Let's talk about UX
Lectures, talks and workshops.
THE STARTING POINT
As UX Supervisor, one of my mandates is to continuously improve the overall standing of UX within the studio. I was thinking, apart from trainings, presentations and workshops, how can I do that? Also, what exactly needs the most urgent improvement and which groups of people would benefit from this the most? All of them, obviously, but idealism aside, there had to be a way to determine the status quo.
Luckily, during my training in London by the Nielsen Norman Group, I had the chance to meet Kara Pernice, the Senior Vice President at the NN/g. In one of her presentations, she talked about the eight stages of UX maturity a corporation can reach, starting from the total ignorance towards user needs to the ultimately user-needs driven corporal strategy... and all the steps of UX-evolution that come between that.
And the coolest thing about it was, there was even a way how to find out on which stage a company is and also how to support it in order to reach the next step of this UX maturity.
THE SETUP
CURRENT TALKS
The Cake is not a Lie -
Benefits of UX in Game Development
This talk gives a good introduction to the general topics of UX and HCI and offers insights and best-practices on how implement and utilize UX within game development. It also emphasizes the direct impact and positive aspects for the product that come along with user research, prototyping and testing.
After all, GLaDOS did it, so it has to be effective, right?
90 min
Duration
UX meets Neuroscience -
Perceptual Habits & Mental Models in Video Games
In this talk, you will learn about the basic principles of perception on neurocognitive level and learn how our brain forms habits and biases. This can be linked directly to the theory of mental models in HCI that help UX designers address subconscious user needs when designing interaction.
We will then take all the take-aways and directly apply them to video game development, to illustrate, how such mental models can positively impact learnability, simplicity, efficiency and aesthetics in games and why context is your best friend. Ever.
90 min
Duration
Interactive Cognitive Art -
Envisioning Information of Complex Interfaces
A picture says more than thousand words, but data as information does not always speak for itself. This talk will take you on a journey to explore different methodologies on how to make complex data comprehensible by users. The goal of this talk is to provide insights into an innovative methodology of structuring and emphasizing information within context, by improving perception of information and emergent user action.
Simplicity does not create clarity itself, context does.
60 min
Duration
Marketing meets Neuro-economics - How your customer's brain makes decisions
Which parts of the brain play a crucial role in decision-making and how can we apply specific strategies address them?
This talk will emphasize the Nucleus Accumbens, the "pleasure-center" of our brain, the Amygdala in terms of loss aversion and parts of the Prefrontal Cortex as supervising and planning instances. We will discuss some best practices and find out not only which ones work, but more importantly, WHY they work.
30 min
Duration
UX & Neuroeconomics -
Decisionmaking in Game Development
What is Neuroeconomics and how can UX and game development benefit from it?
This talk briefly covers the science behind the novel field of Neuroeconomics and addresses the current resarch areas of decisionmaking under risk and ambiguitiy, loss aversion and social decisionmaking.
We will be looking at specific methodologies on how to apply those areas to game development to better understand and improve player involvement and gameplay.
60 min
Duration
LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS
UX in Project Lifecycle
A workshop for producers and managers as main audience.
Here, we will cover the basics of HCI and UX und discuss its benefits within project development. There will be several approaches on how to integrate UX in various management-styles, with focus on agile management and talk about how to create an environment that enables iterative processes and rapid prototyping, as well as user testing in the very early production stages. Also, we'll have a look at the ROI of UX and the latest UX trends and innovations.
approx. 3 hours
Duration
HCI / UX Lecture
Do you know the feeling, when the game you’re playing turns into a chore, rather than fun? Or that tricky vending machine that left you startled and made you feel not quite so clever? In many cases, insufficient UX is the answer to such issues.
This workshop offers an introduction to the principles of information theory, user testing and human cognition, so you can design games with spot on experiences for your target audience, while having your user’s skills and limitations in mind. And you will also find out, why doors can sometimes be tricky bastards or why GLaDOS is just the most dedicated UX professional of all.
2 days (12 hours)
Duration
Prototyping Workshop
Nothing brings a message across as well, as getting hands-on into prototyping.
This workshop is all about practice, learning the principles about UX and iterative processes as you brainstorm, create and rework your product idea. We will go through the process of early ideation-phase and rapid paper prototyping, adjusting it to the needs of the user persona, perform heuristic evaluation, before finally shape it to a mid-fidelity prototype with actual functionality. And lots and lots of user testing.
After all, the faster you fail, the sooner you learn from mistakes and can re-iterate easier and faster to create a more user-friendly and satisfactory user experience within your product.
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1 day (6 hours)
Duration
If you are interested in any of those topics and would like to request a talk or a lecture, just drop me a line