Chris Varosy

Big data is exploding, but we need the right lenses to tease insight out of the noise. Visualization design requires business and number sense, abstraction ability and many other skills not typically asked of a designer. We'll discuss strategies for designing visualizations and dashboards that bring the insight users need to make decisions. Starting with understanding users and their needs, we'll reverse engineer the story that solves their problems. How do we progressively disclose that story? How can we use available data dimensions to show important patterns? What filters and options should we expose? How do we make it work for colorblind people, on phones, and in German? How do we make it perform at scale for data sets big and small? What are the considerations for specific graphing packages? What about pushing it out to other applications and media? This talk will help you tackle all of these considerations and whip your data into insightful information.

How to capture research in a team, how to leverage that information efficiently, and how to turn it into the specific deliverables you need downstream. We’ve been capturing information in granular “insights” that can be categorized, sorted and aggregated. This is in parallel to traditional prosaic notes, but both types of capture are done in shared documents so the team can all capture in one place.

How to remain relevant in UX by focusing on the skills you need to keep learning rather than just tools and processes. There’s a certain democracy to the obsolescence of what we do in UX: if you’re 2 years into it, you might bring as much to the table as someone with 20 years experience. So if you want longevity, focus on voraciously absorbing new things and actively look for ruts you can eradicate.