Pre-launch tickets are the best price we offer, and we only make 200 available. Register for a two-day conference ticket, or add a workshop and join us for all three days. Pre-launch pricing is limited to the first 200 tickets sold, or through July 9 (whichever comes first).
The conference sold out last year, and we anticipate the same in 2019.
The DesignOps Summit is for you if your organization needs to:
Build design culture and operations without stifling innovation
Design workflow management that saves you time and frees up mindshare
Find tools that activate better collaboration across teams
Develop processes for recruiting, on-boarding, and retention that set your designers and researcher up for success
You’ll mingle with and learn from industry pioneers who’ve already built fast-growing design operations at companies like Capital One, GE, Pinterest, WeWork, Atlassian, Autodesk and beyond. You’ll spend three days learning and networking in an intimate setting with over 700 forward-thinking design leaders like you. You’ll head home with new approaches, tools, and connections to build effective systems, on-boarding programs, and workflows for your team.
Something new: Rosenfeld Media communities
Announcing Rosenfeld Media Communities!
We’re in the content business—but let’s face it, the best content is an artifact of the conversations we are already having in our professional communities. Conference programs, books, workshops—all are simply polished versions of the conversations we’re already having.
That’s why Rosenfeld Media began facilitating three communities—covering DesignOps and ResearchOps, Enterprise Experience, and Advancing Research—over a year ago. Through monthly videoconferences and other means, dozens of us have been sharing ideas, content, furthering practices, and learning together in a fun and informal setting.
We’re now bringing these communities to the web and adding even more functionality. The first community site, for Enterprise Experience, just went live a few minutes ago, and the others will launch in the coming weeks. Best of all, our communities are free to join. We hope you will!
New Workshop Added to the EX19 Conference Lineup on June 5
“Make it sexy!” “Add some animated gauges!” “What about a dark theme?”
Have you ever been tasked with designing a mission critical, innovative, exciting dashboard? By tomorrow? sigh…
It is hard to tell, but these directives are actually a cry for help. Your organization is begging for great data visualization and you’re just the one to save them. Our workshop will arm you with the superpowers necessary to bring innovative, exciting and usable dashboards, reports and analytics to your products.
WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND
Behind most enterprise applications, there is a mind-blowing amount of information. With tools available today – from PowerPoint to code libraries to BI software – anyone can visualize data. But the tools don’t know what your users need. It’s up to us to make sure our data visualizations answer these questions:
Is it useful? Is it understandable? Is this what users want or need to know (and at the right time)? Do they have the information they need to take action?
You have to know who you are trying to reach and what they need to know or do before you decide how to use data that you have.
Learning the fundamentals of data visualization can help you up-level your data visualizations and dashboards and use any of your tools more effectively to communicate data in a way that people can quickly and clearly understand, and use.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Designers, front end developers, product managers, their leadership, and anyone interested in learning tool-agnostic fundamentals of effective data visualization design and user validation. This workshop is not for anyone looking to learn how to use a specific data visualization tool.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
In this hands-on workshop (with prizes!), Theresa Neil and Jes Reynolds will cover the fundamentals of designing and testing charts and visualizations to help you up-level your data visualizations for dashboards, reports and analytics tools.
You’ll learn about:
The difference between explanatory & exploratory visualizations
General guidelines and best practices
How to choose the right chart
Using color effectively
Data visualization accessibility
Tips for testing data visualizations
Resources for tools and inspiration
Then you get to put all the fundamentals into practice, win some prizes, and have some fun tearing apart and fixing some egregious dashboards. (Some of these are baaaaad.) And did we mention there are prizes? Register.
DesignOps Summit 2019—Call for Presentations
Thanks for your interest in presenting at the DesignOps Summit! The conference takes place in Brooklyn, NY, USA October 23-25. We’d love to hear your ideas—ranging from case studies to toolkits to inspirational stories—and especially want to hear from members of under-represented communities.
The submission deadline is EOD Monday, May 27. Please note: required fields are marked by an asterisk—and the more information you provide, the better. Apply here.
Videoconference recording now available: “Merging Improv with Design” with Cheryl Platz, March 7, 11am EST
Videoconferences (and past recordings) are available for free to all Enterprise Experience Community members. Join here for invitations.
