Designing friendly experiences in chat platforms April 14 with #slack’s Bear Douglas

Sat April 14 at the NSW State Library

There’s several decades of history and precedence for many interfaces we’ve become accustomed to. Buttons, dials, sliders, levers and other controls are familiar from their metaphorical translation across from the physical world to the digital/virtual one.

Creating good user experiences for apps inside messaging platforms poses a relatively new design challenge. Messaging platforms shake up the types of input that apps can accept, change designers’ canvas size, and demand a different set of assumptions about how users communicate. In this workshop, we’ll practice designing good user experiences for apps inside chat, addressing questions like: what problems make sense to solve through messaging platforms? How can you design experiences that are efficient, effective and friendly? Where does conversational UI make sense, and where should you rely on traditional elements like buttons?

This workshop will be facilitated remotely, by Bear Douglas, straight from   slackHQ in California. Formerly of Twitter and Facebook, Bear has a lot of experience with messaging systems and leading workshops remotely. Slack have also kindly donated a stack of their App UI Guidelines for all participants.

This workshop has three phases:

Bringing a workflow to messaging

What user experiences make sense to bring to messaging platforms? What kinds of tasks are made more efficient or more pleasant through a conversational interface?

Designing for onboarding

Although many people nowadays have interacted with chatbots, many have not. A good onboarding flow needs to introduce your product and invite an end user to make the most of it.

Building a conversation

You will pick one of the tasks they identified as being suited for a chat platform, and design the user story end to end.

Facilitator: Bear Douglas

Bear Douglas leads Developer Relations at Slack, where she and her team help developers build more pleasant and productive ways to work. Before Slack, she led the Developer Relations teams for the mobile and data platforms at Twitter, and worked on native mobile DevRel at Facebook and Parse. She’s passionate about developer experience, great documentation, and a-cappella music.

Tickets available at Eventbrite. Register now!