Social Events at DesignOps 2020
On day 1 of the conference, October 21, 4:30-6:30pm PDT, get ready to party hearty with our Platinum Premier sponsor, Bloomberg LP, Rosenfeld Media, and DesignOps Summit 2020 attendees. Start by leaving your stress in the rear-view mirror (we’ll have a mindfulness expert on hand), watch a mentalist read attendees’ minds (if you believe), view a fantastic UX video based on the play, Hamilton (it’s election time after all), and prepare for plenty of speed-networking with your design operations peers. Lots of reasons to join the fun at our Opening Reception! This event is open to all attendees, even if you did not purchase a day 1 ticket. Add it to your calendar.
Itching to meet your DesignOps fellow travelers? On day 2, October 22, 3:45-4:45 PDT, we’ve got you covered with an hour of speed-networking and other social activities. And we can’t think of better people to get us socializing than Alison Rand, Rosenfeld Media’s DesignOps Community curator, and Meredith Black, co-founder of the DesignOps Assembly.
Beyond the Conference: Sponsor-led Sessions
During conference breaks on all three days, we have a wonderful lineup of sponsor-led sessions to choose from! The sessions happen via Zoom, outside of the regular embedded conference livestream.
Here’s just a handful of highlights: you’ll learn how to use wireframes to improve team communication with Leon Barnard, Head of Design Education at Balsamiq, how to make remote workshops more inclusive with Linda Quarles, Director, Strategy + Organization Design at frog Design, what the DesignOps team at Bloomberg learned in the shift to WFH, and more.
Check out the full schedule of sessions we’ve got queued up for you, and add them to your calendar using the buttons next to each session.
Need help?
- If you still need to set up your account, click here to set up your account for access to the conference livestream and program. You’ll be prompted to reset your password—in the username/email field, use the email address you used to register for the conference.
Once you login, you’ll have access to the conference livestream starting Wednesday, October 21, 8:00am PDT (GMT-7). If you see a “welcome video” in the meantime, that means you logged in correctly! - The main conference program will take place via embedded livestream on the homepage. Sponsor-led sessions, designated by sponsor logos next to each session, will take place separately, during breaks, in Zoom.
- If you haven’t already, please join us on Slack (in #do-general). That’s where discussion and speaker Q&As will take place. And it’s the fastest way to get help (go to channel #do-help).
- Please note, all session times are in PDT, GMT-7.
You can view the program in your timezone using the dropdown menu to the upper right of the program listing. - After the conference, you’ll find recordings, tripnotes, session notes, and decks on the same page where you viewed the conference. We’ll let you know as soon as they’re available.
- If you have any other questions please review our FAQ. If you still need help, let us know by emailing [email protected] or head to #do-help in Slack.—Lou Rosenfeld and the DO2020 team
Meet Eduardo Gomez Ruiz, Lead UX Researcher at Miro
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to design operations professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why is Miro sponsoring the DesignOps Summit 2020?
Eduardo: We’re really excited to discuss and tackle core questions around how the design and research systems built at companies best maximize quality, efficiency and collaboration for designers. Communication and collaboration practices are key to master in design ops, but also really complex! We think visual collaboration is one avenue to start building these better systems.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design and/or research operations?
Eduardo: Design & Research Operations make the work of the entire team happen in a coordinated way. They facilitate the tools, processes, and ecosystem for researchers and designers to work effectively.
My past experience working with Research Ops helped me see how much work goes into recruiting, scheduling, and compensating research participants and how much their support helps researchers be focused on their craft and stakeholder management.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would design employees work with, and who are the champions?
Eduardo: The Design & Research team enjoys a very dynamic, fun, and collaborative culture. We show our “unfinished work” often to receive early feedback and we feel like we’re an integral part of the product teams we support.
Since the pandemic started, we have introduced a series of non-work-related sessions (team bonding, Design team water-cooler chat, “I like” sessions) that help us feel more connected with each other, learn from each other, and inspire us to become a better version of ourselves – which is one of our company values.
Everybody contributes to this team culture, but we count three veterans who elevate our way of working and strengthen our culture:
- Vlad Zely, our Head of Design and leader, who runs the show, giving team members autonomy and confidence to try new things
- Kate Syuma, Lead Product Designer, who has a sixth sense to make our meetings inclusive of all perspectives
- Thom Wong, Lead Content Designer, who brings structure and British humour to our daily conversations
If you love Miro, we are hiring a Product Designer for our Growth team!
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Miro is shaping the way teams collaborate. Benefits can come from increased alignment, efficiency, creativity, connectedness – you name it. In a recent research session, I gathered a few quotes from users who recently started using Miro that really illustrate this:
- “Miro feels really alive for collaborating with my colleagues. It is like being together in one room”
- “Miro saved me 15 hours of work every week”
- “Miro is just more fun, prettier, and nicer [than the tool we used before]. It makes a difference in the way we track our work and it make us feel less stressed.”
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
I find passion in connecting with others who look at the world with different eyes. I am very active on LinkedIn and Medium, where I share my view on how the UX Research function is evolving.
On a personal level, I have been dancing salsa and bachata for more than 15 years!
Meet Yuga Koda, CEO at UXPin
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to design operations professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring the DesignOps Summit 2020?
Yuga: Here at UXPin, we love talking to designers not only about design but also about the ways we can improve the design process. Being a company founded by designers, providing a solution for designers, the DesignOps topic is dear to our heart. We’re really excited that the importance of design is becoming more recognized and that DesignOps is steadily becoming a standard on how to approach design. We’re delighted to be able to support this topic and community!
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Yuga: To have a robust DesignOps process in place, we believe that good collaboration and communication between designers and developers is a necessity. We believe that there is a common language to be established – a language that will remove the translation drift from when a design becomes the product. It might be a bit nerdy but we just can’t hold our joy when we see a design component/prototype that looks and behaves the same way in a design tool as it would in the end product.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
UXPin is a design platform and we’ve recently launched a new product that aims to tackle some of the DesignOps issues that teams are facing. Our goal is to support teams that are facing issues, so they can scale their design team and ultimately have design as a strength of the overall company. With our new Merge technology, we enable teams to have a true single source of truth.
Meet Indra Klavins, Director, Design Operations at Verizon
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to design operations professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring the DesignOps Summit 2020?
Indra: I left the DesignOps Summit in 2017 knowing that I found my wonderful, generous, inclusive tribe, a tribe that I wanted to give back to as much as I could. In 2019, I was lucky enough to be a speaker, sharing my learnings with my tribe. And this year, I am able to contribute in a new way as a sponsor, providing an additional forum for people to connect and talk about our craft of Design Operations.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Indra: The members of the Design and Research Operations community are the people who enable great things to happen. We are the helpers who do the not so glamorous essential work that allows others to do their work. What we do is often invisible, but has such a broad impact. Knowing that my team and I get to make that kind of impact every day is incredibly satisfying.
Rosenfeld Media: What is it like for Design and Research Operations people to work at your company?
Indra: We’re a new, rapidly growing team that (using Agile terminology) has passed the storming phase and is now forming. The foundation is set, but we’re still shaping what will be built upon the foundation. It’s a really good environment who like to see platforms and processes take shape and then identify additional platforms and processes that would be beneficial to standardize on.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would design employees work with, and who are the champions?
Indra: The Verizon Design Operations team has two complimentary mottos for the team that articulates our team culture well. “Through the storm!” This motto can be used when times are tough. It’s a call to arms. It’s a reminder that even if the weather is rough, we will make it through, together. “On a clear day.” This one reminds us that life is not just filled with storms. When we do have those clear days, we need to savor them, enjoy the peace and all that comes with it. By holding true to these two mottos, the people and teams that we support have advocated for the funding that has allowed us to scale as quickly as we have. These Design Ops champions include our Head of Design – Richard Dalton, Executive Director – Brendan Reynolds, SVP of Customer Experience – Geoff Walls and even our CMO – Diego Scotti who we won over during the rollout of Slack earlier this year.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
A personal mantra that I find useful both at work and in life is “I do what I can when I can.” This mantra helps me find balance and allows me to forgive myself for not getting to all of the things that I wanted to get to, have the conversations that I wanted to have, or help all of the people that I would like to helped.
Meet Eddie Ishak, Head of UX Financial Products at Bloomberg LP
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to design operations professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring the DesignOps Summit 2020?
Eddie: Over the last 15 years, Bloomberg’s UX team has matured and honed its approach to the process of design. As we grew, we realized we needed to start developing strategies for managing more, larger teams, while still retaining a cohesive design methodology across many types of projects. DesignOps is a term that’s only been around for a few years, but as a large company with a diverse array of cutting-edge design projects, we’ve been thinking about this for much longer and have a lot to share. We’ve learned a lot, but we still have a lot to learn from the community, which is why I’m excited we are sponsoring this event.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Eddie: I like being efficient! Our department runs lean, so we are always aiming to do more with less. Operations are such a critical part of that effort, because when we’re not increasing headcount, the only way to add more value is to interrogate how we do things and improve our processes and interactions. This year’s conference theme is resilience. Since it takes a long time to shift design practices across a large enterprise, we believe the key to resilience is a strong design discipline with baked-in flexibility. Like many other design organizations, we were forced to respond to the pandemic and shift to working from home, and our flexibility helped us to respond quickly with remote work tools and processes. Our ability to collaborate effectively remained constant.
Rosenfeld Media: What is it like for Design and Research Operations people to work at your company?
