Day 1–Embracing Change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency

— Thank you for the invitation and the panel before remarks was perfect segway and hope you take away that hearing multiple things, multiple times means some truth is being transmitted

• Will remind some nuggets over the day

— Wear multiple hats with hat of CEO and non-profit lead, and provide clarity, with so much to talk about and how it drives impact

— Let’s get started with varying degrees of value that UXR brings in to needs

• Consensus that is UXR not in best of times

— Talk more about UX and design more broadly with UX collective ending yearly trend analysis for this year and hard to not feel personally tracked

— Focus on what you already do to move discipline going forward, and important instigator of impact, and got everything you need and help businesses and customer products thrive

• Using what we know now to build problems and essence of skills doesn’t change

— How we build on foundational principles is what matters most

— Three core themes to ground us, and think about roles in UXR

• Work isn’t going away, and focus on understanding human experience
• Have agency on interrogating impact on how AI will impact work being made
• Clarifying end to what we are applying the right solutions

— Value of research is different, but we have everything we need, without changing quality or nature of work

— Stand in knowledge that you have deep knowledge of human experience and behavior and needs — and see things through dfferent lens

• Images here repersent lot of tools that show work we do and validate and embed research into design thinking process

— Takes experience for effective research plan and more we did this and craft excellence and flexibility and wherewithal and access to new approaches where own current toolkit needs to be extended

• Be open to show-up and learning from others

— Focus on collaboration and ability to ask right questions, and uncover customer needs, and helping them frame their thinking and how people to understand customer needs with empathy and link to embrace learning and sharing with others, especially now

• Collaboration with other UXR is critical and sharpen skills and expertise to complement your own
  • Go far by going together and share your expertise with others, and a lot brought you to where you are, and a lot you don’t know too so keep sharpening skills—always be learnings
• Corroborate your learning with community even if outside the organization and advancing research outside of communities of practice in informal ways, and share across domains and opportunity spaces
  • Keep attending conferences like this one, to figure out how you can grow and pour into broader community of researchers and beyond

— Interrogate power of AI while appreicating the potential

— Perspective of Andrew Ng, who notes AI is the new electricity as a transformative input across all industries, similar to how electricity empowered the industrial revolution

• Capabilities of AI intelligence are rapidly increasing

— AGI to describe artificial agent as intelligent as human in cognitive intelligence, though we are currently seeing more AI powered systems for narrowed tasks

• AGI as concept to describe systems ability to reason
• Singularity as AI surpassing human intelligence and powered by apps we are seeing today lacks real understanding and situations that fall outside of training and models that helped it learn

— Got opportunity as researchers to inform how AGI systems shape the way we work

— If not already clear, I’m trained as computer scientist and early studies involved understanding as comp-sci as opportunity for agent-based modeling and artificial intelligence

• Feels like homecoming and spaces that intersect with GenAI more broadly

— Keep doing what we’ve always done and keep human experiences as core

• AI-driven tools can’t replace those who explain how AI works, or those who apply complex skills that require human creativity and judgment

— So be responsible— and prevent slowly swapping UXR for A-B testing, and choosing to build for the machine and not for each other

• Like call-out that distilling of passion by injecting humanity into AI
• Calling out when partners develop LLM and policy and socioeconomic disparities that will impact users of AI
  • Can partner to ensure alignment and accountability with AI work and UXR uniquely positioned to that

— Can guide users of tech to more effectively engineer prompts when looking to shortcut research itself

• Consider tools to free-up time, like Dovetail to turn user feedback into insights and can be valuable
• Not perfect now, but may save lot of time and key feature and promise of AI

— Research should lead conversations

— Researchers should do no harm and understand risks of human subjects research and what we are already doing and certainly in partnerships with research and respect for persons

• No different from what you already do, and hold space to do no harm

— Specify value insights and research bring to customers and business

— Point to some articulations of shifting researcher landscape

• We have natural response of fear and sense of not doing enough. For others it’s communicating more clearly and tracking progress against insights

— Takes evidence based, data-driven research and do that best when we work with what we do well and insights sharing the same way we do empathic interviews and help inform partners who we need to influence

— Per Erika Hall: Says to turn ethnography inward, to grasp how people make decisions and doing what we do best to grasp business partners and needs and bolstered by strong relationship and alignment

• Embody advocacy

— Taking time to slow down and actioning insights, and comfortable being uncomfortable

• Navigate uncertainty we have around us, is part of our work, and uncovering unknowns is what we do

— The key to getting past uncertainty is to keep moving through it

— Three core themes and stand in knowledge of deep understanding human experience and interrogating power of AI while appreciating its potential

— Surgeons don’t stop healing people or fixing bodies because assisted by robot arms, and new tool to support them

• No one thinks surgeon is less skilled for that
• Same applies to us and expertise and humanity we bring isn’t changing at all and we have everything we need to learn and grow

— At the end of day, we just need to keep standing

Q&A

1. Spoke about how research is changing and how we have choice and passively endure shift or actively shape. Powerful call to action, but can feel daunting. Tangible ways for how UX-ers can exercise agency with moments of transition?
   1. Staying grounded that what you see is what you get and innate characteristics to being a researcher and not shying away from moments of silence
   2. Attitude with building strong relationships with partners and building influence
   3. Need to build strong partnerships and capacity to understand what clients are deeming as important — we can fold that awareness into them
      1. Following-up and research and connecting to them and share that influence and maintain humanity and working with different disciplines and product innovation may have different way of seeing work and understand how we show up through research
   4. Can’t create change in a vacuum, and be provide fierce compassion
2. Advocated for turning capacity for empathy towards colleagues and make them comfortable enough to share open and honestly, and inform real change?
   1. Often we show up as therapists for how we listen and in moment are less quick to talk and respond, and comfortable in white-space in between and way to start conversation
   2. Sometimes people aren’t willing and get more with honey than vinegar
      1. Need mutual respect at minimum for those who are willing
   3. Meeting people where they are gets a lot of mileage— and figuring out what they care about, and space for knowing each other
      1. Figure out in conversation and where people are coming from and easy way to respond ot what they need, and figure out what you need to respond to them
      2. Analogy of getting girls and women into STEM. If they don’t feel safe going into the field, need to meet where they are