.

7:00-7:25 — Experience design strategy: A grassroots approach
by Tshepo Lehutjo

“There’s no time to do proper UX here”
Ever heard that? Ever said that?

The reality of experience-design in corporate South Africa is that designers hardly get the time to test their assumptions until their solution is too expensive to change. Perhaps your product manager is already proudly telling everyone that your team will be pushing to production environment this week? Hooray!

For a lot of us, this means we spend the majority of our time churning out wireframes, complaining to anyone that would care to listen that tech limitations and business requirements are stifling our creativity. Now, I am not advocating that we stop pushing pixels until we get our demands for research-time met. Neither am I saying to stop championing the course for proper UX – whatever that is…

Deadlines are important, they keep us focused on delivering value and a deeply held idea of how you want the overall solution to turn out will carry you through many a stakeholder meetings.

My course is that of experience-design strategy, a guiding star that will show you true north when you need some data to turn to, when there is limited time to get users in your research lab, and when you need the rest of your team in the same movie as you are.

ABOUT TSHEPO

Well you might not readily recognise that name, and most times – he prefers it that way. The guy has the digital footprint of a cat (on social), his presence felt only on Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn. Do check him out!

Makes you wonder though, who is this fellow and what’s his 15 minutes. Tshepo has for the better part of 5 years been crafting usable and delightful online experiences for varied user types; think: accountants, mining enthusiasts, HR personnel, video-entertainment lovers and recently bankers.

He has a unique skill set ranging from user research, information architecture, interaction design and usability testing. His latest fascination amongst other things is experience-design strategy, with which he aims to guide product teams to the promised land by setting a direction that combines the human, technology and information element as well as defining the desired outcomes.

7:25-7:50 — TBC