Designing Great Experiences: What Matters Now

Over the past few years our world has changed. Two-thirds of North Americans own smartphones. A billion people are on Facebook. CNN reports news that’s broken on Twitter. The Internet is increasingly the connective tissue in many of our lives.

Many of our experiences are now mediated by technology, and some of that technology is very good indeed. We carry around pocket-sized computers made with a watchmaker’s precision and share things with our friends using software that collapses an incredibly sophisticated pastiche of systems into a single “like” button.

But we only have to browse a corporate website, or try to pay for parking at a local surface lot, or use a self-checkout machine at a supermarket, to see that most of the technology we use wasn’t designed with us in mind. Sometimes it’s not designed at all, leaving us frustrated and powerless (and occasionally in possession of yet another parking ticket).

In reality, when it comes to hardware and software, there’s a thin film of beauty overtop a deep pool of suck.

For people who work with technology this is a tremendous opportunity. An opportunity to do more than just build websites, but to create experiences that make a difference in people’s lives. In this presentation, Gene will discuss the tools and techniques nForm uses to design great experiences, and talk about how you can do it too for your websites and applications.