Our highlights from Digital Shoreditch 2015

UX for your Granny, escalator experiences and augmented reality — here are our highlights from Digital Shoreditch.

“Let’s Get Real! Groundbreaking Virtual and Augmented Reality”

By Daniel Cheetham (Head of Interactive, Happy Finish)

Virtual Reality was impossible to ignore at Digital Shoreditch this year. From the moment William Hill handed out those google cardboards it was clear that VR would be to digital shoreditch what Meerkat was to SXSW.

One of our favourites (from a lot of excellent talks on VR) came from Daniel Cheetham of Happy Finish. Armed with an array of VR and AR tools, he spoke about some of the techniques Happy Finish are using already and some of the things which may be possible in the future.

“The time is now for VR, the technology has caught up with the hype!”

With huge potential across many industries, from gaming to advertising, shopping to watching sport — it’s impossible not to be excited about the experiences VR will bring to the future of UX. With forecasts showing that AR/VR market could be worth as much as £150 billion in revenue by 2020 — it’s probably about time the future-savvy UX designer began to think about it.

“Designing Responsive Experiences”

By Matt Gibson (Production Director, Cyber Duck)

“Responsive design has grown up. It’s 2015 — if your site isn’t responsive, then it’s probably broken”

When Matt Gibson of Cyber Duck began his talk with this stern wake-up call, we instantly knew it would be one of the golden talks Digital Shoreditch would throw up this year.

We all know the modern web is a hostile environment to design for, we now have to consider a huge range of problems from differing browser capabilities to the lack of data/wifi! Matt has a great way of embracing this experience design minefield:

“We need to be designing experiences like escalators. If an escalator stops working — it’s still a set of stairs!”

Matt ended this talk with a call to the UX community:

“Let’s make truly responsive experiences that we, our clients and ultimately our users will love.”

We’re definitely on board with that.

The SapientNitro Social Stock Ticker was awesome — We eventually managed to spot our tweets!

“Badass UX For My Granny”

By Crispin Reed, Jamie Wilson and Ian Rutter

It’s something we’re all a little guilty of — designing for the tech-savvy and young whilst ignoring the needs of the old. In this talk, the panelists discussed the challenge of user experience design for ‘Experienced’ (Read: Older) users. After all, there is more to designing for the older generations than simply making the text size bigger!

As with all user experience design, it’s really just a case of empathy; designing with needs of the actual user in mind; and ensuring you don’t make any distasteful UX faux pas like this:

“Life Insurance” is directly next to “Funeral Planning”!

Forget the misconception, older customers do want to participate with more modern, mainstream digital products, they don’t just want stigmatised products designed solely for them!

“Good design is ageless. If something makes sense it shouldn’t matter if you’re 9 or 90!”

Therefore, shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the UX designers to design age-inclusive experiences? After all, good design is ageless!

By Tom Adcock, User Experience Consultant

Did you go to Digital Shoreditch this year? What were your highlights? Tweet us @uxconnections!