Vocabularies:

UX = user experience

UXHK= An User Experience learning event annually held in Hong Kong since 2011

March marked WILDDESIGN’s third year of participating in UXHK, Asia’s foremost user experience and service design seminar and workshop. Like other workshop events, UXHK is about connection and education, but it’s particularly worthwhile because attendees tend to be genuinely interested in and passionate about designing the best possible user experiences. The field attracts people in large part because it marks the intersection of customer facing and back-end design, and it’s fascinating to see the industry’s brightest minds explore the cutting-edge ways that the science of UX design is rapidly advancing.

During the seminar’s kick-off speech, the organizers reminded all attendees: “forget the UX label – just focus on the initial needs of the user.”This mentality defined the event, which brought in people from diverse fields including research, marketing, technology and business, all with the same goal of providing a better overall user experience. Two of our designers, Jon Walmsley and François de Martrin-Donos, attended this year’s UXHK workshop and met many people with this same motivation. Of course, they went there not only to broaden their knowledge and skills, but also to share their understanding of the UX-based design approach and strategy.

In many WILDDESIGN projects, we always thinking from a user’s perspectives and this helps us create more relevant, effective concepts. Combining our professional design skills with a deep dive into the user’s situation and perspective makes it much easier to find a solution that will truly satisfy and assist the user. We also encourage our clients to alter their usual role in the design process and join our designers in “co-creating” the final product or service, giving input based on their own experience as users.

To paraphrase UXHK speaker Bill De Rouchey, “no one has a UX career.” While UX remains a popular buzzword, UX design is still a relative young discipline in design creative world. That’s why the UXHK is a valuable platform to share our experience and gain constructive feedback- real case studies are always more convincing than textbooks. With ever-accelerating changes in technology and, consequently, the needs of consumers, fields like human-centered design and UX design will become more important in developing new products and even companies. As the whole world is witnessing the wider positive influence of this design approach –why don’t start to integrating UX thinking into your development process?

Further reading:

How human-centered research helped us win an iF Product Design Award

User centered field research in China