Our guest, Cheryl Platz, applies her extensive experience as a professional improv performer and educator to her design work in “unexpected” ways. Improv is more than a performance technique – it’s a mindset that helps us energetically embrace constraints and uncertainty. Join Cheryl for a Q&A session to ask questions about Cheryl’s DesignOps Summit 2018 improv talk, questions about improv theory, or how to apply improvisational techniques to your storytelling and facilitation.
About Cheryl:
Cheryl Platz is a principal interaction designer whose work on emerging technologies has reached millions of customers across multiple industries. Her professional passions include natural user interfaces, applied storytelling in design and research, and taming complexity in any manifestation. As a Principal UX Designer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she is tasked with exploring and improving the Foundation’s employee experience around the world. Past employers include Amazon (Alexa), Microsoft (Azure, Cortana), Electronic Arts (The Sims), Griptonite Games (Disney Friends), Disney Parks (PhotoPass), and MAYA Design. In her free time, as Principal Designer and owner of design education company Ideaplatz, Cheryl shares her experience with conferences and companies worldwide – providing designers with the skills needed to work thoughtfully (and responsibly) with emerging technologies. Cheryl is also a professional actress and improvisor: as a member of the Unexpected Productions ensemble and teaching faculty for over a decade, she’s entertained and inspired tens of thousands of audience members.
Apply to tell your story at EX2019 – if chosen, you’ll attend for free!
If you’re a UX leader or manager who’s facing one of these challenges, Enterprise Experience is the conference for you.
Collaborating and partnering with your peers in product management, engineering and other parts of the enterprise that share responsibility for delivering great experiences
Helping your team up-level their skillsets to survive and thrive in the enterprise
Read more about how we’ve evolved the 2019 edition of the conference to meet your changing needs. Hope to see you in San Francisco this June!
—Lou Rosenfeld and the Enterprise Experience team
We’re hiring a Sales Operations Specialist!
We’re hiring a Sales Operations Specialist to help the company run more efficiently and position it for continued growth. This is a half-time position. Apply below or forward the job listing to someone who you think might be a good fit!
We are a small motivated team that values each member’s contribution to the company’s goals. We respect work/life balance and strive to create an humane environment where each employee can reach their full potential.
Enterprise flUX: the evolving practice (and conference) of enterprise user experience
In a nutshell: The 2019 edition of the Enterprise UX conference will focus on two new use cases: 1) helping UX leaders and managers more effectively partner with their peers in product management, CX and other parts of the enterprise that share responsibility for delivering great experiences; and 2) helping enterprise UX practitioners up-level their skillsets to become “enterprise-ready”. To keep up with our program’s progress, join our Enterprise UX community mailing list.
What’s the use case for a conference?
That may seem like an odd question, but conferences are like any other product—they need a reason to exist. Given their annual nature, you really need to be asking this question every year, especially in a field evolving as quickly as user experience design. That’s hard to do, especially when the wheels of conference production must begin turning well in advance, sometimes more than a year before the event takes place.
That’s why we’re making some significant enhancements to the 2019 program to stay relevant.
Enterprise UX 2018 was the fourth edition of the conference and, in many respects, we really hit our stride: a user research-driven program, exciting and diverse speakers making polished presentations, and a well-choreographed production.
But the 2018 program repeated many of the same themes as our inaugural program back in 2015. While those themes remained relevant, the industry has changed in important ways over those four years. So we’ve begun planning a new program to match the community’s evolving needs.
From one use case to two
Like the good UX folks that we are, we started with the conference’s use case. The inaugural use case looked something like this:
The Enterprise UX conference provides content and community to UX leaders and managers who are trying to build—and sustain—UX teams within large enterprises.
The future is famously here but unevenly distributed: since 2015, many of those leaders and managers have succeeded in getting their UX teams established, staffed, and funded. They no longer have to constantly look over their shoulders and worry about regime change, activist investors, and other threats that have decapitated design orgs in the past. UX is now irrevocably a part of the DNA of many—if not most—enterprises.
