Amuse UX Conference, Budapest

Last week, I had the privilege of being part of a group attending the first edition of AmuseConf on behalf of our company. Amuse is “an international conference for anyone interested in how to design and develop successful products that users love”. It’s organized by the same good folks that bring us the outstanding CraftConf year after year, sponsored primarily by Prezi and UStream (and SAP in case of Amuse). They did a near-perfect job, with only minor glitches with the seating and catering on the first day. Considering that the Big Data oriented CrunchConf was also literally next door, the event was practically flawless. Fast, uninterrupted WiFi and no food options for vegetarians/vegans remained a hallmark this organizing team (even though Tom Illmensee, event MC is himself vegetarian 😉 ).

(BTW, if you’re wondering why so many tech conferences are being hosted in Budapest, the event’s WiFi password should give you a hint):

510 attendees from 32 countries (as far away as Australia) made Amuse a roaring success, as did its impressive lineup of Speakers. 27% of the speakers were women, which is great for a tech conference — I hope next year we have even more!

Below is a summary of the talks I found the most relevant to my work. But by no means does that mean you should skip the other talks… depending on where you are and what you’re doing, you might be interested in some of the eclectic topics covered such as:

• Designing web interfaces for children by Trine Falbe
• Conducting research outside “sample of convenience” by Bill Selman from Mozilla Foundation
• Design Thinking by Tobias Haug of SAP (my favorite quote: “Innovation = Execution x Creativity”)
• How to get your dream UX job by Andrew Doherty of Google (worth checking out just for his mad presentation skills)
• The Ethical Designer by Cennydd Bowles
• Storytelling in a multidevice landscape by Anna Dahlstrom

Design Equilibrium

By Jonathan Lupo

Jonathan opened the conference with a very engaging talk drawing parallels between businesses and ecosystems: a “balanced exchange of value between Actors, Enterprise and Brand”. He gave practical examples citing the application of Lynn Shostack’s work on Service Blueprinting to a transformation in the healthcare industry. I strongly encourage viewing his inspiring talk on YouTube.

His core suggestion is a separation of Product Design from Service Design. The latter “fills in whitespaces between points of [rich] engagement provided by products”, helping to restore balance to the overall experience, and hence the business ecosystem. This is the real intangible value of services, as opposed to products.

He also proposed the concept of an “Engagement Model”: a framework to contextualize all the data a business collects.

UX: Design as a Science

By Joel Marsh, author of the UX Crash Course

Joel’s key message was that “Scientific UX Design is reproducible”: essentially drawing on the principles of the Lean Startup and applying them to the UX domain. His presentation was one of the most popular and engaging ones, and his quotes and examples garnered a lot tons of positive feedback. One thing that struck me was his exposition on the two types of creativity: Creative expression and creative problem solving. He noted that an over-applicability of creative expression can make you feel good as a designer, but result in an over-designed and bloated product:

Another talk I would highly recommend watching when it comes out on UStream.tv.

Making Dog Food a Part of Your Balanced Diet

By Toby Sterrett

Toby used his work at Simple Bank to highlight the pros and cons of “eating your own dogfood”. The initial employees used the app themselves, and one of the downsides was that the missed revelation that users of such a smooth app had to deal with a paper form-based process to close their account, which took up to 20 days.

Another inspiring talk that you should definitely check out, full of quotes of wisdom like:

• “Delight is design’s superpower”
• A past discussion on Leadership strategy: “Build a shared vision, get the **** out of the way”
• “UX is not about throwing technology at a problem, but throwing people at a problem”

On the other hand, Simple A/B tested as many as 16 variations of their login page (for more examples, check out UserOnboard.com).

