Day 3–Theme Moderator Panel

Moderator Panel

Eduardo Ortiz: CEO and Founding Owner, Conforma

Rachael Dietkus: Founder, Principal Design Strategist, and Social Worker, Social Workers Who Design

Jess Greco: Director Product Experience Design, Emerging Tech & AI – Mastercard

Bruce Gillespie: Associate Professor of User Experience Design- Wilfrid Laurier University

Robin Beers: Founder-Ubuntu Culture Company

Renee Reid: Director of UX Design Research- LinkedIn

Marieke McCloskey: Director of UX Research- LinkedIn

Day 3 Theme Discussion

Welcome back and great to chat with all of you

1. First one for Rachel. What processes can be used to assessed maturity of practices and how to do the audit?
   1. RD: Want to add something didn’t explicitly mention was bringing people along with you as part of audit process, and earlier experiences in non-profit sector. Anytime there was an audit, and one single individual and team of folks
      1. Team of two and team of three
2. Other processes to recommend for guardrail space?
   1. RR: Legal as great partner for guardrails and always a team you can keep close and who you work with and strong relationships and legal when you act on things and invite them
      1. Invite to hard conversation on guardrails and keep you mind and keep legal as partner as well
      2. Take them out to coffee and build relationship before you need them
3. How can data be used to provide more weight to recommendations?
   1. BG: More numbers are good, but throwing data at people is not enough, and not top of mind
      1. Use numbers sparingly and most important numbers are tied with a personal face and experience to drive it home for most audiences
4. When making change at organizations and how did numbers help ing getting story across and importance of what was done across?
   1. Integrated insights and impactful with data analytics and user research and how jazzed two teams can get, and cool to see synergy reflected in aggregate data
   2. In scanning Slack saw lot of comments about power, relational and otherwise
      1. Be great facilitator and consultant way to enhance credibility
   3. Quick story of not doing this:
      1. Presenting qual concepts findings to big audience at very large university and internal conflict about project — run by head of engineering and consulting team said this was an org charge project, and attention to alignment
         1. As presenting findings, we can’t put stock in qual research as gold standard is quant usability testing — saw this flash by while talking
            1. Actually argued in chat as this shook me
      2. Real power to have stopped and ask great questions and manage own reactivity
   4. MM: Thinking how we measure our own impact and how we know if doing good job or more successful and tried to quantify impacts and got into sense of getting stuck— and space to tell stories and not quantified
      1. Very meta
5. For Jess, how do you see minorities and impact on willigness and comfort to seize power, or under-epresneted groups?
   1. Different levels of marginalization, and working with customer support agents who are customer support agent, and not even in reporting relationships and working to include them in the process, and went around the bend to call out leadership contributions
      1. Had expectation of getting hand slapped, and real risk associated with it
   2. More alliances when so-and-so, and shine theory
      1. The more you shine on each other harder it is to ignore
6. For Rachael, dealing with attributing knowledge related to trauma and harm?
   1. What comes to mind is element of attribution, and attributing stories we are being gifted by others, and people are recognized for contributions being made
   2. Many other people have spoke about trauma and harm
   3. Work to elevate “scope of context” with social work background, and peer practicioners who influence work, and integrating with public conversations
      1. Name people specifically, and our work builds and grows off each other, and its about reminding ourselves of that
7. RD: Can imagine won’t be six-degrees of celebration, due to nature of how stories told, and how do we provide attribution to how something originated
   1. Practice of knowledge sharing, and reminding people of those who came long before us and ‘concept of holding’
      1. Roots for what to believe in and what inspires us
   2. Scaling deep versus scaling across, versus scaling more on a topic or thing we are curious about it
   3. So maintain curiosity and feed that
8. When looking at curation of research repositories and how do you maintain them, groom them
   1. MM: Magic of incredible research ops team and questions here dealt with freshness and what went in there and shelf-life of insight
      1. Idea that not all insights will lack equally long, and has own unique half-life and regularly leveraging work on human nature and how we network and look for careers
      2. When typing with AI interface, summary feels new and fresh, even though it references old research
   2. RR: Going back to reclaiming power and reframe question as being powerful discipline, and people don’t recognize power it has and making sure as leaders and practicioners that we have agency to operate in certain level of power
      1. The minute we think we don’t have power— we don’t have it, and need to take agency of that
      2. Speaking about industry and profession is important that we recognize we have lot to offer, and understand that it in some way
         1. As global majority person, and understand where you can show up in most powerful way
      3. As human-centered leaders challenge everyone for agency and empowering in own orgs and teams
         1. If teams don’t cover breadth of capabilities, hard to convince other people