‘Design is how it works’ – Steve Job’s philosophy brought to life at UX 2014 conference

This is the golden age of design, and startups as well as established corporate giants need to excel in the user experience to succeed in the 21st century. Bangalore recently hosted a superb masterclass and conference on user experience, UX 2014, organised by Peepal Design and the global UX Alliance. 

Experts from the US, Ireland, India, South Africa, Brazil, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, France, Canada, Poland and Italy addressed over 300 delegates at the event. Here are my Top 15 takeaways from 15 of the experts who presented at UX 2014. 

1. Align UX with business metrics 

2. Mobile is the centrepiece 

3. Include UX approaches in project management certification 

4. Address current needs but also anticipate future needs 

5. Use visualisation techniques to map UX impacts 

6. Target the UX message to a broader audience 

7. Focus on business goals and not just digital content 

8. UX helps you stay competitive 

9. Embed UX in transactional activities 

10. UX applies to digital and non-digital domains 

11. Test, learn, test, learn 

12. UX is about relationships 

13. Localise, localise, localise 

14. Blend art and science in UX 

15. Tackle the RX to bring UX into rural India 

In sum, the conference and masterclasses delivered a wealth of learnings to the attendees, even making it difficult for them to choose between the three parallel tracks! 

The conference threw up a fascinating range of questions which can be addressed through research publications and at future such events. How can resource-strapped startups not lose out on the UX edge? What approaches work best in dealing with the ‘politics’ of UX in an organisation, when not all stakeholders sees eye to eye on the solution? What term works best to describe UX when users are no longer just users but co-creators of products and services?

Read the whole article in yourstory.com

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This is an edited version of an post originally posted at yourstory.com, by Madanmohan Rao. You are free to re-edit and repost this in your own blog or other use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License terms, by giving credit with a link to www.startupcommons.org and the original post.