40 MINUTE SESSIONS

The best sort of lectures are the ones you get lost in, never realizing the time passing. We at Midwest UX feel that each one of the following talks embodies that exact quality. Immersive, reflective, and innovative: each presentation brimming with fresh ideas and concepts designed to inspire.

Mapping The Experience

Chris Risdon

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your service.

Experience maps offer a framework for mapping human experiences across multiple situations and interactions, helping to ensure that every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.

In this presentation I’ll talk about orchestrating touchpoints and their channels through experience maps. I’ll review an experience mapping framework that includes key dimensions and how they’re used for designing for a multi-touchpoint experience. The presentation will discuss the activities that feed the map so that it tells a tangible story, the key elements make up a useful and actionable map, and how to then define the characteristics of your mapped touchpoints. Experience maps are intended to be catalysts, not final conclusions.

(This will include a detailed case study with actionable lessons, and also discussions touches on ‘design beyond the screen’)

BUILDING BENDABLE CONTENT: WHY THE FUTURE WEB NEEDS CONTENT-FOCUSED IA

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a future that’s flexible, fluid, and unfixed from the desktop, right?

Great. Then it’s time to get to the core of the matter: the content.

Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is too often stuck in meaningless blobs—blobs that break under the weight of responsive designs, mobile sites, and cross-channel distribution.

Which elements are most important? What’s primary and what’s corollary? What’s related or interdependent? What stays, what goes, and what gets truncated on small screens?

When we can answer these questions—and structure our content accordingly—we’ll replace those messy blobs with content that bends, shifting and reshaping to fit varied displays and devices.

To accomplish this, we need to bring our skills in organizing and architecting information to a micro level, breaking content down and lending it the structure it needs to maintain its meaning in an increasingly unfixed web.

After all, we can’t keep creating more content for every new device and channel—our writers and content wranglers will never keep up. But with IA skills applied to this new challenge, we can stop asking for more content and start asking our content to do more.

This session will help UXers advocate for and architect content that goes further by discussing:

• Why adding structure actually makes content more flexible

• What we can learn about structure from technical and CMS folks

• How to analyze content and understand its meaningful elements

• How IA skills apply to this new challenge—and also how they’ll need to change