Front Conference: Design meets technology
"Where Design Meets Technology": At the Front Conference in Zurich, designers and developers presented on an equal footing. Burkhard Müller from the Hamburg agency Mutabor was there as a speaker - and has summarized his highlights for Werbewoche.ch.
An event with top organization at a great location, plus a speaker line-up on an international level: The visit to the Front Conference in Zurich at the end of August was definitely worth it! What were my personal highlights?
Accessibility is "the next big thing
Laura Kalbag opened the conference by showing how digital design has evolved between the 1990s and the present. From a playground with pixel fonts and websites made of spreadsheets, to the interactive movies in Flash, to today where we have user-centric services that enhance our everyday lives. Vincent J. Brathwaite explained why the future of leadership lies in communication and empathy for everyone's needs. In doing so, he showed how design as a discipline has evolved and "come of age" over the past thirty years. He advocated for designers to take responsibility: Not only for average users, but also users with weaknesses and impairments.
Designers can learn from the Allies
The exciting presentation on design decision errors by Jon Yablonski, author of "Laws of UX", took the audience back to the time of World War II. At that time, in the fight against Nazi Germany, the Allies analyzed the specific locations where their planes were being fired upon in order to reinforce them at those locations. However, since they only examined the planes that returned from combat, they used the wrong places for their optimizations: For said machines, Yablonski explained, they should have instead strengthened the areas that were not hit, because those would have caused them to crash if they were hit. The learning: By collecting incomplete data, crucial errors can occur and the actual problems can be completely overlooked.
PowerPoint is still salvageable
When you start PowerPoint, the first thing you're asked is which template you want, then you design page after page and have endless possibilities to customize each slide. And that's a problem, because PowerPoint doesn't empower users to tell a good story, but distracts from it with lots of gimmicks. At least that's the position of Oliver Reichenstein, founder of Information Architects, who developed the MS Word competitor iA Writer with his studio over ten years ago - an iPad hit from the very beginning.
At the Front Conference, Reichenstein has now presented the answer to PowerPoint as a world premiere. Like "iA Writer", the new app impresses with its simplicity: When you start the app, you write and structure the story into headings. The headings are automatically visualized by the app on slides, the rest of the text is seen by the presenter in the Notes. Optionally, images can be added. Layout and formatting are done by the app itself. The target group is not designers, of course. In the tests, professors, students and pupils in particular stood out as a user group. The app will be available in the App Store in a few weeks.
Voice interfaces still have their best time ahead of them
The problem with Siri, Alexa and the like is that, as a user, you can't see what commands you can give them. And technically, they are not yet so advanced that they understand everything you tell them. But they are developing fast, and once they can make sense of the thousand most common questions and commands, they will gain momentum. Front conference speaker Ben Sauer therefore recommended that attendees prepare now and, above all, organize their content centrally. Today, chatbots, call centers, FAQs and Alexa Skill are maintained by different teams with different content. Voice interfaces have a future, and companies should prepare for this today.
Each service has passive users
The better the needs of users are met, the more popular and successful a service is. But every service also has passive users who don't use it but are still affected by it: E-scooters running wild on the street are hindering people. AirBnB makes rental prices in metropolitan areas skyrocket for all residents:inside. And the obvious: Fast delivery services lead to more crowded streets, pressure on delivery services and more packaging waste. My contribution to the Front Conference was therefore that passive users also have needs, and in the long term they are decisive for the acceptance of a service within society.
* Burkhard Müller is Chief Digital Officer at the Hamburg-based design agency and brand consultancy Mutabor.
