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Watch Chris Clark’s “Everybody Knows When You’re Talking To Your Mother” talk on Interaction’14 | IxDA Conference

A crash course in sociolinguistics, and a challenge to find the messages hidden in your own words […]

Words tell our customers what we think of them. Are we speaking to them like our elders? Like royalty? Like buddies? Or idiots?

Our language defines the product experience in more ways than we know. From labels to push notifications and support scripts, every turn of phrase hides a legacy of design decisions and company politics.

The way we compose our messages can invite or exclude, empower or admonish in different circumstances. This is a crash course in sociolinguistics, and a challenge to find and iterate on the messages hidden in our work.

Chris Clark is a product designer for Fitbit in San Francisco, where he’s focused on the impact of friendships in people’s health and fitness. He originally studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Western Australia, and before Fitbit he worked at Square on the credit card payment apps now used to transact billions of dollars a year.

via “Everybody Knows When You’re Talking To Your Mother” Chris Clark-Interaction14 on Vimeo.

By Itamar Medeiros

Originally from Brazil, Itamar Medeiros currently lives in Germany, where he works as Director of Design Strategy at SAP and lecturer of Project Management for UX at the M.Sc. Usability Engineering at the Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences .

Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar has helped truly global companies in multiple continents create great user experience through advocating Design and Innovation principles. During his 7 years in China, he promoted the User Experience Design discipline as User Experience Manager at Autodesk and Local Coordinator of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Shanghai.

Itamar holds a MA in Design Practice from Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK), for which he received a Distinction Award for his thesis Creating Innovative Design Software Solutions within Collaborative/Distributed Design Environments.

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