UX has hit puberty ­­– clients increasing look to UX designers for answers about how our work can bring their business strategy to life. We are in a unique position to help companies evolve so that every touch-point becomes an opportunity for a great user experience. The catch is that to be successful, we must be fluent in language of C-level executives and business directors, AND we must understand the art of persuasion so that we can help them recognise pain points and take the right steps to improve the user experience for their product, service, or brand.

Collaboration requires us to share our work; to communicate our ideas with one another and collect other’s thoughts in order to know whether the designs and creations we’re producing are meeting the objectives of the project. But often we wrestle with collecting feedback. We get comments that are less then helpful because they seem irrelevant or unclear. Or we find that we’re getting feedback and reactions at inopportune times rather than points in the process where they would have been useful in informing design decisions.

Please bring a smartphone or tablet with you

Great UX begins with knowing your users deeply. That used to require months of ethnographic immersion and a massive budget, but it doesn’t anymore. Now that almost everyone carries a mobile device with them, we have new and better ways to connect with the people who share a slice of their lives with us and become our muses. It just takes applying our creativity to research methods in the same way we apply it to the products we design.

Please bring a laptop with you

Sketch is the Mac of design tools. It comes preloaded with essential templates and tools for UI design right out of the box. In Meng’s workshop you’ll learn how to design for multiple screens and for devices like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and create a user interface from scratch in full vector using key features like Artboards, Pages, Symbols and Mirror. You’ll also learn how to work with Rulers and Grids, how to design a basic icon, and how to deliver assets as well as style guides using Sketch Plugins. Get familiar with iOS 8 design, specifically about concepts like colours, typography and animations. Finally, you’ll learn about quick prototyping tools to make your designs come alive.

Design has earned the attention of businesses everywhere. The demand for breakthrough ideas couldn’t be stronger. It’s time for smart “idea” people to take centre stage. And yet… When given the space to be creative—whether it’s a user interface, data visualisation, or new product idea—we often fall back on safe, familiar patterns.

We worry a lot about the time we have, or don’t have, to get things done. What if instead we concentrated on the way we work, and the rate we work at, in order to make our time (or lack of it) less relevant? During this half day workshop we’ll explore ways to create Flow Engines, a way to focus creative energy as much as possible in order to turn it into productive forward motion.