Justin Crowell summarizes key ideas from the ten keynotes of the two day #push18 conference, held in Munich on 19-20 October, 2018.

1. Photo of Push, logo, dates, location
#push18 key takeaways
prepared by Justin Crowell
Lead Product Manager @ AutoScout24

2. Speed Networking
Sponsor Marketplace Failure Slam
Lean Coffee Discussions
19-20 October, Munich, 600+ Design, UX and Product Professionals

3. This talk is:
20 minutes of key takeaways
Attendees saw:
40 minute keynote × 5
+ 10 minute lightning talk × 4
× 2 days
8 hours of content
And many, many talks

4. Adrian Zumbrunnen
Design Tinkerer @ Google
Designing for Attention
Making Ideas Happen in an Age of Distraction

5. What’s the product?
It’s easy to focus on innovative UI, but you must make sure that you’re solving a
user’s problem.
Start experimenting!
Learnings from converting his personal site into a chatbot:
• Animation keeps the interaction from feeling robotic.
• Use context (referring page) to make intelligent guesses about your users.
• Have a voice.
• You can’t anticipate everything.
Create a shared vision.
It’s easy to have an idea. Execution matters. Ask others for help to get their buy-in
early.

6. Laurissa Wolfram Hvass
Director of Research @ MailChimp
Is your Research Useable?

7. Product is for the users, research is for the teams.
Research is worthless if it isn’t shared.
If you involve your teams in the research process, you’ll get better buy in; don’t just
hand off a report.
Treat your research as a product and experiment to learn what kind of presentation
works for your team.
• Identify the decision makers – Product manager? Designer? Lead engineer?
• Listen and observe – treat your research customers (your team) with the same level of insight that you bring to your product
customers.
• Get outside of the research department and build relationships. Make broad social interactions is part of your job.
Don’t forget the big picture.
Research isn’t about facts and figures. It’s about connecting those together into a
cohesive whole.
• People need to hear something 7 times for it to stick.
• Don’t be afraid to remix existing and new research to reinforce a point.

9. Anders Toxboe
Head of Digital Development @ Danmarks Radio
Experiment to Innovate

10. Minimum Viable Product is a verb, not a noun.
Too often we skip “figuring it out” and jump into “making it happen”.
MVP is about finding the riskiest assumption and the smallest experiment to test it.
Questions you should answer:
• Is the problem worth solving?
• Do enough people have this problem?
• Does your solution to the problem provide value?
• Will people actually pay for it?

11. Do the risky part (!!) before the expensive part ($$$).

12. You found a successful product by experimenting.
Don’t stop.
Once there’s a budget and salaries on the line, it’s easy to shift from iterative build-
measure-learn into planned design-build-ship. Resist.

13. Zoltan Kollin
Design Manager @ IBM
Embracing Friction

14. Good UX is
Easy to Understand, Effortless, Intuitive, Clean, Fast
But there are sometimes reasons to make an app
Harder to Understand, Harder To Use, or Slower

15. Protective friction
“Are you sure?” dialogs. “This action will have X side effect” warnings.
Delay for Credibility
Add artificial pauses to create the illusion of “thinking”.
Illusion of immediacy
Keep people busy/distracted while we do hard things in the background.
LinkedIn first loads a wireframe skeleton on a page and then populates it.
Value added friction
Sometimes the difficulty is intentional.
Games, Alarm Clock apps that make it difficult to snooze, sign-in forms with multiple fields to make sure that you only get real
leads.

16. Signe Roswall
Designer
Stop complaining. Start designing.

17. Signe was a freelancer without clients.
She was frustrated with the new design of the Danish public transit ticket app, so
she redesigned it herself and posted her work online.

18. When you’re stuck, don’t complain. Build something.
Complaining is a downward spiral. It acts as a substitute for actual positive action.
Don’t do it for the likes.
Signe’s first redesign was features on blogs and magazines and went viral on
Medium, Prototypr, and Reddit. She tried another design with a second app.
It didn’t get the same level of attention, but she did get an email from the Product
Manager of the app she redesigned and even did some freelance work for them.

19. Katie Swindler
UX Strategist @ Allstate
Animation in UX
The Subconscious Influence of Motion*
*Winner: Hardest Talk to Put on Static Slides

20. To get out of the red zone, you need to make
something more desirable (worth the effort) or easier.

21. Ways to make something easier with animations
Provide clear connections
Example: A “Add to cart” button that animates into the cart icon at the top right .
Clean up the clutter.
Instead of a button, a loading icon and a success confirmation, combine all 3 into a
single animated element.
Example button animation by Colin Garven: https://dribbble.com/shots/1426764-Submit-Button
Control perception of speed
See Also: Embracing Friction from Day 1
Celebrate Progress
“Great Job” messages triggers dopamine. Dopamine triggers seeking behavior.

