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.

Below is a compilation of some of the most relevant points from some sessions I was able to attend. More information and resources can be found here.

       The autonomous vehicle is more than just a blurred dream that is still off in the distant future; it’s already happening. Recently, the first self-driving taxi service has been launched in Singapore. It is predicted that it’s only a matter of a couple of years before fully automated driving vehicles will be available for purchase on the consumer’s market (Tesla is already taking incremental steps to make semi-autonomous driving vehicles available to the public). However, only a few companies like Google and Volvo have been testing fully automated driving cars on public roads. 

         In 2018, research reports from the ACLU emerged indicating that Amazon’s facial recognition technology had reportedly “confused” the faces of 28 congressmen with the faces of known criminals. Let’s unpack that statement. First, Amazon has been developing facial recognition technology, called Rekognition, which can provide “highly accurate facial analysis and facial recognition on images and video.” In 2018, Amazon was actively making movements towards selling this technological tool to law enforcement. The ACLU, among other organizations and individuals, were concerned with the implications of utilizing such technology.  In turn, the ACLU conducted its own study employing Rekognition facial technology. Their research uncovered that Rekognition technology was not as accurate of a facial recognition tool as had been perceived, and resulted in a large number of mismatched faces. Most importantly, the ACLU reported that Rekognition disproportionately misidentified faces of people of color- as highlighted by the 28 faces of congressmen that were misidentified as being the faces of known criminals. While Amazon and the ACLU debated over these results, the findings published by the ACLU point towards a bigger issue- in what ways are racial biases manifesting themselves in facial recognition technology and how can this cause harm to communities of color?

         
      From exhaustive manuals to lengthy lines of texts with bright red arrows to fully integrated narratives, game tutorials became more complex as both available interactions and user expectations grew. An industry valued as a billion dollar market with over 2,700 companies located across America and completely saturated with customer options totaling at over 9,000 titles released on Steam in 2018 alone, is it any wonder that games would dedicate so much time and effort to the first entry point a user sees? Teaching users the skills necessary to master the basics isn’t only used in games of course. In UX design, we are more accustomed to calling this process ‘on-boarding.’ However, many products’ on-boarding processes are dry and overwhelm users by front-loading a ton of knowledge at once. In the words of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Ralph Koster “game design is about clarity that teaches complexity.” The key word here is teach. As UX Designers, we need to treat learning as the equivalent to fun and game tutorials are an excellent starting point.

       More and more the world of banking and investing is moving into the online and technological world. Terms like “cryptocurrency” and “bitcoin” have steadily been gaining popularity as user’s are finding ways to handle their finances in a way that matches today’s fast-paced, digital world.  In relation to online financial going ons, another term that is gaining a lot of recent attention is “blockchain”. Blockchain is not a new term, but it is generating increasing buzz since they will have a massive impact on the future of online banking, investing, digital identity, and more. 

      Many of us at KLI are trying different ways of staying healthy: some of us do yoga, Crossfit, hiking- one of us is even on a rugby team. Swimming and running are my exercises of choice, and I usually choose to go for a run. In my time preparing for half marathons and 5ks, I have tried several apps to use while running. Recently I learned that one of my colleagues is also a runner, so we started talking about the different apps that we use or have tried in the past. We would continue to point out what worked really well and what didn’t which made me wonder what actually makes a running app great for runners?

BREAKING NEWS

The 2018 midterm elections are on November 6th!

….but it is unlikely that this is the first time that you are hearing about them. With all the news, coverage, and spin, we at KLI asked: “is UX being considered when covering politics?” We know that there are other places that you can find political opinions and hot takes, so you will not find any in this article.  I will be staying focused on the UX of communicating and understanding politics, specifically on how different news organizations and outlets have tried to cover the midterm elections.

      As we have discussed before, big data is the study of data sets that are so large that traditional data-processing software cannot analyze it all. Big data, although requiring a different kind of data-processing system, big data allows researchers and analysts to utilize data that was not being previously been taken advantage of, and allows them to generate new insights. Since big data sets contain so much information that may have previously gone unnoticed, it can help to inform strategic business moves, feature areas of improvement and also be used to help predict future trends.

     Competitive Intelligence (CI) is something that is often thought of as a great concept but is not always implemented as a business tool, even though it should be. CI is a useful and critical a business tool that helps business to stay competitive within their fields. Let's start with what it is; Competitive Intelligence is the process and action of collecting, identifying, analyzing information about products, customers, and competitors within a specific industry.