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AMUSE is an international conference
for anyone interested in how to design
and develop successful products that users love.

Workshop day: October 28
Conference days: October 29-30

If you are a UX practitioner, product manager, frontend developer, designer or market researcher of digital products or simply interested what's happening on the other side of the screen this conference is for you. Come and see how UX is done by the greatest players, get inspiration from their successes and failures and network with other professionals like you.

speakers

Josh Clark
Founder, Big Medium

Magical UX and the Internet of Things

'What if this thing was magic?' Designing for the internet of things means blessing everyday objects, places, even people with extraordinary abilities—requiring designers, too, to break with the ordinary. Designing for this new medium is less a challenge of technology than imagination. Sharing a rich trove of examples, designer and author Josh Clark explores the new experiences that are possible when ANYTHING can be an interface.

About Josh
Cennydd Bowles
Digital product designer, former Design lead at Twitter

The ethical designer

For decades, the spaces we live in have been built by consensus. Planners, architects, councils, consultation; and always the watchful eye of the regulators and elected officials. But the world’s favourite digital spaces are largely in the hands of people like you and me. We have to oversee ourselves – and it’s not going very well.
Are we focusing on the right problems? Or just aggrandising the mundane? How do we know what the right problems are? How can we guide ourselves to appreciate the cultural and personal impact of the decisions we make? It’s time for our industry to become ethically aware, if we’re to have a chance of doing the right thing.

About Cennydd
Golden Krishna
Zappos Labs, Senior UX Designer

The best interface is no interface

Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some “technological innovators” are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. In this lecture, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.

About Golden
Joel Marsh
Teller Email Browser, Founder

UX: Design as a science

Joel will describe the Scientific Method and explain how it can be used to solve problems in design the same way scientists solve problems in science. (No mathematics). We observe users, we formulate questions and hypotheses, we design experiments, we run the experiment, and we interpret results and data — exactly like science.

About Joel
Anna Bloom
Content Strategist, Facebook

When words are the product

Creating content for products isn't just about marketing — at Facebook, it’s part of the product development process. In this talk, we'll explore the role of content strategy, and how content strategists use fact finding, truth-telling and honesty to help design and build digital products users love.

About Anna
Bill Selman
Mozilla, Lead User Researcher

Escaping homophily: Better insights through conducting UX research with 'inconvenient' participants

A good deal of UX research practice recruits participants from samples of convenience. While this approach is seen as rapidly deployable and cost-effective, most researchers, designers, and engineers never move beyond the kinds of people they would ordinarily meet in the course of their daily lives. In this talk, Bill will catalog the pitfalls for researchers and UX professionals of using 'convenient' participants. Through examples from our research at Mozilla, he will share approaches to studying participants who better reflect the diversity of a population—as well as the value in studying unrepresentative participants.

About Bill
David Darmanin
Hotjar, Founder & CEO

How we built Hotjar and onboarded 50k users in a year

David, Founder and CEO of Hotjar, will take us through the tools, research and processes the Hotjar team use to iteratively build their solution. In this session, we will see how Hotjar has taken market leadership in a crowded space, by differentiating on user experience.

About David
Trine Falbe
UX consultant & teacher

Designing (non-game) web interfaces for children

Through her research with children, games and learning, Trine Falbe has found that the way kids use interfaces differ a lot from adult interaction patterns. They have different search patterns, language skills, cognitive skills and motor skills. And this has a big impact on the way we should design interfaces when the users are children.
In this talk, Trine will share her insights about the way kids interact with interfaces, how it differs from the interaction patterns of adults, and provide some guidelines on how to design web interfaces for kids.

About Trine
Tobias Haug
Head of Design & Co-Innovation Center, SAP

Unleash the power of Design Thinking

While design thinking may not be a magical elixir to ease all problems, it does provide structures and approaches which help tackle complex problems in a very human way. With over 12 years of experience in establishing Design Thinking practices across its global organization, SAP is a testament to Design Thinking’s power, value and flexibility. Learn about Design Thinking’s core principles & hear practical stories of how it can be applied to a myriad of challenges and compliments the execution power of agile methodologies.

About Tobias
Anna Dahlström
UX designer and founder, byflock

Storytelling in a multidevice landscape

As the number of devices we use are increasing, considering each device's role at different times, situations and context is becoming increasingly important. Our ability to control where a user is coming from and how they get around the experiences we design are becoming less and less. But the one we can still understand is what a user wants, and needs. In this talk Anna will look a the principles behind storytelling in design and how they can be translated onto a multi device landscape.

About Anna
Avi Itzkovitch
UX Designer, Founder of UX Salon

The invisible interface: Designing the screenless experience

The Internet of Things describes a world where identified objects and connected devices will revolutionize the way we interact with technology. As product designers we are now challenged to design interactions for physical objects; beyond designing for the touch screen, we are now designing for the experience, and the experience becomes the product. Join Avi to explore UX principles in a world where multiple connected devices will seamlessly integrate into our lives, create contextual knowledge from sensor data and generate invisible interactions using human behavior as an interface. You will learn concepts for ambient information display and how to design meaningful interactions for the connected world.

About Avi
Rita Parada
Twitter, Staff User Researcher

Observing the mundane - The importance of people watching

Observations of mundane everyday behavior can provide us with unique findings and uncover subtle, unexpected details about how people relate to each other and to their surroundings. Understanding people’s everyday interaction with each other, with their environment, and with the objects they surround themselves with can be the key to understanding of the cultural differences of a particular group, their values, their economic and cultural lives.

About Rita
Toby Sterrett
Simple, Director of User Experience

Making dog food part of your balanced diet

Simple was created with the belief that banking could be beautiful, to design something the creators themselves loved using. With that in mind, 'eating their own dog food' was a guiding principle, and it helped the team create something that they, and many enthusiastic customers, truly do love to use. As tasty as dog food can be, however, it must to be eaten in moderation.
This talk will go over the history of creating the Simple banking experience, how it was shaped into an app, how the team worked hard at sneaking in delightful, unexpected details, the benefits and pitfalls of eating your own dog food, and why it is important to balance that dog food with learning from your customers.

About Toby
Jonathan Lupo
EPAM, VP of Experience Design

Design equilibrium

Ecosystems in Nature thrive on balance. When one organism dominates, or accidents occur, which disrupt the balance of the system, the effects can take decades, or longer, to recover from. The same principles hold true for business ecosystems. Balance, in a business context, is the value proposition and promise, of a Brand. In the past, Designers placed too much emphasis on the Customer, or a single interaction, and must now examine an ecosystem of interactions with a Brand, to make sure that the value proposition is consistently delivered with each interaction. Thus, the scope of Design, and the role of the Designer, has greatly expanded, and a new set of skills are needed, to ensure that Brands deliver on their promise to all members of the ecosystem, and not just to the Customer. Finally, the very goal of Design, in this connected ecosystem, has shifted. It is no longer about creating 'moments of Truth', but Designing Equilibrium.

About Jonathan
Andrew Doherty
Google, UX Lead

How to create a great UX portfolio, and get that dream job

Andrew will share some of the unique ways you can UX your own UX portfolio and ensure that it can compete on a global scale to help you get that UX job you've been dreaming of. With this sobering, and also very funny step by step tutorial, Andrew will help you to ensure the hiring mangers (at your next dream job) put a line under your name, instead of through it.

About Andrew
Daniel Markwig
Designer, Design & Co-Innovation Center, SAP

Workshop: Design Thinking - Are we solving the right problem?

About Daniel

workshops

Visual Essentials for Product Designers
Visual Essentials for Product Designers
with Cennydd Bowles

This full-day workshop is ideal for digital designers wishing to improve their visual literacy, or UX and interaction designers looking to move into full-stack product design. Visual design is a hands-on discipline, so alongside key instruction you’ll spend 50% of the day working on your own visual design explorations and critiquing fellow attendees’ work. Cennydd (formed Design Lead at Twitter) will talk about forms, layout and composition, typography, colour and images, icons, ideas and concept, production and practice. It's a must-attend bootcamp for all who want to move from low- to high-fidelity design.

Where Prezi Workshop When 9:30 - 17:30, 28th October

Prototyping Magic for the Internet of Things
Prototyping Magic for the Internet of Things
with Josh Clark

The Internet of Things promises newly physical interfaces for digital systems. And what could be more magic than commanding unseen forces through everyday objects? This workshop gets you imagining and building these next-generation interfaces. You (and your customers) already have an instinctive understanding of how these interfaces should work: centuries of myth and legend have explained the way we want magical devices to work. Now we have the technology to build them.

