A couple of weeks ago we attended UX London, a new conference that started this year aimed at the user experience community. It was great to meet other designers and hear presentations from some key industry figures including Peter Merholz (@peterme), Luke Wroblewski (@lukewdesign), Dan Saffer (@odannyboy), Jared Spool (@jmspool) and Don Norman.

The conference also featured two days of workshops where we got to work in teams with other attendees – that’s always interesting and fun, and a way of seeing first hand how others who we don’t work with on a daily basis work to create design solutions.

One of my favourite presentations came from Jared Spool, who has an entertaining take on UX – combining examples of good and bad designs interjected with his own brand of humour. His style works really well to communicate the many UX issues that still exist with many products and their effect on users.

The keynote presentation was from Don Norman – who is something of a legend in user experience. His book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ is a classic and one that many interaction design courses have as part of their reading lists. Don has been a champion of simplicity in the past, but at this conference he actually argued that complexity can be a good thing. He illustrated his argument with real world scenarios – like learning to read music, or learning to fly a plane – he argued that although at first glance these are complex, there is fun and learning involved which in itself is complexity and without that the experience would not be so fulfilling. It posed interesting questions about how we handle complexity when it is all around us and natural in many ways.

Resources:
Below are links to presentations and notes from the presentations given by the speakers during day one of the conference:

Dan Saffer of Kicker Studio:
http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2009/06/designing-from-the-inside-out-behavior-as-the-engine-of-product-design/

Eric Reiss talking about Service Design:
http://www.slideshare.net/ericreiss/reiss-on-e-service-ux-london

Luke Wroblewski ‘Parti and the design sandwich’ talk
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?838

Don Norman talk notes ‘In Favour of Complexity’ (notes via Luke Wroblewski)
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?837

Jared Spool ‘What makes a design intuitive?’ (notes via Luke Wroblewski)
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?835

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