A new frontier is opening up in UX design: voice! Products like Amazon's Echo and Google Home offer designers a new place to play, and new skills to learn. If GUI design is 80% design and 20% testing, VUI is 20% design and 80% testing. In this 90-minute seminar, learn about the design process, get busy crafting dialogue, and learn some fundamental principles. You'll see just how different the design methods are, and what the 'Wizard of Oz' testing method is. Come find your inner bot!

Advances in narrow artificial intelligence make possible agentive systems, which do things directly for their users in custom ways users want them done. (A simple example is an automatic pet feeder.) These technologies deliver on the promise of user-centered design more than ever before, but present fresh challenges in understanding their unique promises (say, time savings), pitfalls (say, risk of losing skills), and requirements (say, describing complex goals explicitly). Join Chris Noessel as he discusses this emerging practice, detailed in his forthcoming book Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People, sharing lots of examples that bring it to life.

After a few years of frantic deployment of wearables, the hype has cooled and the reality is: most of those devices didn't tap the very real potential of wearable tech. Why do so many wearables suck, and how can we do better? Author and strategist Liza Kindred’s 20-year career in fashion and technology has explored both the challenges and benefits of (literally) weaving tech into our lives. She’ll offer a host of practical examples that illustrate an eye-opening framework of values to guide us in how we make and use new technology, with wearables as the lens.

This talk will lay out the challenges and point to some potential approaches for the user experience design of dynamic, adaptive, predictive devices (such as the Nest Thermostat, the Amazon Echo, the Edyn water monitor, etc.) that use machine learning to create predictive models of people and sensors. The Internet of Things promises that by analyzing data from many IoT devices our experience of the world becomes better and more efficient. The environment predicts our behavior, anticipates problems, and intercepts them before they occur. The notion is seductive: an espresso machine that starts a fresh latte as you’re thinking it’s a good time for coffee; office lights that dim when it’s sunny and power is cheap. However, we don’t have good examples for designing user experiences of predictive analytics. Attendees will see examples of several different systems and leave with a list of UX challenges to creating behavioral systems, along with potential approaches to addressing those challenges.

Is it true that the next generation of user interfaces are conversational interfaces? This presentation looks beyond the hype to examine why conversational interfaces offer new opportunities for swifter more satisfying interaction. It also shines a light on some of the pitfalls into which conversational interfaces can easily fall. It unpacks the psychology of human conversation and shows how you can turn this into design principles for more satisfying user experiences–whether you’re building a conversational user interface or a standard touch UI.

We are entering a time when automated, robotic products are becoming a day-to-day reality. The combination of affordable sensors, advances in robotics, and home network availability has enabled a new type of sophisticated smart object to enter our world in almost every aspect of daily life such as cooking, cleaning, entertainment, transportation, security and hygiene, to name a few. In this talk, product designer Carla Diana will provide a lively overview of the landscape of smart objects that exist today along with an exploration of the potential for new objects to be designed for the near future. She will discuss how holistic design methods using light, sound and motion can be used to build engaging product experiences that fully embrace the rich relationships among people, objects, and information. This talk will highlight ways to envision product experiences, followed by a discussion of design methodologies that can be used to explore and quickly iterate through ideas that arrive at human-centered concepts built around a specific product behaviors.

Over the next two decades, connected products will demand an unprecedented amount of user trust. Technologists and designers will ask the public for yet more of their attention, more of their data, more of their lives. AIs will know users’ deepest secrets. Co-operating devices will automate security and safety. Autonomous vehicles will even make life-or-death decisions for passengers. But ours is an industry still unwilling to grapple with the ethical, social, and political angles of this future. We mistakenly believe that technology is neutral; that mere objects cannot have moral relevance. And so we make embarrassing blunders—racist chatbots, manipulative research, privacy violations—that undermine trust and harm those we should help. This is a dangerous trajectory. We urgently need a deeper ethical dialogue about emerging technology, and interaction design’s role within it.