Design by Fire Conference 2012

Making any product is an exciting as well as challenging endeavor, especially in technology and software. As humans we are prone to let our creativity run free — but freedom is not always the best solution to solving problems. Sometimes we need constraints more than anything else to truly ignite our creativity.

In his session, Faruk will talk about the values and lessons learned from imposing (sometimes arbitrary) constraints on projects, applied against UI, software, and API design.

Experience design has gone soft. It's our own fault. We worry about users and best practices and working collaboratively. We design for safety, when we should aim for adventure. We believed those who told us users are idiots, and the work shows.

In this session, Andrew discusses the value of designing for a smarter user, and answers the question: What's Wrong with Elitist UX?

Today's web users are accustomed to personalised shopping recommendations, customized news and tailored content. But taste profiling is just the beginning. If you want to find out how your customers tick you need to know about persuasion profiles. By using persuasion profiles you can learn how your individual customers respond to persuasion and select the optimal persuasion strategy.

In this session Arjan will introduce persuasion profiling and show you how you can increase conversion rates by getting into the heads of your customers.

Ben Sykes got stuck at Los Angelos Airport and was unable to speak at the Design by Fire 2012. We are very glad that Arjan Haring agreed to step in.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames

The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn on mute on your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments — which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored — can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that's beloved. This talk provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products: as a series of microinteractions that are essential to bringing personality and delight to applications and devices. We'll discuss the secret history of microinteractions, then delve into the structure of microinteractions: Triggers, Rules, Feedback, and Loops.

Business managers have begun to consider that perhaps their teams could be more innovative and less wasteful. This presents a fantastic opportunity for designers.

But what does Lean Startup mean? And will it play well with User Experience? A crash course on Lean Startup, Customer Development, and how these trends are resolving some of the most difficult problems UX professionals face.

The future is real,
when we see users as people,
when designers are real,
when brands are authentic,
when our work is informed by idealism,
and we take it personally.

The future is what we want it to be, let's make it real.
Mike & Maaike share their experiences and excitement for what's to come…

Ads and content are often antagonists in a product's design. Both compete for attention and scarce real estate. Steady decline in ad engagement however, has lead to ads becoming more prominent than content itself. Ads have now become the necessary evil that lets content be free.

Great products align monetization with experience. At Twitter we believe that ads need to rise in quality to the level of the content. By building in the right incentives for advertisers and paying attention to how users respond, we can change what ads mean to you. In this session, Meekal will investigate a future where you look forward to ads just as much as content because they have earned the right to your attention.

The Internet of Things is finally about to happen; with companies such as Electric Imp creating an easy to use infrastructure for connecting everything to the Internet we now have to ask ourselves what are the conversations we're going to be having with these connected things?

In this session, Brendan talks about his experiments so far with the Internet of Things, why he doesn't get excited about talking to his dishwasher, but is excited about the future of meaningful conversations with the things that surround us.