Live posters being created by @remarker_eu

How We Built Hotjar and Onboarded 50k Users in a Year

By Dr. David Darmanin

David used practical examples from Hotjar to support his model of “Drivers, Barriers and Hooks” when dealing with site visitors. He also put a quirky twist on some timeless wisdom:

MVP is the smallest possible product you need for your customers to tell you that it sucks #ux #lean #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

Hire people smarter than you. It's intimidating but you'll learn something & in the end they'll make you look good #ux #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

The two most amazing insights for me were:

• Hotjar captures every single customer interaction on a Trello board, and uses that feedback to prioritize their features.
  • They also make their roadmap public, which demonstrates their commitment and at the same time reduces enquiries about feature requests
• They use the income from their paid customers to fund the creative freedom to build features for their free customers

The Invisible Interface: Designing the Screenless Experience

By Avi Itzkovich

Avi, founder of UXSalon, opened with a discourse on recent editions of Microsoft Productivity Future Vision. From there he led the discussion on towards a future without bigger and wider screens (which wouldn’t require “superhuman arm strength”):

• “The most profound technologies are the ones that become invisible” 
  • Like automatically opening sliding doors
• “Voice UI is the future”
• “Gesture control is here to stay, but not on screens”

The Best Interface is No Interface

By Golden Krishna

Golden surmised that we are all “chipping away at digital chores”, and we don’t have to be “slaves to screens”. He has laid the foundations of the #NoUI movement with his book: “The Best Interface is No Interface”. His excellent talk (slides here) was supported by book reading and real examples. Also, don’t forget to check out his accompanying toolkit on “how to create elegant solutions with no screens”.

For further inspiration to join the movement,  take a look at his Producthunt collection of “interfaces that require little or no time with screens”.

Magical UX and the Internet of Things

By Josh Clark

Josh opened with an announcement of his book release: “Designing for Touch”. His presentation was literally magical, complete with a wand, to the point that he managed to tie in together excerpts from preceding talks and put the whole conference in perspective. I found a similar slidedeck from one of his previous talks here, and I highly recommend taking a look at it while we wait for the official conference videos to come up on Ustream.tv. It was a treasure trove of out-of-the box examples like:

•  Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES), which literally turns dirt into a high-tech, military-grade user interface… using not much more than a Kinect and projector
• Grab Magic, which brings superpowers to data transfer
• Propeller Health, which connects Asthma inhalers to phones for health monitoring

Josh’s key message was “interaction at the point of inspiration”: that we should think of “the whole world is an interface, just like it has always been”. He proposed “thereables” instead of wearables: bits of smart technology in the physical space where we would expect to interact with them, not something we burden ourselves by carrying or wearing all day long. To this end, he suggested that “the smartphone is Magic Wand 1.0 for everyone” and we should start thinking of it as just more than a screen.

Regarding user interfaces, he had 3 bits of advice that I found remarkable:

• “Technology should amplify our humanity”
• “We shouldn’t educate users on how technology works, unless we really *have* to”
• “Honor intention, don’t assume it”

Josh ended with a call to action:

We have bigger problems to solve. @bigmediumjosh #amuseconf #ux #innovation

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 30, 2015

Like this one.

 

 

 

 

 

Craft Conf 2015, Day 3

Continued from Day 2, here is a summary of talks I attended on Day 3:

From the Monolith to Microservices: Lessons from Google and eBay

By Randy Shoup | Video | Slides

Another eye-opening presentation with valuable insights, such as the fact that [a big organization like Google] doesn’t need architects, it just needs standardized communication and standardized interfaces. And that one of the biggest mistakes people make with microservices is reflecting the provider’s model instead of the consumer’s model. I highly recommend his talk, because it is based on the analysis of several Silicon Valley giants, successful either in the past or the present.

Interaction Driven Design

By Sandro Mancuso | Video | Slides

Sandro’s presentation was full of real examples rather than just theory. I had never heard of the Walking Skeleton before. It was an interesting intersection of DDD (Domain Driven Design), MVC-type architectures and SOLID principles, leading up to a pragmatic way of structuring and packaging software projects. Other advice from Sandro included modeling behavior, not state and not necessarily representing repositories as first-class citizens.

WebSocket for the Real-Time Web and the Internet of Things

By Peter Moskovits | Video | Slides

Not only was it an amazing presentation with live demos, Peter was also fully prepared with a backup plan for everything – including a PDF version of his presentation. After a historical perspective & technical explanation of how WebSockets work, he jumped into Kaazing demos which you can also experience online here. The most interesting was a kind of MVP for disseminating airline telemetry data (here).

