User Experience Conference Provides UX Enthusiasts With a Look Into the Exciting Future of UX Design
Researchers, students, and industry professionals alike joined one another at the UT Dallas Computer Science Department for the 2019 Conference on User Experience (UX). The goal of the one-day conference was to provide a forum for UX Design enthusiasts who share the same passion so that they can explore and gain insight into the present and future state of user experience design, interactive design, user research, usability, accessibility, and other associated fields within UX Design. The UX Conference was hosted by the UT Dallas Computer Science Department in partnership with the Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association (DFW-UXPA) and the UT Dallas School of Arts and Emerging Technologies (ATEC).
The conference began with three parallel workshops in the morning followed by technical and creative talks led by prominent speakers from both industry and academia with networking opportunities throughout the day. The workshops, which are led by UX Design practitioners and professionals, worked to inspire its attendees while helping them to learn and build their skill set as well as grow their professional networks. The following is a list of the hands-on workshops included in the 2019 UX Design Conference, click here to read a more in-depth description of each workshop.
| Workshops |
|---|
| User Experience Design Workshop – Professor John Cole, UT Dallas Computer Science Department |
| Empathy Immersion Workshop – Seda Sookias Maurer, Sabre Accessibility Program Manager and Brian Sullivan, Director of Design Strategy at Sabre and Organizer of DFW UX Meetup |
| Content Strategy for Chatbots Workshop – Srikant Chari, UX Researcher at BMC Software |
During the second half of the day, attendees were provided with the opportunity to listen to UX Design professionals discuss, address and explore UX thought and design. Following the morning workshops, Cassini Nazir, Director of Design for the ArtSciLab and a Professor in the Arts and Technology School at UT Dallas, delivered the keynote talk titled, “Design of the past, present & future.” In his interactive talk, Nazir took an in-depth look into the past and future to examine the long arc of design and explore what user experience is fundamentally about.
During the latter part of the conference, attendees had the option to attend either technical or creative talks, which ran parallel to each other. The conference ended with a closing address from Brian Sullivan, Director of Design Strategy at Sabre and Organizer of DFW UX Meetup, who delivered his talk titled “Make the Invisible Visible: Getting More from Your Stakeholder Maps.” In his talk, Sullivan explained that by building a more usable stakeholder map you can have better conversations, review roles and responsibilities, determine what stakeholders’ value, and know how to communicate with each person more effectively.
The invited talks featured speakers who are experts in the field of UX Design and are passionate about designing great experiences for people and businesses. The following is a list of the talks from the 2019 UX Design Conference, click here to read a more in-depth description of each talk.
| Technical Track |
|---|
| Creating the Unforgettable User Journey – Jason Brewer, Senior UX Architect at Rent-A-Center |
| Computing Curriculum for Designers – Reflections on the Bauhaus – Professor Karen Doore, UT Dallas Computer Science Department |
| Designing for Enterprise UX using reusable modules – Aditya Kelkar, UX Consultant for the City of Dallas |
| Money Talks: A Look at the Conversational Design Process Behind Olivia.AI – Srikant Chari, UX Researcher at BMC Software, UX Research Consultant at Daito Design, and former TEDx Organizer |
| Usability Testing – Actionable Data in One Day – Daniel St. Clair, Senior UX Designer at Cinemark |
| Creative Track |
|---|
| Human by Design – Debi Ndindjock, UX Design Lead at IBM Watson Health |
| Accessibility Army of One – Seda Sookias Maurer, Sabre Accessibility Program Manager |
| Designing for Future Technology – Adaeze Okwesa, IoT focused UX Researcher HARMAN International |
| The Mission Driven Design Career – Jayneil Dalal, Senior UX Designer at AT&T |
| High Fructose Content: Why People Crave It – J. Schuh, Design Strategist at Sabre |
The CS Department co-organized another event on entrepreneurship in parallel with the UX Conference. The IITEAN Mentoring Workshop, co-organized with the IITNT group, an organization of North Texas area alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, sought to match mentors with startup companies under its IIT Entrepreneurship Advisor Network initiative. The event was attended by nine startups that the group is mentoring, along with their mentors and other participants. It included invited talks by Derek Chapin, Business Catalyst and Ex-CFO at Woot, and Amisha Sinha, marketing guru and adjunct faculty at SMU.
Below are photos from 2019 Conference on User Experience (UX) Design. Click here to view additional photos from the conference.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,800 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,000 master’s students, 190 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 41 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2018. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.