Eddie: Every day there is a new challenge. Bloomberg is such a large, multi-faceted company that is constantly innovating how it presents data to its customers across many different products, so we are always busy. We think critically about how our design affects business impact. The work is very collaborative, and because we serve the entire company, demand can outstrip supply. This means that even junior designers can have a huge impact on widely-used products and features that our clients use every day. There’s no rulebook for much of what we do, so the whole team is collectively developing best practices as we go. That feeling of being at the forefront makes our work challenging, but simultaneously fun and rewarding.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would design employees work with, and who are the champions?
Eddie: Because we have such a tremendous amount of influence across the organization, we have to be able to push through projects quickly, with buy-in from many stakeholders. Fortunately, senior management has placed a lot of trust in the UX team. Even our founders and owners are engaged with the work we do, because they recognize how critical UX is to our business. In fact, Bloomberg’s award-winning design ethos has been at the center of the company’s product and customer experience since it was founded nearly 40 years ago.
Our team is committed to developing inclusive products that are accessible to all, and this commitment manifests itself in everything from the diversity of our team members to product features. Recently, we have evolved the UX of the Bloomberg Terminal to be more accessible for people with vision impairments. This includes the development of accessibility color schemes for users with Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), as well as upgrading our UI technology to ensure the Terminal is compatible with screen readers.
We are also passionate about engaging with the broader UX and design community. For example, we have an ongoing research partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Many of our current team members came to work for Bloomberg as a result of their experience in that program. Close ties to academia, such as this one, enable us to incorporate the latest research coming out of the classroom into our real-world practices.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you bring to the practice and our community?
Eddie: We’ve spent the last fifteen years scaling our practice to a team of more than 100 UX specialists across many areas, including interaction design, visual design, research, prototyping, consistency, technical writing and project management, inside of a mature organization, long before the term “DesignOps” was coined. This scale, and our experience growing within a global organization, gives us a unique perspective. We are able to draw insights from a wealth of case studies and operations projects, such as our building in-house usability labs, large-scale hiring with exponential growth across several years.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Eddie: Having a deep computer science background (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science) I had always had a passion for technology and the way we all interface with it. During my time as a graduate student at Columbia University, I had spent several years designing and building multi-modal and augmented reality interfaces for a variety of different domains, including medicine, archaeology, and government intelligence. Because I had initially very little understanding of what these experts do, I learned quickly that understanding the domain and empathy for the user were paramount before designing their experiences. It was this time in academia that eventually led me to seek User Experience as a profession. After a few small stints developing websites for NYC-based startups, I was led to Bloomberg and hired to design solutions for financial professionals. My technical background allowed me to hit the ground running as I watched us evolve from a small, scrappy, tangential team to the centralized, highly influential department that it is today. I am excited to be able to share a bird’s eye perspective of how good UX design practices can thrive inside large organizations.
Facilitate a Cohort at DesignOps 2020
Rosenfeld Media piloted the concept of attendee cohorts at a prior conference (Enterprise Experience 2020), and it was enough of a success that we’ll do the same at the 2020 DesignOps Summit!
Our belief is that attending together means learning together, and that attendees also will come away with stronger relationships than they would at other virtual conferences. We’re looking for volunteers to facilitate our DesignOps cohorts.
Pairs of cohort facilitators help small groups of randomly-assigned attendees (10-15) meet each other, establish common learning goals, check-in during the conference, and reconvene at the end to revisit those goals. These meetings take place in Zoom on a set schedule. Facilitators and attendees’ discussions take place throughout the conference via a private Slack channel.
Facilitators are expected to attend an orientation meeting, run their cohort’s meetings, and attend the full conference (October 21-23). In return, facilitators receive a complimentary ticket to attend the conference, and are listed on the conference website.
Podcast: Designing for Diverse Users—Bria Alexander, DesignOps Summit Emcee
Lou and Bria Alexander, Brand Experience Program Manager at Adobe, range widely in a conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion—and how they pertain to how a conference program might challenge your beliefs, the ways in which capitalism influences design, co-creation, and more.
Bria will be the emcee at the DesignOps Summit, October 21-23.
Bria’s recommendations:
- The Curb Cut Effect
- How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- The 1619 Project podcast
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
- August 2 John Oliver episode discussing U.S. history
Podcast: The Other L Word—Addressing Workplace Loneliness with Kat Vellos
Kat Vellos, author of Connected From Afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You’re Far Away and We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, is our opening speaker on day one of the DesignOps Summit this October 21-23, 2020.
Here, she discusses the issues of loneliness in the workplace, and how managers can support their teams—especially in the time of remote work and added stresses from a global pandemic. In addition to supporting employees’ humanity, a manager who keeps their staff happy enough to stay can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line—at the average national voluntary turnover rate of 25%, a company of 100 people with an average salary of $50,000 will spend between $625,000 and $2.5 million dollars on staff replacement costs in one year.
Kat’s recommended reading: Building Brand Communities
Learn more about Kat’s session at the DesignOps Summit and get your ticket.
Follow Kat on Twitter