22. Reinforce your brand with animations. (Brand voice
isn’t just for copywriters.)
Collect brand traits and movements that reinforce those traits.
Human - Heartbeats, breathing, drumming fingers on a table. Add slight imperfections.
Respectful – Copying Japanese ceremonial culture, bowing, not hurried on entry. Quick to execute orders on exit.
Down-to-Earth – Grounded, gravity physics, items have a point of origin.
Translate with developers into bounce, easing, etc.
Create guidelines for entrances, exits, transformations, object relationships.
Apply to real work and tweak if necessary.

24. Florian Gulden
Managing Director @ icon incar
Acts of Love

25. Innovation is about bringing great ideas to life
without losing the creative vision.
User Experience happens before, during, and after.
You anticipate the use, then you use the product, then you have an emotional
connection – either positive or negative.
We focus on the during. Probably too much.

26. Florian is worried that the craftsmanship of design is
being lost.
Strict Corporate cultures and overuse of strict processes can kill craftsmanship.
Tools like Dribbble, Behance, and Sketch and UX paradigms like iOS can create filter
bubbles and limit your thinking.
But there are positive forces, too.
Your brand makes a promise that your product must live up to. Care about the
details to turn something good into something great.
Your job as a designer is to translate between human and machine. Do it right and
you’ll build a relationship between them both and earn your user’s love.
Designers make something out of nothing. They have the vision to imagine 25
years into the a future and then work backwards to build the first step in that
direction.

27. Josh Clark
Principal @ Big Medium
Design in the Era of the Algorithm

28. Designers still have a role when machine learning and
“intelligence as a service” is included in your product.
You’re moving from a designed fixed path that you completely controlled to one
that you’re co-creating with an artificial intelligence.
Part of the job when working with ML is to anticipate weirdness.
Part of the job is designing for failure and uncertainty.
Part of the job is setting expectations and channeling user behavior. Don’t make
promises you can’t keep.

29. Our algorithms have an overconfidence problem.
“Ok, Google. Are reptiles good pets?” “Yes” + 30 second explanation why.
“Ok, Google. Are reptiles bad pets?” “Yes” + 30 second explanation why.
Embrace the Uncertainty.
ML delivers suggestions and signal, not fact.
How about “A dinosaur (95% certain) on top of a surfboard (26% certain)”
Create Honest Interfaces with Productive Humility
“I don’t know” is better than a wrong answer. ”I’m pretty sure” is better than “I
don’t know.”
`

30. Machines only know what we tell them.
They’re really good at identifying normal and abnormal.
This creates a risk of embedding the biases of the past into the recommendations
of the future.
You might need to trick it to be biased towards the future we want.
“You Are the Product” has become “You are the
Training Data”
Our machines used to work 100% for us. But not it’s just as likely that they are work
for their inventors, too.
Be loyal to your user. Your bots will have the values that your embed into them.
If we don’t actively decide, then the tech will decide for us.

31. Nathan Moody
Interactive Creative Director
The Magic Circle
Ensuring Success in Place-Based Interactions

33. Ways that public, interactive tech is different from
building a website or app.
Part of being interactive is that you’re around other people. Design for users to
have an audience.
People don’t like to fail in front of others, so you have to always ensure success.
There are no established UI conventions for physical space. Make yours
discoverable and consistent.
People don’t read. Learning curve has to be very simple.
But you can leverage the audience for learning. An interactive element should
engage at < 0.5m, inform from 0.5-3m and attract at >3m.
Your installation should adjust to every level of engagement, from the interested -
2m tall 40-year-old that’s reading closely to a 1m tall 4-year-old that’s just banging
on it.

35. Cynthia Savard Saucier
UX Director @ Shopify
The Impact of Bad Design

36. There are different degrees of bad design.
First, Ugly.
Nobody died from ugly UX. Take the risk.

37. Hostile
Benches that prevent laying
down.
Confusing opt-outs.
Shaming close boxes: “No thanks,
I’m happy being unhealthy.”
Sign-up checkboxes on unrelated
forms.
Define a code of conduct to help
you make decisions between two
“rights” – like “good for the
business” vs “good for the users”

38. Cruel
No sentiment analysis on Facebook
Year-In-Review feature reminded many
people of very sad events.
Cruel forms assume exactly 3 names —
first, middle, last — or assume surname
is between 5 and 25 characters long.
Try to avoid arbitrary rules.
Periodically “shift your center”: What if
the 2nd or 3rd most important persona
was actually the most important?

39. Deadly
All these design problems become more important when you’re building
something that can change someone’s life.
Warning systems
Medical devices
Stop blaming our users for not using our
software correctly.
Identify possible abnormal, unintended, or
incorrect use and account for it.

40. There are more ways to misuse something than to
correctly use it.

41. Thank You
Videos of talks: https://vimeo.com/pushconf
My info: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmcrowell