On Thursday night I was lucky enough to be invited to the European Premier of Design Disruptors. Held at the London Palladium to a packed crowd of enthusiastic Product Designers, UX and UI Designers, Artists, Developers and a host of London’s finest tech heads. Design Disruptors is a brand new feature length documentary by the web-based prototyping tool, InVision. The documentary was tailored around products and start-ups and how users engage with design in the current world of smart phones, responsive websites and tablets. Design has become one of the most dominant factors in the modern world of business. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, AirBNB and Spotify have become so successful because of the functionality of the site, but more importantly, the aesthetics and fantastic user experience they provide.
InVision as a product is used to craft these user experiences and has risen to popularity amongst the Product people evolving the way we use these apps and websites. A great point which is drawn upon is that art is timeless, but in modern society, design is constantly evolving.
The film featured a handful of industry leaders such as Braden Kowitz (Google Ventures), Jenny Arden (Airbnb), Mike Davidson (Twitter), Julie Zhuo (Facebook) and Tobias van Schneider (ex Spotify) who gave us a brief insight into their ever-changing world of product design.
Julie Zhuo – Design Disruptors
Julie Zhuo (pictured above), who is the VP of Product Design at Facebook talked about practices they use at the company to improve the Users Experience. One, which I found fascinating is how every Tuesday the employees would have 2G Tuesday, so when they logged in to their Facebook accounts they would have a 2G experience to give an insight into how people in poorer countries use their product, and the experience they have. She also mentioned how there is no such thing as an “Average User” anymore. Once upon a time Facebook would have an Average type of user, whereas in 2016 with more than 1.6billion active users there is no such thing as an average. This makes the process of designing products and experiences far more difficult.
I personally found the documentary very insightful and really interesting from a designers perspective. The team at InVision have done a great thing by shining a light on the people that are responsible for changing the world through technology.
Design Disruptors will be released on August 1st, 2016 and will be free to view at www.designdisruptors.com, Netflix and certain cinemas.
Presumably, everyone in the Palladium uses the Invision product and also presuming that most of these people receive tonnes of marketing emails from the “Mystical” Clark from Invision…. Therefore, I couldn’t resist but ask in the Q&A if Clark from Invision is in the building. Sadly, he wasn’t.