This workshop focuses on how to adapt both thinking and techniques for this new kind of interface design. Through hands-on exercises, expert guidelines, and a rich collection of case studies and examples, you'll find out why and how you, your company, and your product fit into the internet of things.

In this workshop you will...

  • Prototype physical interactions for IoT interfaces, using a new framework of tools and techniques.
  • Discover opportunities and techniques for creating interactions off the screen and between devices.
  • Learn to identify business and customer value for physical interfaces to digital systems.
  • Conceive new interactions that effectively turn users into wizards.
  • Have lots of fun in a unique, hands-on and highly creative workshop.

Where Design Terminal When 9:00 - 17:00, 28th October

Design Thinking: Are we solving the right problem?
Design Thinking: Are we solving the right problem?
with Tobias Haug & Daniel Markwig

Agile software development methods have brought us a long way towards building our products right. But sometimes we’re still struggling with the question whether we’re building the right product … enter Design Thinking. The first part of this interactive workshop will provide an introduction to Design Thinking. Learn what Design Thinking is and what you need to be able to use Design Thinking in your customer interactions. Approach a showcase design challenge to experience first hand how a Design Thinking process plays out. We will do user research, reframe the design challenge, ideate on solutions, and finally build a prototype. The second part of the workshop will highlight some advanced methods and tools that come in handy in selected parts of a Design Thinking project.

Where Ericsson When 9:00 - 16:00, 28th October

location

Meet Budapest,
a really awesome city

Here are a few reasons
why you need to visit Budapest

Budapest is closer than you think

only a short flight away

Conference venue

Millenáris Park See it on a map

The conference will take place at Millenáris, a modern cultural complex in Buda surrounded by a large park, with excellent public transport accessibility. The location is actually the reconstructed site of the one-time Ganz Electric Works, and you still can see the parts of machinery that were used here.

Need an accommodation?

Stay at Opera-Garden Hotel and get 10% off with the promotion code preziustream.

schedule

Thursday
08:00-09:00 Registration and breakfast
09:00-09.15 Welcome speech
09:15-10:00 Jonathan Lupo: Design equilibrium
10:00-10:45 Joel Marsh: UX: Design as a science
10:45-11:15 Coffee break
11:15-12:00 Toby Sterrett: Making dog food part of your balanced diet
12:00-12:45 Trine Falbe: Designing (non-game) web interfaces for children
12:45-14:10 Lunch
14:10-14:25 Sponsor introduction
14:30-15:15 David Darmanin: How we built Hotjar and onboarded 50k users in a year
15:15-16:00 Rita Parada: Observing the mundane - The importance of people watching
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:15 Anna Bloom: When words are the product
17:15-18:00 Avi Itzkovitch: The invisible interface: Designing the screenless experience
18:00-19:30 Dinner
19:30 Party
Friday
08:00-09:00 Registration and breakfast
09:00-09.15 Sponsor introduction
09:15-10:00 Cennydd Bowles: The ethical designer
10:00-10:45 Golden Krishna: The best interface is no interface
10:45-11:15 Coffee break
11:15-12:00 Andrew Doherty: How to create a great UX portfolio, and get that dream job
12:00-12:45 Anna Dahlström: Storytelling in a multidevice landscape
12:45-14:10 Lunch
14:10-14:25 Sponsor introduction
14:30-15:15 Bill Selman: Escaping homophily: Better insights through conducting UX research with "inconvenient" participants
15:15-16:00 Toby Haug: Unleash the power of design thinking
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:30 Josh Clark: Magical UX and the Internet of Things
17:30-17:45 Closing ceremony

sponsors

Diamond

Platinum

Gold

Silver

Bronze

Supporters

Partners

We are looking for sponsors who help us make this non-profit conference happen.
Interested? Contact us at hello@amuseconf.com

contact

Amuse Conference is organized by

Zsuzsa Kovács
Zsuzsa Kovács
Senior UX Researcher, Prezi
Zoltán Kollin
Zoltán Kollin
UX director, Ustream
László Laufer
László Laufer
Senior UX Researcher, Prezi
Medea Baccifava
Medea Baccifava
Head of conference management, Prezi
Bernadett Otterbein
Bernadett Otterbein
Sponsor manager, Ustream
Attila Balogi
Attila Balogi
Event manager, Prezi
Kata Marosvölgyi
Kata Marosvölgyi
Travel and accommodation manager, Prezi

Questions? Drop us a line at hello@amuseconf.com