This week we went to our first UX conference of the year, The UX conference in London organized by the school of UX. An insightful day filled with 10 practical UX design talks. We are happy to share a few takeaways in this blogpost.

The first fun idea that we want to share with you, was the use of the online platform sli.do for questions during the talks. The event came up with this idea because visitors are often too shy to ask questions, and it was a great success.

First of all, Joost van der Ree from Uber taught us how to make design decisions if there are a lot of constraints in three steps.

1. Know the context. Apart from just understanding the problem, understand the context that the solution needs to be a part of.

2. Be aligned on a goal. Define the problem, priorities and principles, together with your team and stakeholders.

3. Define the ideal product. Create a vision of what the ideal product could be, without too many constraints. Be careful, don’t make compromises too fast.

Design depends largely on constraints… Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem-the ability of the designer to recognize as many constraints as possible-his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints-the constraints of price, of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.

Charles Eams

After that Ben Franck from British Gas persuaded us to involve stakeholders in our user tests. They created an observation room next to their user testing room, where everyone from the design team, the product team, management and other stakeholders can come and follow the user tests. They provide screens and sound, post-it walls, print-outs and everyone is welcome. Stakeholders have often no idea how a user test works and by showing them they tend to really understand and appreciate the insights from the ux team. They have had more than 2000 visitors in their observation room in the past 3 years.