The first talk was about traffic congestion by Joannes Vandermeulen, founder of Namahn. He gave an entertaining talk about how traffic congestion makes our life more difficult and gave some examples of how technology allied with usability could solve some of these problems. Even though the solutions are a bit futuristic, everyone can already do something today to decrease the traffic around us. It was not so motivating to know that most of the participants went by car... but the message was given.
The second talk was a Brussels Airlines case study by Audrey Benoit from Brussels Airlines and Raphael de Robiano from Emakina. They presented the process applied by Emanika to conceive and design the new website for Brussels Airlines. The main differential is that they performed a global user experience mission by following all the steps of any usual customer, such as to look for information, compare prices, book flight, checkin, travel, etc. It was a great talk, all the issues that the mission revealed were surprising and significant to bring about major changes in their products and services.
The third talk was about social networks by Amandine Feix-Villain from Groupe Reflect. She presented a different point of view that each person manages different facets of themselves, depending in which social network they are. For instance, someone's facet on Facebook (a more friendly and loose profile) is different from his or her facet on LinkeIn (a more professional profile). But... what about transportation? Am I able to "travel" easily from a facet to another? Am I the "driver" of my own facet information?
Well, there was a fourth talk, but unfortunately I had to leave at this moment because it was getting late and I had to take the subway and the train, a one-hour trip to get back home from Brussels to Louvain-la-Neuve. But it was certainly worth it, I had fun, learned a lot and saved a bit of traffic congestion ;-)
