I recently got back from speaking at the Forge Conference in Philadelphia. Had a wonderful time! 

The startup scene in Philly is rad and there's a ton of energy there. We had the good fortune of meeting with the President of Greater Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce to learn more about their initiatives to foster an entrepreneurial climate in the tech sector.

As for the conference, the awesome team over at O3 World organized a fantastic event! The talks - as well as the Skybox Event Center venue in the Fishtown neighborhood - were inspiring. 

My colleague, Weszt Hart, and I gave a talk about designing engaging experiences. He spoke to a case study for a recently launched feature; and I framed the problem space and introduced how we think about and manage experience design. 

A few, key takeaways from my section to an audience of Designers, Product folks, and Makers included:

Evangelize through Doing: UXers love to talk about process. I'm certainly guilty of it! ;) Tying into the spirit of the maker movement, our point here was that design thinking evangelism becomes much more real when you do things that demonstrate value. 

For example, our team's design footprint extends well beyond player-facing stuff; we also actively lead and Product Own initiatives around internal experiences for our employees. That includes service design, which is a lot of fun and moves into the land of I/O Psychology. 

Although upfront product discovery and definition is incredibly important, the takeaway here is that nothing builds credibility like leading through example. It shouldn't just be about our design process (e.g., User research, affinity diagramming, [insert your very own, go-to UX process issue here], etc.)    

Understand Context and Culture: Regardless of whether you are creating responsive sites, web apps, or mobile products, at the end of the day we're all solving problems for people. And since more and more products are inherently social, why not leverage the work of Social Psychologists early and often? We work closely with psychologists to help us frame problem spaces and to better understand the ability to influence behavior - well before we put pencil to paper or move pixels around. 

Our other point here was the usability is table stakes these days. Simply allowing the user to get from point A to B won't define your product. 

What differentiates are engaging and immersive experiences. We feel that leveraging principles from the world of Game Design can help achieve some of that. (For example, one of my favorite User Experience design books is The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell).  

Emphasize Experiential Goals and Outcomes First: If you work in the world of Agile, chances are you've encountered user stories. 

As a < type of user >, I want to < some goal > so that < some reason >. 

Um, yeah; about that. "Some goal." "Some reason." Sounds like Mad Libs.

Somewhere along the way, the spirit and intent of a bunch of user stories and their epic simply gets lost. Backlogs grow, priorities are argued over, and it's too easy to loose the forest for the trees.

Instead, we challenge you to start with experiential goals and outcomes. Really focus on what you want your users to feel and achieve by using the thing. What's the emotion that you're seeking? How do you want the feature to feel? Trust me, you can ask that of even the most seemingly mundane of services to help make that emotional connection. 

Our audiences are becoming increasingly sophisticated. It's hard to create deeper and more meaningful experiences unless you start with clear goals and the outcomes that you want to achieve first. 

You can learn more about some of the above considerations through an interview that we did with UX Booth: Forging Ahead in the World of the Web. 

And last, but certainly not least, I got an incredibly-detailed, commemorative bobblehead doll of myself... 

The likeness is pretty, darn uncanny and my baby daughter loves it! So fun :)

Marc