142 The Awwwards Conference is one of the biggest web events for the year. Awwwards is known worldwide by web designers, UX/UI designers, motion designers, developers, web experts, social media influencers, educators, and more. Scality sent its design team to get inspired at this year’s event in Amsterdam. The team spent three exciting days with some of the most influential speakers in the industry who inspire, teach, and guide us as we face the many challenges and opportunities which lie ahead in the future of the web. The days were an intense immersion into the latest developments in User Experience (UX), Dark Patterns, Conversions, and much much more. We have chosen five of our favorite talks, ones that resonated with us. We made a list and would like to share this with you, hoping it inspires you as much as it did us: Paul Boag @paulboag UX & conversion optimization strategist. Author of User Experience Revolution. Founder of @boagworks and non-exec director of @smashingmag and @headscapeltd. Paul Boag is a user experience consultant, author, and speaker. He helps not-for-profits such as the European Commission, UCAS, and Doctors Without Borders adapt to the digital world. He works with his clients to build a user experience culture and learn to engage with a new digital audience. What We Learned From This Talk Paul helps people to get things done. He talked about transparency on the web and best practices, making the user the most important factor while designing engaging interfaces. He encouraged us to not only see the user as a target, but as a person that goes to a website looking for a story, trying to find information in the simplest of ways, and wanting to feel understood and safe. Boag spoke on how to deal with resistance and building a community who will love and trust our product. His blog posts, classes online and podcasts are among the most useful we have found online. website: boagworld.com Chris Do @thechrisdo Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the founder of The Future—an online education platform that teaches the business of design to creatives. He currently serves as the chairman of the board for the SPJA, and as an advisor to Saleshood. What We Learned From This Talk Chris Do spoke about the latest trends in social media. Carousels are a big thing now out performing other content on Linkedin and we should use them as much as we can (while their popularity lasts). He talks about being consistent, organized and being an active part of the Social Media community. Engaging with other people and other peoples’ posts will help you get noticed. He also spoke about why the Gary Veynerchuk pyramid model for content creation might need to be revised. See his LinkedIn post here on how to implement and use Social Media Carousels correctly. An example of his Instagram Carousel: website: blind.com Robin Noguier @robin_noguier Freelance Designer Ex @uenodotco & @ultranoir Jury @Awwwards & @TheWebbyAwards Email: hello@robin-noguier.com Robin Noguier is a freelance interactive designer from France working on apps, marketing websites and digital experiences. In the past, he traveled the world for a year to find talents for the Esperanto project, worked at Ueno in San Francisco, and at Ultranoir in Paris. He’s been fortunate enough to work for clients like Chanel, Google, Facebook, Uber, Mercedes-Benz and Redbull amongst others. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED FROM THIS TALK Side projects matter, as Noguier explained in his talk. He managed to fulfill his dream of traveling the world and working at the same time. Combining his love of cultures and design, he started a project that consisted of interviewing top designers from around the world and then documenting it in an original and fun way. The final project became Esperanto Design, a web-based project that became one of the most successful side projects of his life. It opened many doors, and he’s been working with top-notch clients since. See the outcome of this project here: www.esperanto.design Vitaly Friedman @smashingmag Owner of the online magazine Smashing for professional web designers and developers. @SmashingSupport, @SmashingConf. Vitaly Friedman is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. You can find him giving inspiring talks and leading top-flight workshops at tech conferences the world over. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED FROM THIS TALK Smashing magazine started as a side project that Vitaly fought for, keeping it small and ethical. He would not let big investors get involved and he would always have the user in the magazine’s best interest. He said that it takes longer for a project to succeed without strong financial support, but in the long run, what makes it exceptional (and long-lasting) is how faithful you are to your beliefs and ideas. Do not let go and trust your instincts. website: www.smashingmagazine.com/ Interview with Vitaly Friedman by Awwwards: Awwwards Interviews – Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine from awwwards on Vimeo. Mustafa Kurtuldu @Mustafa_x UX designer on @googlechrome. Design Advocate. Effective use of loading to distort time perceptions. Mustafa is a Senior UX designer and advocate at Google. His role involves leading the design for developer/designers learning and supporting them worldwide to create beautiful user experiences on the web and beyond. He has over nineteen years of experience working as a UX Designer across multiple sectors, including publishing, charities, central government, education, and finance. – Designers versus developers, spiritual versus rational, inspiration versus reason. Both disciples seemingly suspicious of the other, not understanding or empathising with each other’s role. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED FROM THIS TALK Speed of delivery on site greatly influences conversions, but using the latest advancements in web development, the perception of time can be distorted to optimize the performance and user experience. Some simple additions to how page loads can help retain visitors to a site.Intelligent design on the web means you can control the cadence of visitors’ engagement on pages with the use of multiple factors such as content, graphics, and space. Website: dribbble.com/mustafa_x Blog: @mustafa_x
