After a long break from our last event, we returned to the local community with our proven formula of talks, learning, nibbles, and chat. This time we made a couple of welcome tweaks. The first was to our name; UX Bournemouth is now UX Insider Bitesize. After the success of our UX Insider one day conference we’ll now use the UX Insider for all our learning and insights events. The second tweak was to the venue, this time we held it in the lovely Bourne Space.
Ali, our commercial director and compare for the evening, kicked off with a short talk on the noise surrounding user experience and customer experience in business. His position was that most of the activity and discussions in boardrooms quickly turn to tech when they discuss customer experience. He encouraged the audience to return to the customer, like in meditation when you return to the breath, to centre the projects and keep everyone in our organisations focused on the right things.
Ben Holliday – FutureGov – Seniority In Design
Next, Ali welcomed Ben to the stage who kicked off the evening by asking us what ‘what does it mean to be a senior designer’? Is it a job title, or a way of thinking? He believes it should be the latter. Ben took us on a fascinating journey about what it means to have a ‘design mindset’ and how this works in practice. Ben’s talk concluded with tips on how to inspire and become an agent of change. The highlight for me was this quote that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since – “the best teams feed off of each other, they don’t need one person cheerleading at the front.”
Adrian Howard – Quietstars- Help your UX team succeed with OKRs that don’t suck
Next up was Adrian. Adrian’s talk titled ‘Help your UX team succeed with OKRs that don’t suck’ gave a practical view of how to deploy strategic objectives throughout an organisation. His talk outlined how to set Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) using a formula that ‘doesn’t suck’. Adrian provided some examples from projects that had implemented the OKR methodology and demonstrated a mix of results. He ended the talk with some tips to try and some things to avoid when working on strategy deployment.
Matteo Menapace – V&A – What can a UX designer learn from game design?
Matteo finished up the series of talks by asking asked ‘What can a UX designer learn from game design?’ After explaining that any game is just a series of interesting choices, Matteo demonstrated this cleverly by getting the audience to decide where his talk went next. The ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style delivered a unique talk that connected personal experiences of climate change with what businesses are (and should be) doing to make the world a better place.
We ended the evening with drinks and discussions in Bourne Gardens.
Thank you to everyone who supports our events and makes them the friendly and informative experiences that they are. We hope to see you at our next event which we’ll let you know about soon.
As always, we’d also love to hear from you if you’d like to speak at one of our events. Please get in touch if you want to share your knowledge with our UX community.
