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       An Event Apart is a series of three-day-long UX Conferences held throughout the US in the following locations: Washington DC, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Orlando. An Event Apart offers attendees three full days of "design, code and content"- three days worth of opportunity to learn, connect, and explore. An Event Apart (AEA) offer presentations and panels from industry leaders, thinkers and innovators, focusing on a range of topic today and tomorrow.

The annual VRX conference was held in San Francisco, CA on December 7 & 8 2017.  Here are a few of the major takeaways from Key Lime Interactive’s Lead Researcher and Strategist, Rick Damaso, from this year’s event. 

“User Experience designers and researchers can impact the course of events by creating technology, products and services that are inclusive at their core.”- WUD2017

    This past Thursday, November 9th, was the Puget Sound World Usability Day 2017 event, which focused on the theme of inclusion through user experience. This theme addressed the power of technology as a medium that brings people together and helps us to embrace our similarities. This powerful theme attracted a wide range of industry members, from Google to Amazon, to two Key Limers. This WUD 2017 was extra special for us because our amazing VP of Client Insights, Steve Foster, gave a presentation on Biometrics in UX Research.

Dallas is so much more than cowboys, great BBQ, and big hair. As most know, they have a notable UX community that gets together frequently within the UXPA Dallas group. Last Thursday, we had the opportunity to attend their recent Meetup gathering hosted at Improving and give it a Key Lime Interactive splash.

Global Research study pros from Groupon, eBay, Google and Key Lime Interactive were seated on a panel at the International UXPA Conference event in San Diego in late June. They came together to share their words of wisdom for successful global user testing endeavors.

The Gaming Analytics Summit held in San Francisco brought together a nice crowd of headliner video games such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, Destiny, Angry Birds, and Candy Crush. In attendance were the big gaming giants such as Sony PlayStation, Xbox, Activision, and Electronic Arts. Being an avid gamer and data analyst made this conference extremely informative. The topics ranged from in-game analytics to building a company structure that best handles big data. My focus at this conference was to see how the user’s voice was being heard in the video game development pipeline. Qualitative interviews meant very little to this group who focus more on big data and analytics, but some companies set themselves apart by emphasizing the importance of the user in maximizing their earning potential.

There were two topics in particular that I found most interesting at this year's NetFinance conference in Miami:

1. Digital strategies to support the Omni-channel experience
2. Is Personal Finance Management (PFM) dead?

Let’s face it. We have become a “Google it” society. We can answer almost any question in .00012 seconds (according to Google’s search results page) and get a pretty accurate response. So, before attending the LeanUX15 conference in Brooklyn, NY, I wondered what would Google’s response be for UX’s impact on modern day Systems Development Life Cycles (SDLCs)? Was it even possible to wrap terms like DevOps, Kanban, Lean or Agile into a neat package with a UX bow on top?

One of the big themes of nearly every SXSW event we attended was personalization. Even events about the Future of TV had panelists talking about supplemental apps or making sure people could watch on the devices they chose. A news discussion with Dan Rather and Dan Pfeiffer also discussed how people consume news on the platforms of their choice, like Facebook and Twitter. Customers are looking for a more personal, customized experience in the place of their choice.
Predictive technology is making big strides in making these more curated experiences accurate. Facebook’s facial recognition technology is making use of their extensive data on user tagging so they can auto-tag your photographs when you post them. This technology may be more accurate than that of law enforcement. Netflix’s House of Cards was famously made by using data to understand that a political drama starring Kevin Spacey directed by David Fincher would be popular. An important consideration with using predictive data for customer recommendations is providing said data to customers.