The past two days I have been live sketchnoting / graphic recording / visual scribing at the Design Matters conference in Copenhagen – an awesome conference for Designer made BY designers. A written summary of the sketchnotes will follow under each sketchnote.
I personally encouraged as many people as I could to start sketchnoting at the conference. I would love to see your notes if you did!
I have compressed these images – if you want a higher resolution image just contact me.
The first talk on the main stage was by Tobias Ahlin from Minecraft. My key take away from this was that he encourages us to:
Move from a paradigm of utilitarian work without any feelings, back to more expressive work! Emotionally engaging and simplicity is not in conflict!
Tobias used a matrix to prove this point – placing example cases from expressive to utilitarian and complex to minimalist.
I admit I am biased, because I really love the app, but the this talk was one of my favourites! Christine Cha and Vicky Tan from Headspace, did a talk about the brand journey of the company, as well as taking us through the their process of improving their onboarding retention. My key take away from this, was that:
Data can help you identify opportunities, not make decisions! Research and science can help you understand, and intuition can help fill in the gaps.
In just a few weeks Mckinsey Design will release a new big report on where to focus your money in the design process, based on looking at the 5% of cases that outperformed their peers. I am looking very much forward to reading it and perhaps summing it up visually in much more detail! Ben Sheppard, partner in Mckinsey Design, introduced the 4 areas tied to make design financials better. He emphasized that:
It is harder to outshine the competition and decide where to put the extra $. You need to focus on all 4 of these areas to elevate – or you should not bother at all!
These 4 areas are something we as designers would probably think is common knowledge, and now we have numbers as proof to celebrate the importance of design.
The 4 areas are:
- More than a feeling (what would happen is half of your bonus was tied to your product’s amazon review?)
- More than a department (no ivory towers, your team should work physically together)
- More than a phase (involve designers in all phases)
- More than a product (design for the entire experience).
Designer Jack Koloskus from the Outline spoke their platform and Why and how they plan to fix the big media struggle, and in the process enable non designers to make good content.
Masuma Henry did a talk about “the business of the underserved”. By taking us through a traditional design process and adding a step to each, she urged us to shift our focus to make a change!
You can make a change – no matter the design position you are in!
You need to start:
- Including and representing people who isn’t today!
- Promote shared values and expose viewpoints that need it!
Along the way she showed us great examples, only two of which were from Amazon themselves.
Starting with sharing her personal story about the first time she tried to create change and failed because she lacked the right approach, Anisha Jan from Dropbox, shared with us a talk about how small learnings can add up to big changes! She took us though the 4 steps in the arch of change, from listening for the unexpected to amplifying beliefs! This framework can be used to utilize findings that you have previously ignored, and turn it into big changes.
A fortune cookies without the words of wisdom would be a pretty bland experience.
Ben Hersh from Medium took us through how to make you use words better (inspired by cognitive science), by first making them clear, then friendly and then expressive!
- Clear: Reading takes time and work, choose words carefully! Make the rhythm of a text more like a fairy-tale, to make it easier to read.
- Friendly: When you are alone your brain makes conversations with yourself. Use “you” instead of “I”, and treat people like you do in person! Say thanks and be polite.
- Expressive: Who says the words or its typography changes how you think of the text itself
Vanessa Li from TikTok (previously Musical.ly) took us through 3 lessons of how they reduced friction in design to create a more immersive experience. The lesson I took with me the most, was that even though they solved the problem of how to give money to broadcasters, they changes their minds and were not satisfied with the solution and made a new and much better one.
Did you know that 1/10 people have no clean drinking water? Charity water aims to change that, but how do they do that when 42% of Americans do not trust charities? Alyson Nakamura took us through the journey of Charity water and how their unique and close communication makes their doners feel close to them throughout their charity cycle of 21 months.
I am not personally into football at all – so to get me excited about Fifa19 was quite a challenge, and Felix Lai from Fifa18/Ea sports succeeded! The UX immsersion Matrix introduced in this talk functioned as a framework of describing how content go from abstract to realism, and functional to emotional. My biggest take away was that you can:
Use a UX Immersion Matrix and touchpoints to create a 3D emotional journey!
Man I wish there was a game like this but for something else than a sports – or maybe a different sport… like tennis or iceskating? I would be all in!
The last talk of the conference was by Teyosh, also known as Sofija Stankovic and Theodora Stojkovic. This talk went though some of the projects created by this pair, that balances benefiting society with something they find interesting. Dictionary of online behaviour can be found here, and I highly suggest you to have a look!