I’d never really thought of heading out of London for a conference. I’m biased, I know, but London is usually where all the cool ‘stuff’ happens. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality and diversity of the speakers at NUX5, held in Manchester.
The speakers included; Boon Sheridan, Lola Oyelayo, Karina van Schaardenburg, Glenn A. Gustitus, Sophie Dennis, Graham Odds and Henny Swan. All the talks were top quality, and I somehow felt they were talking directly to me – everything I tackle at work and outside of it.
Boon talked about not relying on checklists or best practices to make decisions, Lola talked about wicked problems, Glen talked about security, Sophie spoke about the Kano model and the peak-end rule, Graham said about chatbots, and Henny talked about accessibility.
Security and user experience
Companies often create terrible customer experiences by trying to be ultra-secure but lazy with how they do it. Think of those CAPTCHAs that are impossible to read or have overly complex password requirements. Heck, not too long ago, I came across a site that wanted me to create a password and enter it twice but wouldn’t allow me to copy/paste between fields because of “security”. We make users work too hard to access the things we make.
In his talk, Glenn showed how easy it is to guess someone’s security question answer and gave an example from google, which has stopped using security questions. Instead, replace it with a recovery email address or telephone number.