Conference Program

In this Q&A session, you’ll hear how former clinical researcher and PhD scientist, Clemens Janssen, is running research at 15x speed, supporting the needs of Nutrisense, an health tech company. As the first researcher, Clemens will share how he’s built a research culture with training, standardized processes, and templates.

Data cannot interpret the world. Only humans can. Because of that, the next evolution of AI requires a more collaborative approach to building systems. And UX researchers are uniquely positioned to build the dream team responsible for managing the data collection required for more responsible AI.

Anthropology and sociology methodologies provide us the framework to interpret human behavior in a way that telemetry can’t. Qualitative research leads to more socially conscious computing decisions that will impact technology companies going forward.

Join this fireside conversation to discover…

• The power of changing one tiny acronym from “Human-Computer Interaction” to “Human-Centered Innovation”
• Expert recommendations for building more responsible technology
• What it will take to build a fundamental practice around collecting and analyzing high-quality data
• Practical steps you can take today to build ethical products in the future

This talk aims to unpack the notion of participation used in participatory design research, by proposing a framework through which different levels of participation can occur at different stages of the research process. Drawing examples of work in child welfare and foster care, this framework is ultimately an invitation to challenge the notion that participation is binary (i.e., either research is participatory or isn’t) or fixed (i.e., there is only one way participation can be done). Instead, participation is a negotiation that should take into account different factors (e.g., partners, resources, timeline), and could include a combination of different levels at different stages in any given research study.

Online shopping was first premiered in the 1980s, as a way for people who couldn’t shop in-person to easily make purchases. But how far we’ve come! In this talk, Fable’s Accessibility Evangelist Sam Proulx will walk you through some of the key factors to create an online shopping experience that is accessible to everyone. From his perspective as a full time screen reader user, and drawing on Fable’s thousands of hours working with people with disabilities, Sam will highlight how consistency, convenience, confidence, and customizability enable a smooth experience for all users, disabled or not. Let’s bring online shopping back to its accessibility roots!

We’ll take a look at how UX propagates within organizations using a viral model ( a modified SIR model to be more precise ). We’ll look at such questions as:

• Does it simply need more time?
• Is the transmission rate/function the problem?
• Is part of the organization effectively “inoculated” against UX?
• and how, when and where to track progress

While getting UX into an organization isn’t as simple as solving a set of differential equations, we hope to show you that doing just that might be a useful step in getting insights into what might work and what might not.

Generative workshops are a critical generative component of any product development process. But in my 20+ years conducting product user research, I have seen more product harm come from so-called “workshops” or “design sprints” than good. In this tutorial, I will share more about my experience and what I’ve found are critical components of generative workshops — whether they last five hours or five days.

Contrary to popular belief, a design sprint is a highly structured and carefully designed series of exercises, not a brainstorm, design jam or free-for-all. The whole point is to drive a cross-functional team to the right outcome, and this requires a set of structured exercises which weave the thread of user needs, behaviors and attitudes throughout. This involves more than reviewing the research at the start and then moving on to create without that research in context.

A true design sprint takes us from user insights — even broad user insights — to user-evaluated concepts or designs. The generative phase of a product is deeply impactful, and design sprints are a fantastic tool for driving this needed impact. However, many are practicing brainstorms or design jams rather than true design sprints. One can make a mismatched concept extremely usable throughout the product development process, but that will not remedy the fact that it is not the right concept.
Researchers are ideal design sprint organizers and facilitators, but researchers are sometimes not even considered a critical component of the sprint. It’s important for knowledgeable researchers to drive design sprint impact.

Join us as Zapier’s Senior Insights Program Manager, Michelle Bejian Lotia, shares her research repository journey. With insights coming from all directions at Zapier, important research was often lost in the fray, resulting in repeated projects and siloed efforts.

By consolidating insights into a repository that all stakeholders could access and contribute to, Michelle is looking to compound Zapier’s research efforts and drive insight-led decision-making across the organization.

Come along and hear firsthand the challenges and triumphs of rolling out a research repository in a growing, fully remote organization.

Many of today’s processes and methods for design thinking and UX design feel limited in a world where we use these approaches to solve complex problems. Systems thinking is a mindset and approach that helps designers and researchers broaden their lens and empowers them to increase their impact.