Rather than managing up to get a seat at the table, UX leaders and managers now need to shift their focus: managing down (building the right teams) and managing laterally (collaborating with peers from other parts of the enterprise). Ergo, two new use cases for Enterprise UX 2019:
The Enterprise UX conference provides content and community to UX leaders and managers who need to:
1) Help their teams acquire the skills they need to succeed in the face of enterprise challenges; and
2) Understand, align, coordinate, and collaborate with peers in other parts of the organization that impact the user’s experience.
Use case #1: Managing down
It’s no secret that the supply of UX talent simply can’t keep up with demand. And perhaps the biggest driver of that demand is the growth of teams at large enterprises.
This results in placing fairly inexperienced practitioners—many fresh out of short-term programs like General Assembly’s—into settings rife with complex political, cultural, and historical challenges. These practitioners maybe be strong craftspeople, but don’t have the business acumen and soft skills to succeed in an enterprise setting.
To become “enterprise-ready,” these practitioners desperately need to expand their toolkits, and it’ll take more than a single conference to get them there. But acknowledging the need in a public setting is an important first step. Enterprise UX 2019 will offer a variety of workshops to help practitioners become better at the listening, collaborating, negotiating, empathizing, understanding, and partnering skills they need to create and sustain great experiences at enterprise scale.
Use case #2: Managing laterally
In enterprises—large, distributed, and deeply complex—the user experience can’t be owned by UX teams; at best, we’re its shepherds. UX leaders and managers realize that they need to understand, serve, and partner with peers in all the other parts of the enterprise that impact the users’ experience, whether employees or customers. That means learning the goals, motivations, challenges, perspectives, and—perhaps most importantly—the language of people in HR, sales, CX, engineering, innovation labs, analytics, and the C-suite.
We envision an Enterprise UX 2019 program that takes the bull by the horns, teaching UX leaders and managers how their peers think, feel, and act, and modeling ways—through panels, storytelling, group exercises, and other means—to combine forces to create better experiences for enterprise users.
Diversity of the multidimensional variety
At Enterprise UX 2018, we made huge strides in diversifying our speaker roster. The key to reaching underrepresented communities was acknowledging that we, the program curators (Uday Gajendar, Lada Gorlenko, Dave Malouf, and me) lived and worked in a detached, self-reinforcing network made up of people just like ourselves. The only way to reach beyond it was to let go: to delegate a share of our programming to people who inhabited very different networks. It’s never easy to give up control, but the outcome was well worth the risk.
For 2019, we face a similar task. In addition to reaching underrepresented communities, we also need to reach beyond UX to our “sister” enterprise silos that impact the experience. We’ll start with these siblings:
Customer experience (CX)
Product management
Engineering
Data analytics
Cross-disciplinary diversity in our program will require a similar approach: adding well-connected members of those communities to our curation team and empowering them to take substantial roles in programming. These ambassadors will help us understand the landscapes of their respective communities in terms of potential speakers but, more importantly, the goals and challenges they face when it comes to crafting successful enterprise experiences.
Is it still Enterprise UX?
Most definitely. But the past five years have made it clear that enterprise UX is not owned by the UX team—it’s owned by the enterprise. To make the conference a home for anyone involved with the enterprise experience, we’re considering changing the conference’s name to something more inclusive—perhaps simply “Enterprise Experience”.
While the name is important, the program and the people it serves are what matter most. If you’d like to keep up on our progress and let us know what kind of program you would like to see, please subscribe to our Enterprise UX community mailing list. That’s where we’ve already been sharing resources, ideas, and discussions about Enterprise UX for many months now, mostly in the form of free monthly videoconference calls. I hope you’ll join us and be part of the discussion!
We say “preliminary” because our sessions’ titles and descriptions will get tuned between now and November. As with all Rosenfeld Media conferences, we spend months torturing, er, working closely with our speakers to tune their content and presentation style. We also have some “TBD” spaces in the program where we plan to try some different types of content out; more on that soon.
But for now, know that we’ve planned a great program, headlined by keynoters Leisa Reichelt (Atlassian) and Doug Powell (IBM). Have a gander; hope you’ll join us November 7-9 in New York City!