Why Is An API Like a Puppy?

By Ade Oshineye | Video | Slides

RESTful APIs are not the solution to all of the world’s problems: Ade was short, succinct and insightful. The title of his talk reflected the fact that an API is an expensive long term commitment, it’s not just about the initial cost of software development. He got a lot of attention when he revealed that Google’s most successful API is AdWords, and it’s SOAP, not REST. Although REST is theoretically good, it doesn’t usually fit well with the real world consumer’s way of thinking. Another one of his gems was that if your [public] API is not being spammed/abused, then either no one is using it, or it’s happening and you’re not aware of it.

Implementing the Saga Pattern

By Caitie McCaffrey | Video | Slides

There wasn’t anything interesting to me during this time slot, so I decided to go with this one just for the Halo reference. There was just one picture of Halo. And a lot of “so” and “like”.

Techniques and Tools For a Coherent Discussion About Performance in Complex Architectures

By Theo Schlossnagle | Video | Slides

Theo decided it would be a good idea to plaster all his slides with huge pictures of steak. Anyway, after establishing that User Experience is measured in milliseconds, and that performance is also about the time spent between service layers, he covered distributed tracing systems such as Dapper and Zipkin.

Great Engineering, Failed Product

By Marty Cagan | Video | Slides

Marty drew on decades of experience in Silicon Valley to summarize why great products and companies fail over and over again. I highly recommend watching his inspiring and insightful talk. Some of the things he touched upon while comparing successful and poorly performing teams:

• Customers and company executives are a bad source of product ideas, because they don’t know what’s technically achievable
• Developers are a good source, and so is Data (analytics, metrics, usage)
• Multi-billion dollar projects are not based on a Business Case accurately predicting future revenue
• Roadmaps are not a good indicator because Customers have other options available to them
• Think Time to Money, not Time to Market – which means more than one iteration is involved
• Product Managers are not mere [user] story writers – they need to have a deep understanding of the business, industry, customers and constraints
• Most teams work in a way that gives them probably 20% of the benefit of Agile Methodologies
• Value outcomes over output; think in terms of results, not projects
• Successful teams run as many as 20 MVP experiments in a week – even if it involves hardware
• Successful companies use an OKR approach to measure progress

• The four product development questions:
  1. Will the customers choose it? (Customer Validation)
  2. Will they be able to use it? (User Experience)
  3. Can we build it? (Feasibility)
  4. Can our stakeholders support it? (e.g. Legality)

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Craft Conf 2015, Day 2

I had the privilege of attending the second year of CRAFT, a tech conference in Budapest focused on software craftsmanship. The last year (which was the first time it was held) had completely blown my mind. A year later I still keep referring back to the talks and haven’t finished fully absorbing them and putting all those inspiring ideas into practice.

In short…

Craft Conf 2014 was better. The speakers came from a more diverse background, the talks spanned a multitude of unrelated topics and I remember it being very, very hard to choose from talks happening in parallel. Each minute spent there was a revelation.

This year, though, many of the talks seemed to be plug for a company or a product, in disguise. Certainly there were brilliant takeaways, but not at the same scale as the previous year.

In my opinion, 2014 was also held in a better venue, although the 2015 venue was outstanding too, as far as tech conference venues go. But the rooms were too far spread out (the map was inaccurate), the acoustics were bad everywhere except the Main Room and unlike 2014, the WiFi was not flawless. Lastly, there were far fewer food choices, longer queues, no bottled water (even for the speakers) and therefore a lot of glasses clanking.

On the positive side, the schedule was followed down to the minute, the live video streaming was smooth and considering the scale of the event (1300 attendees), everything was beautifully organized. I’m not complaining – it’s just that the first CRAFT had set a pretty high standard.

