The UX-Driven Startup: Crafting an Effective Experience Vision

You have a great idea, a sophisticated technology and a product that meets an unmet need—but what will using your product or service feel like? What kind of experience do you want to create? While these questions may seem squishy, having a concrete answer can have tangible effects on your product and set it apart among competitors.

Whether you have an established product or an idea you can’t wait to get off the ground, this session will equip you to craft a concrete experience vision that can drive development and ensure that the experience surrounding your product is not accidental. User Experience is about more than usability and user interface elegance, it’s about having this kind of vision and making it real through purposeful design.

Drawing on her experience as a user experience designer for Adaptive Path and founding her own startup, Foodspotting, Alexa will introduce you to tactics developed to help Smart.fm transform their “adaptive learning platform” into a “motivating, social world of learning” and to get people excited about “spotting foods” long before a single screen was designed.

Through examples from real projects and step-by-step instructions, you will learn how to:

• Craft a set of experience principles that can inform decision-making.
• Create an “artifact from the future” that captures the imagination and articulates what your product will be like when it’s complete.
• Map out the ecosystem in which your product exists.
• Tap into metaphors and make believe to frame your thinking and inspire ideas.
• Tell your product’s story clearly using fuzzy, low-fidelity sketches.
• Assemble an experience poster that brings it all together.

You will leave this session equipped to create an experience vision for your startup and to put it to use to help you and your team make purposeful strategic and design decisions.