What I learned @fusionconf #fusionday (Sept 3, 2015)

I'm not a User Experience (UX) professional. That doesn't stop my marketing clients from asking me UX questions. When I heard about Fusion Day, I decided to attend.


Here are some of the things I learned.

UX is not UI

Mariah Hay made this distinction clear. From the context, it sounds like this is an old debate. For me, being a novice , this was new and profound.

UX is a process of understanding your users. It involves research, strategy and design. UI is a piece of this, especially relating to the design.

This often gets confused by organizations who know they need UX and UI but don't know what they need. (I empathize with this. Many companies ask for SEO but lump it together with all online marketing efforts).

This leads me to the second thing I learned at Fusion Day.

UX is about more than a digital experience

It's easy for digital professionals to think that UX is all about the digital experience. However, as many of the speakers noted, a good user experience should be part of every touch the customer makes with your business.

Good UX should go beyond your marketing efforts, too. Build your organization around good UX. Both Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman and Gilbert Lee pointed out how good UX can help an organization on many levels.

The Future of Mobile UX

Cameron Moll discussed the current state of mobile UX. He showed us some of the limitations of Responsive Web design.

He showed us how the future of Mobile UX will be "Elective UX". This will allow users to select how they interact with the content provided to them on mobile devices. Unfortunately the technology for Elective UX is not ready yet.

While we wait on this technology to evolve, we should aim for Unified UX. This considers that users often shift between devices while executing on a particular task. We need to make every effort to present data across these devices in a consistent way. A unified experience also should consider our verbiage. Do you invite users to "click" a link? For example: how can you click on a mobile device?

How to Test UI

A couple speakers from Microsoft (Joe Raio and Amanda Lange) offered some tools to test UI. Lange also suggested how to test your interfaces.


If I'm honest, I understood about 40% of the content. Some of the talks might have been about topics to which I couldn't empathize- since I'm not a UX professional. Despite those limitations (which I place upon myself), I did learn a lot about UX.