Design It, Build It Conference

8 July 2016

Attending the 2016 DIBI Conference in Edinburgh was a wonderful opportunity to hear from great digital professionals without having to leave town and incur greater expenses, or impact my university attendance too much. The digital sector changes at such a speed that it can be hard to keep up – particularly for academia and university courses that can soon become dated.

When I took a break from working to pursue the MSc, I wanted to dive into theoretical academic research but after 8 months, I felt like I was missing out of current digital practice, so the conference was a great way to re-engage with current topics, such as website performance budgeting or minimum viable products (MVP), and all in the context of companies that have pioneered digital in the past decade: Facebook, Buzzfeed, Tinder.

The focus of the conference was the intersection of design and web development, via the user experience, and one of the highlights was the first keynote speaker, from Buzzed, talking about how they made their designers learn to code to create a more fluid development process, and using job descriptions to ensure it was something they all worked on. Other case studies followed, such as how the BBC News app was developed, which was a very insightful look at the constant iterative process (something all presenters brought up) and how to cater for great variability of user preferences, as well as accessibility challenges such as how the site will load in poor internet regions or translate to other languages like Welsh (long names don’t fit in buttons!) or Arabic (different reading directions).

I am particularly interested in the cultural and heritage sector, and having experienced how resistant to change it can be, it was very insightful to see case studies about the recent digital transformation of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the V&A museum. Primarily how they successfully used A/B testing to secure senior stakeholder buy-in on major innovations.

Another of the highlights of the conference was a talk on the need to stop thinking about just 3 devices when designing the web: mobile, tablet, desktop. But rather, the importance of universal design, as browsers can now be found on everything: televisions, game consoles (a huge source of internet browsing traffic for 16-24yrs old and growing), gym equipment, cameras, etc.

Presentation aside, I chatted to several other attendees, mostly from agency backgrounds like my own, with whom I discussed each presentation. This really enriched the experience and even bumped into some familiar faces, which was very regarding.

From a conference point of view, it was well organised and the venue was very nice. Breakfast and lunch were provided, and was pleased by the quality of healthy options and their lack of disposable materials, instead opting for more sustainable glass and ceramic plates. Overall, it was a valuable experience that has complemented by studies and re-engaged me with the digital sector in Edinburgh.

Beatriz Palacios Fernandez, MSc Marketing and Business Analysis