app design & development conference 2018

App Design & Development Conference 2018

Hello. My name is Anastasiia 💁‍. I'm a UI/UX designer at Eleken company in Kyiv, Ukraine. I started my career path 6 months ago and since then I keep my mind wide open to every opportunity that may help me to become better as a designer and as a person.

I was inspired to write this review by Tracy's Osborn talk on ADDC conference in Barcelona 🙌👩. Tracy is a designer, developer and author (Toronto, Canada). She shared some good practices in marketing for a new app promoting.

Some words a b out me: traveling is my passion. Meeting new people with different culture, mentality, background, experience and mindset is vital for me. A week ago I've attended App Design and Development Conference in Barcelona, Spain. That was my first conference experience abroad and it was super awesome 🔥. I've enjoyed beautiful city, gorgeous cuisine, delightful people and of course fascinating talks of high-level professional designers and developers from world top companies.

Tribute to organisers: organisation level 👍, venue 🏰, food 🤤, staff 🤘, guests 👩‍🎤👨‍🎤, attendees 🤪.

During the conference speakers have covered many topics:

designer and developer collaboration
AR & VR
chatbots
prototyping
depth sensing technology
gaming experience for UX
design for emerging markets

Eli Ganim, Engineering Manager, Facebook

The first one and maybe the most significant talk for me was about apps designed for emerging markets from Eli Ganim 👨‍🔧. Eli is an Engineering Manager at Facebook. He revealed the importance of building apps for users from such countries as China, India, Russia, Brazil as emerging markets will account for over 90% of new mobile subscribers globally by 2020. We all should absolutely keep this in mind while working on our own projects.

Dori Adar, the founder of Hands on Games and UX specialist, provided important takeaways from the gaming world to apply in almost every digital product design. During his talk we could observe real time experiment on how "Compelling Goal" influences frequency and eagerness of user experience, find out good patterns of teaching users how to use a product, learn the importance of random reward and storytelling in user experience.

Cristina Santamarina, the technology consultant and founder of the Neon project, shared the most important language challenges she faced when designing conversational interfaces (bots). During her talk Cristina proposed techniques how to deal with such problems as typos, slang, trolls, technological illiteracy and others.

Cherry on the cake 🍒 Sara Cambridge, User Experience researcher from Google. Sara presented her research that is focused on understanding of designer/developer collaboration. She has interviewed tones of designers and developers and shared her insights into what works and what does not for the teams. The most important lesson that I've learnt from this speech is that we should communicate a lot. Discuss, ask, advise, share, support each other on every stage of product development. Bring out issues and ideas, suggest solutions, be open to different perspectives.

The other thing that I find crucial especially for designers (devs) who just started their careers is the feeling of psychological unsafety. 👶 designer may have something to say, that can be helpful and will eventually improve the process, but he/she does not because he/she thinks that it's stupid, it's not worth to be mentioned, other colleagues will start laughing at him/her.

According to Sara we should think of our work as of a perpetual learning process. Making mistakes is not the end of the world and they even should be made while learning. That's why we need to speak up as much as possible. Only in this way psychological unsafety will be gradually gone.

Besides learning and discovering new things, I've met wonderful people that made my stay even better. Thank you Mert, Andrew, Antonia, Rob for sharing this experience with me ❤️.

Thanks to the dedicated organisers of the conference for your contribution in our professional and social lives 🙏.

Conclusion:

Go to conferences abroad 🛫.

Make people know your company and your country 🤝.

Share your vision 🙆‍.

Dance on bumping boat 💃.