7 TED Talk Recommendations by a UX Designer to Learn UX

Nowadays, it has become common to consider UX design during product development and growth.

Along with including UX design, various approaches to designing a better user experience have emerged.

The area of UX design to consider differs depending on whether the object to be designed is digital or analog.

To become a good UX designer, it is important to have a broad knowledge of UX design and in this article, we present seven TED Talks that go over seven different ideas.

All of them are 10-15 minute videos, so you can learn a lot in a fairly short amount of time. These are also highly recommended for non-designers who want to learn more about UX design.

1. Donald Norman – 3 ways good design makes you happy

The speaker, Donald Norman, is the author of “The Design of Everyday Things”.

He uses the MINI car and Google’s search page UI as examples to explain what makes a product attractive to people.

According to Donald, there are three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

1. The visceral level of processing where people subconsciously feel that the service or product is an enjoyable experience.
2. The behavioral level is also a subconscious experience where people feel in control of the environment.
3. The reflective level is “like the superego, a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do, no control over the — doesn’t see the senses, doesn’t control the muscles.”

The good thing about this talk is that it reminds us that the way people see things is surprisingly simple.

At the beginning of the talk, Donald states that he does not use his Philips Starck juicer to squeeze juice from fruit, but keeps it as an ornament on his front porch.

He says that his juicer has a strange shape, and if he tries to squeeze the juice out of it, it doesn’t go into the cup properly and overflows.

However, he says it has an attractive look and feel, which is enough to keep customers happy.

There are many ways to evaluate UX design, but essentially what we should be looking at is people. People judge things based on whether they want it or not, regardless of UX design methodology.

This TED talk will teach you how people see things.

2. John Maeda – Design for Simplicity

The second talk is by John Maeda, a world-famous designer, who talks about what simplicity is, along with his own experiences.

He talks about his own view of simplicity from the perspective of someone with a complex upbringing.

In this talk, John discusses the spectrum of complexity and simplicity not as opposites, but as ideas that have a harmonious relationship.

As an example, sushi is a very complex culinary art to master, but a piece of sushi is essentially very simple.

Simplicity has been considered important in the field of graphic and product design, but what does simplicity mean when designing something that cannot be expressed in a form, such as UX? The talk will focus on this question.

The purpose of “user experience” is to help people enjoy using a product or not, and it is important to keep it simple.

There are many books and blogs on UX design, and it tends to be treated in a methodological way, but watch this video and think about human feelings in a simple way.

3. Rochelle King – The complex relationship between data and design in UX

Rochelle King is an accomplished designer who previously led UX and service design at Netflix and currently leads the team at Spotify as Vice President of Design and UX.

In this talk, he discusses the importance of data in UX design.

In particular, the data that can be collected from digital products is very accurate, and can tell you where buttons are pushed and how long people spend on a page.

If we can make good use of this, we can avoid spending time in meetings arguing about which design is better.

One part of this talk that I would like to draw your attention to is the part where she explains how she actually used the data to improve the UX at Spotify as an example of her work.

Spotify is a huge product with more than 300 million monthly active users, and the design process that supports it is a very important part of their business.

Its design process will be helpful even to non-designers.

4. David Kelley – How to build your creative confidence.

David is one of the founders and former CEO of IDEO. He is known as a leading authority on design thinking and design education.

He talks about his own view of creativity from the perspective of someone who has built such design knowledge.

In this talk, David emphasizes that creativity comes in different forms, and there is no need to lose confidence just because your ideas are conventional and not cool.

I once met someone in a workshop who was not very good at being creative. I once asked them why, and many of their answers were, “I have to create something cool,” or “I am expected to come up with novel ideas that no one else can come up with.

However, creativity is not limited to such flashy things.

As an example, the MRI procedure to check for abnormalities in the human body was introduced.

Many children are frightened by the intense noise they hear during an MRI exam and become violent.

For this reason, sedatives were used to quiet the children.

The doctor was so distressed by this situation that he painted the entire room to look like a pirate ship and explained that the noise during the examination was the sound of a pirate ship rocking.

This allowed the children to go through the examination without getting out of control. This kind of care is also creative.

5. Tony Fadell – The First Secret of Great Design

Tony Fadell is an engineer and designer. Known as the “father of the iPod,” he specializes in hardware and software.

In this talk, he talks about the good and the bad of people becoming habituated.

Through habit, people tend to forget small despairs, such as being mistakenly exposed to cold water in the shower, for example, and the ability to discover them is what entrepreneurs and designers need.

There are three tips to discover this.

1. Look broader
2. Look closer
3. Think younger

Summing up these tips, Tony says to be as pure as a child.

He cites Picasso’s quote, “Every child is an artist.”

Young minds see the world more clearly before the frustrations in life gets in the way. Tony’s tips are about unlearning, seeing more clearly, and experiencing the world at first sight.

In UX design, it is important to be able to find these small insights and complaints. Many problems are minor, and as we get older, it becomes harder and harder to feel dissatisfaction.

However, only a design that solves these problems can provide people with a truly pleasant and powerful experience.

6. Johannes Ippen – Humans, not Users: Why UX is a Problem

Johannes, who has broad experience as a graphic and UX designer, expresses in his talk that we need to be conscious of designing for people, not define them as users, to make consumers truly happy.

In his talk, he points out that the addictiveness of social networking services and the pressure of seeing the number of “likes” that has become a problem in recent years are the result of UX design that prioritizes company profits by treating the consumers as “users” rather than “humans”.

For example, it has been reported that Facebook is responsible for one-third of all divorces between married couples. According to *divorce-online.co.uk

What is particularly interesting is that these issues say we should move from user experience design, which only increases engagement and retention rates, to human experience design, which looks to fit experiences within a person’s dreams, needs, and wishes.

From now on, designers must be aware that their creations are taking up people’s time and must take a hard look at what is a happy state of affairs for people.

7. Phill Motuzas – Creating Next Generation User Experiences –

This talk on next generation user interaction and UX features Phill Motuzas, a professor and user interface researcher at Algonquin College.

Phill called the smartphone interface, which most people are now familiar with, a “natural user interface,” in which everyone can predict the outcome, like pressing this button will take you to a download form.

This is because gestures and interactions should be designed and referenced through the real world, therefore allowing everyone to intuitively understand the needed actions and use.

In particular, he emphasizes the importance of the predictable state of smartphones, which features a motorized haptic feedback when touched, and the similarity between turning a page on a screen and turning a book in the real world.

Another area of focus is the similarities between products’ set of sensors and our human senses.

In recent years, sensors that can measure blood oxygen levels have been installed in the Apple watch, for example, and it is gradually becoming possible to measure and take action without having to be conscious of the operation.

On the other hand, he voices how touch, the most used of our five senses, takes in information through sensory input on a smartphone’s touchscreen, unlocking a part of a bigger potential of interaction.

In the context of UX, it will be important to create situations that do not require human intervention, and it will be necessary to consider UX design based on situations that do not require human intervention in the future.

What the seven TED Talks have in common is that they are all trying to have a positive impact on society.

There are a number of ways of thinking about user experience, and UX designers need to be able to successfully select and discard their tools according situations and products.

The knowledge necessary to make these decisions is available through various media, such as podcasts and the TED talks introduced in this article.

Nowadays many people are so busy that they don’t take time to study new things.

Why not take advantage of the various resources available online and make the most use of them to learn something new in a minimum amount of time?