(Video and Slides links will be updated by next weekend, when they become available)

Agile Engineering in a Safety-Critical World

By Nancy Van Schooenderwoert | Video | Slides

“Instead of freezing the ocean, learn to ride the waves” – Nancy’s talk was mainly about how our need for predictability for effective coordination is at odds with our need for fast learning to handle unknowns. She pointed out that in the agile context, “Architecture is any design decision that you cannot easily change”.

There was the customary reference to WikiSpeed to dispel the myth that hardware changes can’t fit within 2-4 week iterations. And an interesting one to a paper called TIR45 from AAMI: Guidance on the use of AGILE practices in the development of medical device software.

Coding Culture

By Sven Peters | Video | Slides

Sven’s talk was both informative and inspiring. Some of the key takeaways:

• Innovation needs time
• Stop and celebrate wins, however small they may be
• Balance your passion for code with your passion for customers
• Turn your passion into product
• Value trust, autonomy and transparency (Atlassian achieves this by using chat over other communication means)
• Products come and go, culture stays

Take a look at Atlassian’s Mood App and Stash Reviewer Suggester.

Building Reliable Distributed Data Systems

By Jeremy Edberg | Video | Slides

This one was good, until we went deep diving into the NetFlix Simian Army, which was also good but could have been summarized in just one slide. One thing that stood out from Jeremy’s advice was to “build for three”, because if you can overcome problems there then the solution can be [more] easily scaled up to n.

Don’t forget to check out NetFlix Open Source Software Center.

Oh! You Pretty Tools

By Andrew Bayer | Video | Slides

Andrew gave an interesting talk about the role of internal tools and their developers in the organization, covering both the pros and the cons. For example while making the build or buy decision, consider the fact that people are more expensive than software. And some thoughtful insights, like how Integration Tests can double-up as the roadmap to your tool’s usage. He also revealed that Cloudera runs ~2000 Jenkins CI builds every day(!)

The rest of it was basically about, and lessons learned from, CloudCat.

Testing and Integration (The Remix)

By Ines Sombra | Video | Slides

Ines entertainingly summarized everything we know so far, and topped it off with new insights for a good measure.  She emphasized:

• The importance of lightweight short-lived branches so that CI is not overlooked
• The more likely a test is to fail, the sooner you should run it
• The testing of provisioning systems, such as Chef Recipes, too
• How test setup time and parallelization are the key factors in minimizing the testing cycle time

She recommended this talk about the Google Build System.

Her punchline was that CI is a predictor of professional maturity at the organizational and individual level, and she ended with a “rantifesto” about building a culture of quality.

Beyond Features: Rethinking Agile Planning and Tracking

By Dan North | Video | Slides

From Cutting to Curing: Dan presented the powerful and inspiring idea that maybe software engineering is more like surgery than the civil engineering principles that we currently use to manage it. Agile methodologies essentially optimize for predictability, and this not necessarily a good thing. He mused on how a 2-week sprint is just enough time for a mini-waterfall, and thus we are all basically whitewater rafting.

After reviewing where the Agile Manifesto has brought us, he set an ambitious new goal to sustainably minimize the lead time to business impact. 

He ended with:

• The role of Features, Delivery and Kaizen
• Schedule, Measure, Track, Showcase
• How Value Stream Mapping can reveal surprises like typically a piece of work spends upto 90% of it’s time waiting for dependencies

How To Save Innovation From Itself

By Alf Rehn | Video | Slides

For me, Alf’s talk was the highlight of the event. It was so good and so inspiring that I won’t even summarize it here. Go watch it!

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The day ended with a party thrown by EPAM, which included free beer, a DJ-saxophone duo and a surprise flashmob.

You may also want to read my review of Day 3 of Craft Conf 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

India: As seen from Hungary

I get asked a lot of friendly questions about India from my curious colleagues at work. The more we talk, the more I realize that India and Hungary are not so different after all. Last week I presented this prezi during a team building event at work, in the ambitious attempt to answer all the questions (and myths) in one place. On a related note, it was my first prezi and I am hooked to the product. Although I had some minor glitches towards the end, overall I am quite sure I wouldn’t have been able to achieve the same effect with the same ease of use had I used Powerpoint instead, even if I had spent more than twice the time on it.