Use design to build relationships with your customers

There are plenty of reasons to come to a Generate conference; you might want to learn the latest tricks and techniques for using flexbox or implementing SVG animation in your web interfaces, or perhaps pick up some hot UX tips. It's a great opportunity to learn new skills from the biggest names in frontend development.

Generate likes to think bigger than that, though, with talks that will inspire you to think about your business as a whole, encouraging you to look at what you do and wonder whether you could do things differently and better.

Take this talk from Generate New York back in April. In Overthinking design and embracing minutia, Jon Setzen from Media Temple discusses the possibilities of a 'design for service' approach. Often, ne notes, we focus solely on how a user will interact with any given digital experience. 

As experience designers, we spend our days (and often nights) working hard to solve problems for people. Often, he notes, we focus solely on how a user will interact with any given digital experience. What we tend to miss are the many touchpoints that can help shape the larger experience and enable customers to emotionally connect to a product, a service or a company. 

In today’s competitive marketplace, service and experience can generate the loyalty and the relevance that can make or break brands like never before, and in this talk Jon explains how embracing a 'design for service' thinking can help digital design teams shift from transaction-driven thinking to a relationship-centric approach.

If this is the kind of thinking your business needs, then you'll find more like it at upcoming Generates. At Generate London on 21-23 September, Mike Kus will encourage you to be the black sheep: stand out from the crowd by learning to extract a client's identity and using that to create truly distinctive designs, and Jeff Veen will discuss crafting a creative culture, sharing advice from two decades of experience leading the teams behind some of the world's biggest digital products.

And at Generate Sydney on 5 September, Erika Hall will look at all the data that's beyond measure, explaining why you need to think beyond analytics and allow things like human experience - the stuff you can't quantify - to inform your decisions. And in UX for change, Nick Finck will discuss the responsibility of designers to change the world for the better, and explore how this might be done.

Want to know more? Head over to the main Generate site to see what's coming up and to book your tickets.