Level Up Your Web Design & UX Skills at the Generate Conference

It’s all too easy to get left behind in the world of UX, which is why, no matter how much of an expert you may be right now, it’s essential that you carry on learning.

Generate – from the folks who bring you net magazine and Creative Bloq – is one such opportunity. It’s grown over the past few years into an international event. Over the next few months, we’ll hold Generate conferences in San Francisco, Sydney and London. They’re an ideal opportunity to learn digital design and development best practices in the company of fellow professionals.

We’ve partnered up with UXPin (who’ve contributed hundreds of articles to CreativeBloq) on an exclusive discount for all events.

The conferences also a great way to get a feel for what’s going on throughout the web design and frontend development business. They might not directly apply to your job, but sessions on subjects such as SVG animation, flexbox and web apps probably affect the implementation of design decisions. More specialized UX sessions also represent an excellent opportunity to grow your skills and career.

Here’s the most relevant UX talks and workshops at the three upcoming Generate conferences.

Generate San Francisco
1. The future of the web: and how to prepare for it now

The internet as we know it is less than 9,000 days old. So what do the next 9,000 days have in store?

Peter Smart, Global UX Director at Fantasy, will explore how breakthroughs at the edge of technology, science and design will transform the way the web affects our daily lives – from invisible interfaces to touchable experiences and adaptive ecosystems.

Drawing on leading research and experiments across our industry, join him on a tour of the next 9,000 days on the web – and how we can prepare for them today.

2. Design Sprints for Startups

The design sprint is a 5-day rapid UX process developed at Google Ventures.

In this talk, Braden will discuss how this approach can shortcut the usual endless-debate cycle, and enable companies to build and test nearly any idea in just 40 hours. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, teams get great data from a prototype.

Developed at Google Ventures, it’s a ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavioural science, design thinking and more – packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Discount for UXPin Users

Save 30% on your ticket to Generate San Francisco (July 15th 2016) with code: UXPin30.

Generate Sydney
1. Crafting a UX that’s fast and rich

Too often increased performance is about reduction.

Developers are always saying there are too many resources on a page or that the design team went way over the top with content overload. This can lead to a culture of tension between designers and developers, with an enforced minimalism and a mentality of the fastest page being a page with nothing on it.

SpeedCurve’s Mark Zeman explores three case studies that push the boundary of what’s possible when delivering the richest web user experience possible in a way that is still highly performant.

2. Beyond Measure

We can track, measure, and store more than ever before. This is naturally exciting to designers and technologists who want to make better informed decisions.

But, says Erika Hall (Co-founder of Mule Design), more data doesn’t necessarily create more meaning, and might even make it harder to see what matters. Human experience does not reduce to an engineering problem and what we can’t count still counts in an increasingly quantified world.

3. UX for change

We are at the beginning of a new era of communication and design.

We have more access to more information than ever before in the history of humankind. We can instantly reach out around the world and talk to leading professionals in our field. In a way, the things we are creating today will shape the way the human race operates for the foreseeable future.

We are in a rare and unique position to be at the forefront. In this talk, Nick Finck (Product Design Manager at Facebook) embarks on an exploration of the possibilities of changing the world as we know it.

Discount for UXPin Users

Save 30% on your ticket to Generate Sydney on 5 September with code: UXPin30.

Generate London
1. Never show a design you haven’t tested

It isn’t hard to find a UX designer to nag you about testing your designs with actual users. But we’re not always that good at explaining why you should – and how you could do it in an affordable way.

In this talk, Ida Aalen (Senior UX Designer at Netlife Research) will share affordable, practical tips for testing your designs, with examples from actual projects she has worked on.

2. Building device-agnostic UX systems

There was a time when we did glossy page designs for our desktop browsers. With the rise of smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, that approach is now outdated.

With further developments in technology and screens, our content could go anywhere. As a result we need to move away from designing for specific devices to solutions that are device-agnostic.

For UX designers that means letting content guide layouts, and moving away from designing pages to focusing on the modules that those views are made up of. In this talk, UX designer Anna Dahlström walks through why device-agnostic design matters, what it means and how we go about it.

3. Designing for our next billion users

How does mobile first design look when users are dealing with intermittent or non-existent connections? How can we provide elegant and seamless experiences on a low speed connection where data costs are high? And how can our products be just as usable for folks navigating in their second or third language?

In this talk, Rachel Ilan Simpson (UX Designer at Google) gives context around users in emerging markets – why we need to consider these users and what kinds of limitations they face. She’ll talk about research conducted for Google Chrome, share some of the team’s early insights, and show features designed to solve these problems.

Discount for UXPin Users

Save 15% on a conference, or conference and workshop-combined ticket to Generate London (September 21-23, 2016) with code: UXPin15.

Other great speakers at Generate London include:

Adaptive Path and Typekit founder Jeff Veen
Mike Monteiro from Mule
Lyza Gardner from Cloud Four

Additional UX Advice & Inspiration

For a taste of what’s in store, here are a couple of videos from previous Generate events.

In The UX of things, Dan Goodwin looks beyond the web and considers how user experience applies to things which affect people’s health, well-being, comfort, or safety.

And in The web and flow of things, John Allsop considers what it is about the Web that keeps it thriving, despite seemingly all the odds, and how by understanding its flexible nature, we can think about its future, and help it reach its true potential.

You can find more ways to stay ahead of the game over at Creative Bloq. Among its UX articles you’ll find practical advice, including:

How to design a winning UX portfolio


7 UX tools you need to try


Google’s UX design secrets


The UX of VR

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