So here’s the thing: Innovation isn’t a bad word. Overused? Perhaps. But not bad.

How do I know this? Because cheese in bread, cookie dough in ice cream, and Genius Bars inside Apple stores are AMAZING.

These are just a few examples of innovation that create great user experiences. They’re creative ways of putting existing things together in new ways that add real value to users’ lives.

So that’s what our fabulous lineup of presenters will be focusing on at UI18. They’ll tackle innovation in UX design from a variety of angles.

Scott Berkun will talk about what it takes to enable innovation in the first place — from thinking creatively to managing projects, egos, and business risks. You’ll hear how to lay a foundation for developing seriously great ideas and persuading teams and management to get onboard.

Get to know your users with Christine Perfetti. Her 90-day user-research plan is perfect for organizations hungry to find opportunities to innovate. You’ll learn to recruit participants, design tasks for them, organize field studies, present the data in terms stakeholders will love.

With Kevin Hoffman, you’ll find out how to structure meetings so the creative minds on your team can rally behind powerful, innovative ideas. He’ll show you a bunch of frameworks to encourage ideas from everyone and weigh business risks before jumping to design.

Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry will focus on building consensus around innovative design ideas through sketching, studios, and critiques. If you’ve ever experienced a “swoop and poop” of a stakeholder steamrolling ideas late in the game, then get in this workshop ASAP.

Jeff Gothelf is the leading voice behind Lean UX, a methodology to break ideas into bite-sized chunks that can be prototyped and tested super fast. See how to re-invigorate your design team and get to innovations faster, all by taking a scientific approach to design that minimizes risk.

Kim Goodwin will get your team on the innovation train, too. You’ll see how to map your user’s journey, then sketch with project managers to collaboratively define requirements. She’ll also talk about “minding the gap” in the UX across devices and within your organizational silos.

Dig deep into design details with Dan Saffer. He’ll show tons of examples of micro-interactions that delight users in unexpected, innovative ways. You’ll experiment with different types of triggers and feedback loops, then set realistic rules for your experiences to follow.

If you’re ever needed to design a data visualization or infographic, then Stephen Anderson’s workshop is up your alley. He’ll show you how innovative data interpretation can be; when you help users understand your story in new ways, they repay you in action and engagement.

Each of these fabulous presenters knows how to add real value to their users’ lives. And with their help, you’ll see which tools and processes you can use to make innovation happen.

With so many ways to measure our impact, why spend any more time trying to invent a better mousetrap?

Don’t just invent a better mousetrap. Come to UI18.

In this week’s UIEtips, Margot Bloomstein discusses the strategies content producers should take to optimize their writing.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

But with the opportunities of publishing come immense challenges. Don’t just write; write well. Don’t just blog once; maintain a schedule. Don’t just launch an app; ensure your content is appropriate for the many contexts and devices through which it may appear. And goodness, don’t just curate content by choosing keywords and automating aggregation; hone your perspective on the topic and continually revisit your collection to maintain its relevance.

Read the article: How Content Strategy Can Help.

How do you prioritize the content you create for your web site and blog? Let us know below.

What if you could ask one question during an interview that would tell you everything you need to know about the candidate you’re thinking of hiring?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Lou Adler’s Hire with Your Head recruiting strategy. A big component of how Lou approaches hiring is the interview conversation. While Lou isn’t thinking of hiring designers specifically, it turns out his approach is perfect for the folks who will thrive in your environment and produce great work.

The question is a simple one: “What’s the project you worked on that you’re most proud of?” Now, this isn’t the only question you ask during the interview, just the first one.

Once the candidate tells you their project, you ask them to explain what it was they were trying to do. Then you ask them how the project started.

You can then ask them who else was involved. Design is a team sport and I love having candidates draw org charts of their projects. Then I ask them to tell me who else was involved and what everyone’s contribution was. It helps identify how much of a team player the candidate is and how they dealt with whatever people issues arose.

Anything you want to know about their skills, talents, and contributions can come from that first initial question. Because it’s starting with something they are proud of, I’ve found candidates are more open and honest about what they did.

It also becomes easy to see where a candidate has depth and where they are only skimming on the important qualities. A great candidate can dive into details of their best accomplishment and show what it was all about. Someone who wants to say “I was involved” when they really weren’t starts to stumble and pause when you get to the followup questions.

This one question gets to the core of behavioral interviews, where you look at the past behavior of the candidate to best predict how they’ll work out on your team. Because designers repeat the work habits they learn throughout their career, understanding the details how they’ve worked in the past can tell you a ton about how they’ll work with you.

In this week’s UIEtips, Stephen P. Anderson discusses micro-moments in design.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Good interaction design is about attending to every moment that passes between a person and the device (or system, or service) with which he or she is interacting. These moments can be explicit, as with gestures, taps, a button-click, or the completion of a form field. Or, these moments may be more elusive, such as a pause while you try and understand what is being asked of you or how to answer. It’s these internal conversations that users have at any given moment that often get overlooked.

Read the article: UX Design, Role-playing & Micromoments.

What micro-moments have your experiences that added to — or diminished — your experience with a design? Lets us know below.

