Vote for EchoUser at the SXSW Panel Picker

It's that time of year again when tech's best put their ideas forward for next spring's SXSW Interactive conference — and this year, EchoUser is among them. We've got not one, not two, but three great panels currently up for vote at the SXSW Panel Picker, and we could use your thumbs-up to help us represent in Austin. What ideas would we bring to the SXSW community? Below, check out the panel pitches from our own Mick McGee, Boaz Gurdin, and Garrett Godsey.

UX Leadership: Is It Dead?

How can UX professionals truly lead in the companies they work for and the products they work on? How big a role can they really play when engineers have the power of code and business executives make the final call. Companies are flocking to User Experience methodologies as a way to improve their business and are staffing up their internal UX teams along the way—but are the voices of UX professionals getting heard early enough— or taken seriously enough—to influence decisions at the highest level? Or will UX architects, designers and researchers always be making incremental improvements? False dichotomy? Sure. Important discussion topic? We think so. This session will tackle questions of leadership, ownership, organizational structure and the impact that UX professionals can have in their organizations, as well as discussing trends which may pose challenges. The discussion will be led by Mick McGee and Dan Rosenberg, who both have decades of experience in UX leadership. Vote for UX Leadership: Is It Dead?

Time: The Invisible Design Medium

From EchoUser's Boaz Gurdin: As interaction designers, we design how people spend their time. Judging by the amount of distracted multi-tasking, stress from information overload, and struggle for work-life balance, we're doing a pretty bad job of keeping people in control of their time. One reason that we suck at designing how people spend their time is that our core ways of representing how people interact with technology, such as user journey maps and flow models, fail to represent how people multi-task. We ignore the context of how people spend their time outside of our user journey and flows. By ignoring the possibility that people have anything better to do than engage with our products and services, we often distract people instead of focusing their time on the people and interests that matter to them most. As interaction designers, we need to recognize that our medium is time, and we need to become masters of our medium. We have the power and responsibility to redesign how people spend their time. Vote for Time: The Invisible Design Medium

To Virtual and Beyond! Designing Immersive UI

For designers of complex user interfaces, the prospect of designing experiences for virtual reality is a challenge we've been longing for. But where do we start and when should we be ready? Recently, companies like Oculus and Zeiss have built the next revolution of consumer priced virtual reality headsets. These devices provide high definition first person views of an immersive virtual world, plugging directly in to computers and gaming consoles. Mainstream virtual experiences are here. The implications are impressive: movies, gaming, immersive learning, CAD visualization, and first person views of remote controlled equipment. All of these areas will need beautiful and usable design. How can we prepare to design for these new immersive experiences? What design strategies could we lean on? How would the process differ from the one we apply to today’s UI, UX, and usability challenges? Here, our Garrett Godsey pitches it to you: Vote for To Virtual and Beyond! Community voting is open now through September 6, so click over and let us know what you think!