UX Scotland 2016 Conference Recap

On the 7th - 9th of June, I was lucky enough to have been invited to speak at UX Scotland in Endinburgh. UX Scotland is the annual hands-on, practical UX and design conference for the UX, Service Design and Digital Communities in Scotland and the north of England. Held at Our Dynamic Earth, more than 200 attendees were given the opportunity to learn from peers and industry leaders, improve their skills and make professional connections.

Our Dynamic Earth /\

Into the mix of workshops and presentations, I spoke about Architecting Speed | Making Racing Data Useful. Centered around work that I’ve done creating a meaningful representation of the large amounts of data collected during motorcycle racing, my presentation was aimed at teaching attendees the difference between data and information.

Proof I was there ;-) /\

Data vs Information

What typically happens when clients want to make use of large sets of data? They request a dashboard or a data visualization. While those tools definitely make the data more colorful, they don’t necessarily make the data more meaningful. And meaningfulness is key. People don’t act on data. People act on information. Unless the data has been shaped to provide immediate information based on what users are trying to achieve, the burden of converting that data into information is left to the user. When that happens, we’re not doing our jobs.

Better proof I was there ;-) /\

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Kevin Richardsonhas been working in the area of user experience for 25 years. With a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, he has experience across business verticals in the fields of research, evaluation, design and management of innovative, user-centered solutions.

Kevin’s experience includes web sites, portals and dashboards, enterprise software and custom business applications for medical, pharmaceutical, communications, entertainment, energy, transportation and government users.

On the weekends, you can find Kevin on his motorcycle, racing for Infragistics Racing at a number of different racetracks on the East coast