UXify Bulgaria - Conference Videos

For the second year in a row, in Bulgaria, we hosted UXify – a conference about usability and design in the month of June. We followed the steps of our US colleagues, who kicked 2015 off with UXify US, an inspiring event held this past April. For us, several months of preparation culminated in two amazing days of people sharing their UX knowledge and experience with the local community.

This year our team joined forces with other prominent, local, usability figures and together we created the first month dedicated to UX in Sofia and Bulgaria. Four events related to usability were hosted in less than three weeks and we all had a lot of fun meeting and welcoming new people into our vibrant local community. The event that capped off the series was our UXify conference. This year we decided to flip the order of events: the conference was held on Friday 19th and the “less-talk-more-action” was left for Saturday, during which the Infragistics office hosted six amazing workshopsin three parallel tracks. Since it is hard to put a hands-on workshop into words, I will simply tell you that the attendees rated them all very high and advise you to keep an eye out for the 2016 tickets. This year, they were completely sold out two weeks before the event!

Our goal for the conference this year was to decrease the number of talks and keep them really focused around usability …and so we did. We offered 12 talks in two tracks and managed to record some of the talks that you can listen to below. However, before the tracks kicked off, we brought everyone together for the keynote address given by Infragistics’ VP of Product Management, Community, and Developer Evangelism - Jason Beres. He dedicated his keynote to the growing numbers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the need for UX design practices when creating such “interconnected” human experiences. Jason’s inspiring talk definitely woke everyone up and set the proper mood for the rest of the day.

Then it was time for the people to choose their first presentation. In one hall, our very own Jim Ross was talking about user research and methods that allow us to gather the actual user needs. Meanwhile next door was Dimiter Simov (Jimmy), who shared his thoughts about the way habits are created and broken, providing the audience with insight into the habits a proper UX design can create to serve better the user’s needs. We were able to record the latter talk and are more than happy to share it with you.

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The second session provided the attendees with a choice between an introductory presentation and more advanced talk. George Balinov spoke to half of our guests about the first steps in the creation of a successful user experience (slide deck is in Bulgarian) while our Sr. Director of Design Tobias Komischke was educating the rest of the audience about the design of dashboards. Tobias already did a webinar earlier this year but in case you have missed it, here is your second chance to hear what he has to say on the topic.

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After lunch, the schedule offered a choice between my talk on Gamification and Stoyan Dipchikov’s advice for front-end developers. I understand that Stoyan did an outstanding job in the other hall while I was telling people about ways to incorporate gaming experiences in our products and processes. You can learn more about the process of player-centered design thanks to our recording of the talk.

Then it was time for Deyan and Georgi to share their insights on Metaphors, how they are used to create digital experiences, and their prediction regarding the future of metaphor-based experiences. Meanwhile, Todor Panev was having a great time telling people about the responsibilities of the designer and his key role in establishing trust between the user and the product. We recorded Deyan and Georgi’s talk and you can find it below.

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A short afternoon coffee break was followed by presentations from Anton Radev, about the front-end development's interaction with UX, and Leo Laskin’s short talk about the UX design of Pages. This short talk was captured and can be watched below.

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UXify was concluded with class by the two final speakers for the day. Grigor Grigorov spoke about the UX frontier, diving deeper into mobile user experiences. At the same time, Simona Georgieva was rocking the stage next door with many case studies from her professional experience on the impact UX has on online retail. If you are curious to hear about these case studies, the good news is that we had them all recorded.

To all people that supported us in this endeavor, we would like to say a huge thank you. To all people who believed in us and attended the conference, we would like to thank you too. We’d also like to thank you for your kind words both during and after the event. Don’t forget to look at this galleryof pictures from the event! They’ll bring the smile to your face when your current work gets you down. Lastly, we would like to ask for forgiveness for the mistakes that we made and ask you to forget them because, thanks to your feedback, we will leave them out of your UXify experience in 2016.

Thank you all once again and we hope to see you next year again!