In the desire to expand your prototyping toolkit, you need to regularly try out new tools and techniques. Your goal is to have, at your disposal, as many different prototyping tools as possible. Maybe you want to learn a new software tool? Maybe you’re interested in practicing your whiteboard sketching skills or play with paper prototypes?

Even though you might be tempted to use a new tool to work on a new design, I think that’s a bad idea. Instead, I think you should set aside some time to redo an old project or mimic an existing design using the new tool. Grab a challenging interaction from your existing product, copy a cool design you use every day, or take the last prototype you built and rebuild it in the new tool.

Learning a new tool or technique takes full attention. Yet, coming up with new design ideas and approaches also takes full attention. Why divide the attention? If your goal is to master a new tool, make the investment to do just that.

Give yourself the time to learn and experiment with the new tool. Pick a design you’re very familiar with and practicing rebuilding it. Remove the need to concentrate on what makes the design good and focus on how you emulate it with this new tool.

Make the practice session all about learning the ins-and-outs of the new tool. Play with the different methods for rendering and simulation.

Take time to practice the techniques for prototyping before you need to put them into action on a real project. (And if you haven’t used a tool in a while, practice that too.)

Other thoughts on prototyping:

• Prototyping’s Resurgence: Communicating the Designer’s Intent
• Five Prevalent Pitfalls when Prototyping

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss the five most common pitfalls of prototyping.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Prototypes are a fabulous way to exploring ideas with a team. They shorten the time between “This is what we’re thinking…” and “Oh, I get it.”

In our work with design teams, we see a lot of teams using prototypes today. We’re also seeing many of those same teams fall into traps that reduce the effectiveness of their prototyping efforts. Here’s five of the most common ones we see.

Read the article: Five Prevalent Pitfalls when Prototyping.

Have you run into any of the problems discussed in the article, and how did you resolve them? Let us know below.

In this week’s UIEtips, we look back at a past article where I discuss several different user research strategies and the profound impact they can have on your products.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Damn, I wish we’d done this a year ago.” That’s what I hear right after I’ve started a team on their first user research project. The process of learning what your users need is so powerful, senior stakeholders wish they could go back in time and create their products and services over again, this time with the insights they’ve just received.

Of course, you can’t go back in time (yet), but you can start with your own user research program right away. Once you decide to go down that road, the first thing you’ll realize is how rich your choices are of research methods. Usability audits, heuristic evaluations, usability testing, field research – which one do you choose first? Which are the most effective?

Read the article: Starting Your User Research.

What techniques did you start your user research with? How did that work for getting people on board and inspired to create change? Let us know below.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss the sophisticated approach of genius design.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

A team that approaches genius design needs to focus on a specific problem that has a big enough market to provide a decent return on the investment. For example, an agency might decide they’ll become the industry experts in building web sites for small community hospitals. Because there are thousands of these hospitals across the country, many of which have pretty poor web sites, this is a market that could be beneficial. By establishing an expertise in this space, the agency could provide a cost-effective tailored solution that works.

This means the agency would need to learn everything they can about the people who run the web sites, the people who use the web sites, and what the web sites need to meet everyones’ needs. If they succeed, they’ll create an internal knowledge that separates them from every other web design agency out there, because they’ll know how to demonstrate their expertise to potential clients.

Read the article: Genius Design’s Little Secrets.

Have you ever applied the principles of Genius Design with success? Share your thoughts below.

In this week’s UIEtips, Richard Rutter discusses how you should consider the users’ medium and their environment.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Designing web sites is a strange and wonderful thing. The web is often described as a medium, but it is no more a medium than ink. To be a medium, ink must be combined with paper and a means of forming letters; otherwise ink is merely a means of transporting pigment. Similarly, the web is merely means of transporting data and structuring ideas. It is only when these meet a combination of software and hardware that we have a medium for design. But unlike all written material before it, that medium is under the control of the reader.

Read the article: Embracing the Medium.

How do you take the users’ environment into consideration when designing your web site? Share your thoughts below.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss how APIs are making it increasingly easier to integrate complex features into your designs, such as photo manipulation, credit card processing and other automated tasks.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

APIs give designers a much richer toolbox than they’ve ever had before. We can now take advantage of capabilities on our devices, the wealth of knowledge stored in databases, and pull together resources to provide a richer experience for our users.

APIs provide us LEGO-like building blocks, each with unique capabilities, that we can plug together to extend our abilities. Just a few years ago, if you wanted to integrate SMS into your app, your development team would have to learn the ins-and-outs of connecting to the carrier’s interfaces (which weren’t standardized) and constantly deal with a shifting landscape of technology. The costs were unacceptably high for most organizations, so only the richest could afford to develop and maintain it, with low returns on that investment.

Now, rigorously built APIs, like those provided by Twilio and its ilk, bring those development and maintenance costs down significantly. The lower bar of entry means more competition, which lowers costs even more. This makes incorporating these capabilities easier than ever.

Read the article: APIs: The Future Is Now.

How are you using APIs to bring more value to your users? Share your stories below.