Future-Proof your Product – UXcamp Europe 2017 (+ “UX-The Musical Nr. 5”)

My talk at UXcamp Europe, June 3rd 2017 in Berlin.

During the last few years companies approached me with always the same question: In a world of Artificial Intelligence and total automation, where does this leave our product? Where will we still be relevant for our customers? There is a playbook to answer these challenges and in this talk I tell you all about it, and how designers can and should work with Artificial Intelligence.

Plus, “UX-The Musical Nr. 5”. Big thanks to Gunnar, the UXcamp choir, and Marvin! And thanks to Katrin for recording. :-)

The Design of The Future – UXcamp Europe 2016 (+ “UX-The Musical Nr. 4”)

My talk at UXcamp Europe, June 25th 2016 in Berlin.

In this talk I want to look at The Design of The Future: Where our industry is going, how the role of designers is changing and how to predict all of this. I talk about revolutions in interfaces, intelligence, simplicity and our own work.

Plus, “UX-The Musical Nr. 4”. Big thanks to Aminata, Gunnar and Marvin! And thanks to Martin and Luzi for recording. :-)

The Future Part II: Now even more futurer! — UXcamp Europe 2015 (+ “UX-The Musical Nr. 3”)

My talk at UXcamp Europe, June 20th 2015 in Berlin.

In this talk I want to look into the crystal ball and see what the far future will bring for all of us UX designers. I talk about algorithms, exponential progress, artificial intelligence and procedural literary. At the end we all have a dose of future shock.

Also, once again, we are doing “UX-The Musical Nr. 3”. Big thanks to Tanja Cappell (@frauhoelle), to the Singing Hulks and to Marvin! :-)

The Future of User Experience — UXcamp Europe 2014 (+ “UX-The Musical part 2!”)

My talk at UXcamp Europe, June 7th 2014 in Berlin.

In this talk I want to look into the crystal ball and see what the future will bring for all of us UX designers. What is the future of technology? What are business models of the future? And what does that mean for User Experience Design?

Also, once again, we are doing “UX-The Musical!” part 2. Big thanks to The Northern Soul Machine and Marvin. And thanks to Katrin, Granaton and Markus for filming.

The UX Personality Test — a talk on different types of designers (+ “UX-The Musical!”)

My talk at UXcamp Europe, June 22nd 2013 in Berlin.

Over the years I figured there are many different kinds of designers I’ve worked with. So in this talk I thought it would be fun to discuss this, see which one you are and – of course – see which one is the best. Along the way we discuss rationalizing decisions, the movie trailer method and of course the very surprising whodunnit conclusion.

And as a bonus at the end we do “UX-The Musical!” This originated last year but see for yourself. Big thanks to Aminata, to The Northern Soul Machine and to Confetti-Markus! :-)

Make A Wish! — a talk on successful projects and songs

My talk at UXcamp Europe, May 26th 2012 in Berlin.

For successful projects you need two things: You need to know what you want to do and if this is the right goal, and you need to make sure that everybody involved works towards the same goal. In this talk I explain how to go about this, what this has to do with Disney songs and why song-driven design is the new thing now. Also, I got roughly 400 people to sing about user experience.

Storytelling und Magie (und das Target Principle)

Mein Vortrag vom World Usability Day, 10. November 2011 in Mannheim.


Storytelling und Magie! (Und was das mit erfolgreichen Projekten zu tun hat.)

Storytelling ist in aller Munde, doch niemand weiß genau, was sich dahinter eigentlich verbirgt. Meistens beschränken sich die Erklärungen auf „Gutes Storytelling erfordert gutes Zuhören“ und danach wird es schon dünn. Doch wie erzählt man wirklich eine packende Geschichte? Warum lohnt sich das? Und was kann man davon für die eigene Arbeit lernen?

Why first impressions matter

First impressions matter, but not in a way you’d think. Let me explain…

When experiencing a product or a service customers will be guided through this experience by their first impression. In a way this is snap-judgement and in a way it is totally unfair of them to do so but that’s the way it is.

You see, our brain is constantly bombarded by millions of tiny bits of information. So our brain became very good at filtering out what’s what and what is worth paying attention to. And thus we judge things and the quicker we can judge the better we are off. See for example our tendency to put people in boxes: This person is a pusher and that person is a whiner and so on. Sure it is rude and will never do these people justice but for our brain it is a shortcut, which in some situations can be very handy.

But to rate an experience you need a baseline, something to compare it to. And this is where the first impression comes in. Our brain tries to judge something very quickly and then only ever compares it to this initial assessment. So if your product fails at the first impression it’ll be very hard to convince the customer otherwise. If on the other hand the first impression is a good one all further interactions with the product will be helped by this. Your customers might even forgive you some minor errors here and there because their general opinion of the product is good.

You know this from pitching ideas to clients. If at first they didn’t like an idea how often did you convince them of it anyways? Probably only very few times and when you did it probably took you quite some effort.

So your product and service needs to make a good first impression to smoothly sail your customers through the experience — if it doesn’t you’ll face an uphill battle against your their initial judgement. It also has to make a good last impression but we’ll discuss this in the next article.