Join us for this session with Sheryl Cababa, the author of Closing the Loop.

This is a case study of a strategic, enterprise-level IT project that was stalled due to organizational and cultural issues within company. By applying a few familiar research techniques and frameworks (and one unfamiliar modeling framework) towards understanding and solving organizational problems, the project team found its footing and was able to deliver a complex application that will position the company for success.

Product teams, including those I work with, struggle to overcome the grinding momentum of product delivery timelines to make room for adequate discovery, learning, and application through research. The game of product development becomes fiercer when it’s not the first time, but the fourth team assembled to tackle a complex product space. In well-trod territory, strong opinions may abound, and talking past each other and rehashing approaches is rampant. Challenges that face researchers as partners in product development include establishing a sense of shared team vision, separating facts from fiction, and moving the team past hang-ups to establish a research strategy and product direction. This case introduces the idea of “grinding momentum” and outlines a stakeholder engagement process known as a FOG session that helps all team members across functional expertise areas claim voice, hear others, and share in collective aha moments that define next steps. Using a mixed-methods approach, a process is outlined to frameshift the value of existing knowledge spanning many departments within an organization, bring together distinct expertise vocabularies and analyses, and propel product partners to identify true knowledge gaps.

In many organizations, design thinking dominates the research process with expansive research processes upfront during discovery. Pharmaceutical research gives us an alternative model that we can adapt based on a fail early and fail often (tech mantra) that should make discovery research an easier sell in any organization.

Takeaways:

• An alternative model to discovery research with reduced upfront costs
• Starting discovery research when buy-in is difficult
• Maintaining discovery research when funds tighten up
• An alternative model to measuring the value of research that takes into account savings

Working as a UX researcher in 2023 can be overwhelming—and connecting with peers is more important than ever. Whether you’re looking for an opportunity to get advice, vent, laugh, cry, be heard, make new friends, or just be with your peeps, join us for a UX researcher community mixer. We’ll spend most of the hour in a series of small groups where you’ll get to meet, talk, and most of all, connect with your peers.

We empathize and deeply understand our products’ end users, but do we understand our colleagues and stakeholders to the same level, as they are users of our insights? In this session, we’ll discuss how changing our mindset and better understanding our colleagues can unlock a path to research acceleration.

There is no shortage of data in our organizations, including that which comes from research studies, in today’s “data-driven” organizations. Due to sheer volume, attention is often focused on the myriad tools and methods that exist to gather and manage data, not on the importance of establishing context and coherence across data sets. This talk will explore how researchers are uniquely qualified to use a mixed-methods mindset to transform fragmented data collection into meaningful insights, examine the barriers that challenge this outcome, and learn from real world examples about how to get stakeholders to demand the same.

No topic within the insight industry has drawn as much impassioned debate and existential questioning about our future, value, and craft as that of research democratization. It raises fundamental questions about our practice and raison d’etre:

• Should knowledge be owned or controlled?
• Is research art, science, or craft?
• How much research is too much?
• Can anyone ever not be biased?
• What does it even mean to be a researcher anymore?

Join us for a head-to-head debate between a passionate defender and a fervent detractor of democratization. They’ll engage in strong but respectful dialogue about the rights, wrongs and pitfalls of democratizing research.

We are excited to welcome Xenia Adjoubei, Research Specialist in territorial analysis, sustainability and emergent tech, and Associate Director at Studio intO to our upcoming Advancing Research session on Wednesday, 29 March at 9:45am-10:15am.

Xenia will share her insights and experiences on a range of topics, including the power of community-led research, the democratization of knowledge, and the impact of new-old tools in promoting social good.

Her talk will be an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the role of research and innovation in addressing humanitarian crises and promoting social justice. We invite you to join us for this inspiring and informative event, and to be a part of the conversation about the future of research and innovation in our communities.

The inclusion of women in research has existed in narrow and siloed ways, if at all. Usually we include women when the project has an active gender focus (often in international development projects), or in an effort towards more inclusive research. But, we are not practising inclusion of women unless it is deeply embedded in both, the way we do research and what we do research about.

