I started the morning of the second day of the conference with the W+K Amsterdam talking about redefining reality, virtual worlds and how speculative fiction thinking flies into clients desires. Technology needs our soul and our input to enhance reality, so we should be giving our projects some personality, a theme and explore numerous different scenarios.
Daan Klaver from Build in Amsterdam gave us 12 insights to create good digital flagship stores.
- Don’t pitch – you need to pick consistent brands, not companies based on a lucky pitch. Financially driven companies don’t do the best work;
- Everything should have a reason behind it;
- Always work as a team! There should be no layers on decision making, no titles, but teamwork;
- If something goes wrong, don’t blame others, focus on your errors. Question what you are doing wrong so you can learn and improve from it;
- UI is UI and UX is UX, don’t give your UX to someone else and vice versa;
- Good brand experience brings more revenue;
- Don’t think in journeys – don’t predict user journeys, everything should be shuffled for a good experience no matter the user;
- Everybody has an opinion, ask for user feedback. Having an open mind is most important.;
- Ideas are formed consciously and unconsciously from everywhere, it’s not where we take things from but where we take them to;
- You are a brand – Always create work you truly believe in;
- Take a nap – it increases productivity;
- When you think you are finished, you probably are not, you are never finished. Always try to be improving!
In the afternoon, we started with DPDK, Finding the CX sweet-spot telling us to to work with design principles. We all have time frames as well as budgets, so finding the right way to keep things as simple as possible and as human as possible is crucial. Always be honest with yourself and with your customers!
We ended the day with Claudio Gulieri’s talk, “How far can we push it?” talking about experiences spanning across device inputs and senses. As we understand consumer technology staggered evolution, but the creator tools continue evolution. He divided his talk into three different ability sections: motor related ones, human vision and cognitive.
On motor related ones, we should always consider the direction and ranges that are more comfortable for repeated motion. Focus on increasing efficiency and accuracy of what we can do within a comfortable range.
On human vision related abilities, we should check what we can visually perceive from our digital world, know when to break the rules and focus the attention on content.
Lastly, on cognitive abilities, the main focus was on how we could improve the digital world.
These two days of Awwwards conference ended up with the announcement of all 2018 Awwward winners. Overall speaking, this was a great experience where I got to learn and network with some of the most influential people in the industry.