IDEO’s Simon King Joins The CanUX 2018 Lineup

We’re thrilled to add Simon’s perspective to this year’s event.

 A/B, Creativity or Design: Deciding How to Make Product Decisions
} Nov 3, 2018   3:40pm / 30 MINUTES

Physical products require all design decisions to be made up front, before mass production begins. But digital products never stop evolving, extending the role of the designer and introducing new decision-making methods. One example is A/B testing, where groups of users are shown different versions of a product and their aggregate behavior is analyzed to see which one “wins.” This data-driven design has the seduction of science, the authority of analytics, and the measurable proof that management savors. But these attractive qualities can overshadow a more fundamental question: What are we trying to learn? And does the data have the answer?

This talk looks at when and why you should use A/B testing, rely on creativity, or utilize design thinking. I’ll discuss how that choice should be influenced by the stage of your product, relationship you want with users, and why choosing how to decide can be an ethical responsibility.

 Speaker Bio: Simon King

Simon is a Design Director at IDEO, one of the world’s most fabled global design consultancies. Based in the Chicago studio, he leads interdisciplinary teams through all stages of the innovation process to help organizations launch products and services that make the world more responsive, connected, and humane. He is also the author of Understanding Industrial Design: Principles for UX and Interaction Design, an O’Reilly book that aims to inspire digital designers to expand their disciplinary overlap as the lines between digital and physical blur.

Previously, Simon was a Senior Product Manager at Duolingo, the world’s largest online language learning platform, and the Director of the CMU Design Center at Carnegie Mellon University, an interdisciplinary space that connects students and faculty from across campus through design. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Western Michigan and an MDes in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon.

An IDEO ‘boomeranger’ (he might tell you what that means in his talk), he’s also easily excited by new ways of prototyping, elegant data design, thoughtful storytelling, and nerdy debates.

For more info, you can follow Simon on on Twitter @simonking

*Image credit: Simon King