In this session, Mansi will share Women-Centric Design: a methodology and toolkit to equip designers and decision makers to actively design with and for women. Drawing from her research with gender and feminist practitioners around the world, Mansi will introduce researchers to themes that are core to serving women as equal users of our design — and the role research can play in broadening our project scopes so we can shift away from overlooking women towards truly including them.

If you look across all disciplines, the one person whose achievements got to the heart of a behavior in nature was the 20th century mathematician Emmy Noether. While geniuses in physics received accolades for figuring out conservation laws in physics, she went an extra step, and this was a step most people didn’t even know was there. She figured out where conservation laws came from.
In this presentation, we are going to look at where Emmy would fit in high tech today.

Today, our world is filled with a plethora of templates, one day courses, agile and lean approaches, blogs on how to get “quick wins” and many other forms of content directly or indirectly trying to satisfy our appetite for speed in high tech. This is reflected in a desire to get to key takeaways or insights as quickly as possible.

Many times, these “lean” approaches can be incredibly useful, but not always. Sometimes in the rush to answer or iterate, something fundamental is missed. Insights that could have been discovered with just a little more up front thought and formalism of the problem space.

Asking one more “why” question.

And asking it like the kick*ss 20th century mathematician Emmy Noether.

Design and research-driven leaders have evolved from being responsible for executing design concepts to having a crucial role in driving change across organizations. This is welcome progress, but with greater responsibility comes new challenges, especially when it comes to championing change in organizations likely to resist it.

As design and research-driven changemakers have risen in the ranks of business, they’ve “learned on the job,” experiencing both setbacks and victories. We captured many of these learnings by interviewing over 40 design leaders and incorporating their shared wisdom in our book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Whether these leaders worked at IBM and Google, a US government agency, or a small consulting firm, their insights and observations are applicable to all and well-worth considering.

This presentation will offer an overview of what we learned. It will cover the top mistakes changemakers make as they navigate the messy processes and people issues involved in driving any type of change. You’ll learn how to determine the ground conditions needed for success, how to find and align supporters, how to minimize detractors, and how to repurpose design tools, frameworks, and techniques to your advantage.

Maria Guidice is the co-author of Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World.

What drives customers to take the first step in their digital journey? What friction can knock their journey off-kilter or end it completely?

We surveyed thousands of consumers after they visited websites across multiple industries to understand how digital experiences can make or break customer loyalty – and ultimately, your bottom line.

In this session, you’ll see the results of our research and a data-rich deep dive on why website visitors fail to complete their intended missions, the barriers that cause them to give up, and where they go after a bad digital experience.

We’re all familiar with the standard justification for secondary research – it’s a process to contextualise what’s already known to plan more focused (primary) research studies. Among research practitioners and non-researchers, secondary research is rarely thought of as a method in itself – and rather a supplementary phase of work before the real investigation begins.

In this talk, we hope to convince fellow researchers that secondary research can be more powerful and impactful than just offering a foundational starting point. With the right “research infrastructure‚” secondary research can allow us to step back, triangulate and evaluate not only a larger corpus of data but also consider data from different sources and teams to make better-informed decisions.

We share how we evolved our secondary research processes to do more efficient research and help our teams make more informed decisions.

There are many innovations in “research” that push the field forward. From inclusive research, democratizing research, fast research, futures research, and VR/AR research to mixed methods, agile research, participatory research, behavioral research, AI research, systems research, and trauma-responsive research; the future of research seems to be improving. However, the vast majority of innovations in “research” work at the outer surface of “research,” leaving the Anglocentric core of “research,” along with its assumptions and views, fundamentally untouched.

Interestingly, only a tiny percentage of research is done by people we call researchers. The vast majority of research is done by people around the world in the service of their hyperlocal being and doing, their aspirations, livelihoods, survival, visions, thriving, and problem-solving.

With their inspiration, what happens when we break away from this UNIverse, this one-world world with only one center, one globalizing Westernized understanding and control of research and knowledge?

What happens when we enter a world of many centers and many understandings of knowledge and research that come from various ways of being in the world? What happens when we acknowledge and enter the pluralistic multiverse – the pluriverse? Let us explore what research in the pluriverse looks like and whether you are ready to embark on a pluriversal journey. It only requires a yes.