User experience in product and service design — INTI Auditorium
The first one took place on Wednesday, November 28, under the name "User experience in the design of products and services" and was held in a new venue for the UX "world": the INTI. The agenda had an excellent level.
Speakers included Lorena Paz, Juan Marcos Ortiz, Sebastián Betti and Eduardo Mercovich.
Each of them, from their own view of what User Experience is and its shapes, enriched the perspective of a new audience, different from the one we are used to as members of the community (IxDF, IxDA), since most attendees were Industrial Designers, in a completely different environment.
UX Summit ’18 — Digital House
We can now say it's a classic among UX events in Buenos Aires. The 2018 edition of the "UX Summit" lived up to expectations and presented big names on all fronts.
Personally, I chose to attend two workshops.
The first one was given by Sof Andrade and had a reeeeeally long title: "Empathy as a path towards inclusive design: preparing interviews for interaction design research".
Basically, she talked about how to prepare and run an ethnographic interview. She introduced a couple of tips that can be very useful when facing that challenge. Really good!
The second workshop I attended was run by the folks from Auth0: Bárbara Mercedes, Fernando Carretoni and Julian Leiss. It had a shorter name: "Accessible Color".
It was very interesting to see the work they are doing internally to improve the accessibility of their products and, on the other hand, to introduce many people to web accessibility.
Some (brief) conclusions
We want design to make every interactive product or service usable and accessible for all people, regardless of their level of digital literacy and their physical, sensory, and intellectual capabilities.
I found it very interesting that in both events, essentially very different ones, very similar topics came up.
Empathy and inclusion (gender, cognitive and physical) were the central themes.
I think we are slowly reaching a level of maturity that allows us to think more and more about Universal, User-Centered Design without making distinctions between different types of users, and that's always good news. As Lore said in her talk, this is key in a world that is increasingly mediated by interfaces. Sooner or later, we are all going to need it.
The quote above belongs to the "Inclusive Design Movement" and it's more than 8 years old. We are getting closer and closer 💪