WebExpo 2017

The conference (WebExpo) is mainly about web, but it covers this topic in several views - design, business and development. I was happy to be part of the volunteer team, which help with conference in one day in exchange to free ticket to the other day. The first day I was helping with stage named “ABC Theatre” - in this hall was several interesting lectures which I was able to hear.

  • What language does yout product really speak? by Sagit Siegal (Thomson Reuters)

    • You should consider non-native speaker when design your product, because for example they can exchange min. (in meaning minimum) for min. (in meaning minutes). It can change the way they are feeling about your product. The behavior of non-native English speaker is somehow different, so you should AB testing even with this concern in the mind.

  • VR: End of flatland, we’ll be togerger. by Karel Hulec

  • Inside the chinese electronics markets - How I built my own iPhone and Other Adventures. by Scotty Allen (Stranger parts)

    • Very interesting journey how the market in Schenzen works and that there are a million of possibilities. It is very competitive and different from the western world. The result was iPhone 7 with 3.5mm jack connector.

  • Building data-driven products at speed. by Jan Šrůtek

That was the first “work” day. The other day I could fully dive into all lectures that attracts me. I highlighted all interesting lectures which I want to see. Sometimes it was hard because the lectures was taken in 4 parallel stages so I had to decide what to see and what not.

  • How we failed with chatbot. The success story. by Martin Zlámal (Kiwi.com)

    • A journey how they develop a chatbot for customer service at one of the biggest air-ticket recommender system. At the end they develop a system where their chatbot only helps (suggest possible answers) to human employees, who will decide if the reply is OK. It saves approximately 2 minutes per call so if they sum it up, it saves about 7 man-day per day (that means that they can fire up 7 people and still manage the same amount of requests per day - of course they are growing bigger so they can do that :D).

  • Designing the Pivot. by Julia Khusainova (Airbnb)

    • Ones of the famous pivots (firms that change the focus of their business to try something new) were Groupons, Twitter, Pinterest, Shyp). She talked about zoom-in/out direction, customer specialization, platform/technology specialization, all this happen because the market is changing (consumer -> business, mobile -> web + mobile, new features -> standards). Besides that you can skip/speed up some part of the development process you should not forget on wireframes, user-flows diagrams. At the launch time you should distinguish between the “old” product and new pivot (say what are the new features, principles and so on).

  • Scale your Design up. by Emanuela Damiani (Mozilla)

    • The background of this talk was based on an idea that you have your product and marketers find that there are some ways which should improve it. Then she talked about the water-scrum-fall. The drawbacks can be in developer team ,they discover that in some cases the product can fail, but worse can be if that discover your users. And all that prolong our development. The way to improve this is to use true agile SW development. Not building SW like HW. Inspect and adapt. Minimise effort, maximise feedbacks. REALLY FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTER (size of the button is not important if the button is useless). Ask user for feedback - normally it is free win-win situation.

  • Dangerous predictions. by Brendan Kearns (InVision)

    • This lecture was shorter than I expected and because of lunch I don’t get a start so there is almost nothing I can write.

  • The Ultimate Bank Robbery - How Fintech Startups are Killing Highstreet Banks. by Philip Bonhard (Lloyds Bank

    • The biggest media company creates no content. In the 67 years of the Fintech you should not under-estimated influence of the iPhone (2007), even in the Fintech. In the 2014 was launched ApplePay. The speed of the Internet and development is increasing, the cost of power and memory is decreasing - all this leads to perfect base for the fintech startups. The global market can access me easily and vice versa. All interesting start-up are afraid of the big 4 (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon). Is interesting to realize that some time ago, sending money across the border was an expensive and long process, now with an amount of interesting starups you can do it even quicker and cheaper (reference to TransferWise. Problem with the banks are that there are risk averse so they don’t want to try new ways,a radical rethink their business (but is is changing - SLOWLY)

  • Putting the ‘Story’ into Storytelling. by Graham McDonnell (The New York Times)

    • The lectures had several videos with a very strong (in fealing word) story and then Graham explained what was the big TRIO (for example: problem, element, outcome). We need to have a strong story to tell if we want the others to listen. The execution is just as important as the story .. but is is not substantive.. Give user “undirected exploration experience” and they will be listening you, at least give them some sort of power over the story (“simply choices”). And one important note: HIDE THE VEGETABLES.

That was my experience with WebExpo 2017. I really like the time I had spent here. I would really like to be attending next year too.

I would like to highlight a volunteer way to get to the conference because you help them and they help you (WIN-WIN). (I have been at several conferences ( Game developer session 2015, 2016, Machine learning 2015, 2016, Festival Fanazie 2014) thanks to that)

Written on September 23, 2017