Books, Walking, and the Ethics of Scale

Systems and products that have the most influence on the world today tend to have the least presence. What tools can we use to make their intangibility and intensely unhuman scale more human and tangible? We'll look at book design, how designers of the 20th century have tackled this problem, and how meditative practices such as vipasanna and walking are useful tools in the contemporary human toolkit.

The Small Things That Add Up: How to Find What Design Factors Influence Conversion Rates

How do you know what consumers expect from your site? Every shopper is different and every shopping visit is different. Industry stats tell only part of the story. You need to crack the hood and analyze your own real user data.

Tammy will outline how and why to gather real user data, extract action-oriented insights, create a better shopper experience, and improve business metrics.

Building Resilient Frontend Systems

It’s time to accept that system and network failures are inevitable and to start designing our systems to withstand them. Accomplishing this isn’t easy but we’ve learnt a few tricks along the way which we would love to share!

I’ll explain the principles behind our approach as well as detailing some of the solutions we have put in place: covering areas of automation, instrumentation and continuous testing in production. Come and learn 19 ways BuzzFeed designs their frontend to be resilient to failure!

Eight Talks, Lightning Fast!

A Sneak Peak of Alva

Tilman Frick

Even with the latest tools, design artefacts are still a product of waste. Alva enables designers to work directly together with developers and coded elements to create prototypes that work like the final product. We'll give you a sneak peak of Alva in just 4 minutes.

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Educational Technologies - Design and Usability Challenges

Tanja Adam

A teacher's perspective: teachers are encouraged to use modern technologies for their teaching. What tools can I use in order to combine pedagogical needs and design at the same time? Open source learning management platforms such as Moodle are the industry standard. They have a huge potential.

Design matters if we want students to be engaged with educational technologies. What if I cannot code? Where can I find tools and plugins that help me re-design to meet my didactical claims? We need to face it, teaching and studying needs good and modern design and engaging colors to be successful!

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Understand Data-streams with Marble-diagrams

Sjoerd Valk

Websites and applications are becoming more and more based on datastreams and asynchronous behaviour. Frameworks and best practices are moving to a reactive way of handling these data-streams. Understanding data-streams can be hard, to test them can even harder. With marble-diagrams we can understand and test our data-streams and observables.

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Internationalized Domain Name - Wonderful World of Inconsistency

Szymon Nowicki

IDN gains importance since web is more and more international. Whether you focus on Asian markets, or wish to have an emoji domain for your homepage, you will stumble upon many issues when using or supporting IDN. Some are expected, some not. This short talk would give you an overview on the subject and show some common problems with suggested solutions.

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The 6-weeker – from idea to lead generating prototype

Frederick Hofmann

How can you manage to find a product idea, code 70 screens, create 150 learning videos and inspire companies to want this product in just 6 weeks?

We’ll give a glimpse of the methods & tools that helped us to build a prototype called DLX for Haufe.

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Canvas Your Life

Nicolas Gehlert

In HTML5 the <canvas> Element was introduced and it can draw and manipulate graphics via JavaScript.
For a lot of people it is just something libraries use under the hood but it is actually pretty easy to have some fun with it.
So in this talk I will give a couple of examples how to get started with canvas and how I rebuild one of my favorite childhood DOS games with it.

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A little accessibility goes a long way

James Hall

We are all building dynamic and engaging websites but we are ignoring 1 in 5 of the population that have a disability. We will show you why this is important and some of the biggest issues along with a range of quick fixes

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Smooth transition from Atom to VS Code

Samuell Snopko

I like to change my editor once an year and just recently I switched from Atom to VS Code. The transition was smoother as I expected, so I want to share few tips & tricks to save your time.

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Designing for Global Audiences

Whether or not the product you’re creating is currently only being sold in one country, it’s always crucial to design and build it with global audiences in mind.

Many businesses are convinced that designing for other markets means copying their successful business model in the home country. They believe that localisation is about translation. They design their products without properly understand what changes are needed and why they are needed. Even big companies do not always get it right.

In this talk, Chui Chui will discuss how these inaccurate perceptions can lead to flawed businesses and decisions, and explore why and how to understand and design for users in different markets.

I Thought we Were Building World Peace - Using Tech Ethics to Build Better Futures

Every decision we make is one made on behalf of your user. How do we know the decisions we make are the right ones? It is time we initiate a conversation: About where we are and where we want to go, about how we define and measure goodness and rightness in the digital realm, about responsibility, about decisions and consequences, about building something bigger than our own apps. It is time we talk about the ethics of design.

This talk introduces a method for ethical decision making in design and tech. Rather than a wet moralistic blanket covering the fires of creativity, ethics can be the hearth that makes our creative fires burn brighter without burning down the house.

Hack to the Future

Seb loves to strip down classic machines from the 80s, and give them an extreme make-over with cutting edge technology. You may have seen the hacked Nintendo light gun with laser, lights and a built-in smoke machine that became a viral sensation on the internet in 2016.

This insight into technology from a simpler age gives us a new found appreciation and understanding about the tools we use on a daily basis.

Expect super bright LEDs, electronics and, of course, lasers.