What we covered at Enterprise Experience 2020

Join UserTesting and Nina Smiley, Ph.D for Mindfulness in Minutes: Start off Day 2 with a half-hour session that would provide an understanding of how mindfulness works in real-time/ in real life and the skills to be able to bring these techniques with you and begin leveraging immediately once the session is complete.

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Grab your coffee and join the Handrail team to chat about the challenges of data collection and carrying out different research methods.

In eighteen months, Zendesk’s UX Research practice grew from a single researcher to a seven-person team. The new research program has greatly enhanced Zendesk’s design and development process. Along the way, researchers have successfully informed design strategy and helped improve product quality and usability.

Veevi Rosenstein is deliberately crafting the UX research practice from the inside out to support Zendesk’s growing development organization. She’ll share her approach and overall vision for the research program, including operational plans, methods, toolkits, communication and knowledge capture strategies, and the steps she’s taken to make it all happen.

User-centric design and development mindset and maturity has been low in an enterprise context. UX departments struggle a lot to gain momentum and help organizations create better products in various different ways with RoI of their efforts being low. How might we increase the user-centric maturity and mindset of the enterprise in a more organic way and help as many product teams as possible while having insufficient UX specialists?

Vasilieos will present a case study for top-down and bottom-up approach taken at LEGO with practical information, learnings and reflections so far.

A key part of AMEX’s success is that design is a true strategic partner, and not just an “add on.” The team has intentionally built a culture where design, engineering, and product, work together to listen to and solve customer problems.

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We’ve all felt the pain of tool fatigue. When your teammates are working in different applications, you can exhaust yourself hopping from tab to tab, trying to track down information and keep up with updates. To save time and stay aligned, learn how you can bring all of your project work into one Miro board. Join our interactive session to learn how to:

• Extend the power of Miro through our marketplace
• Leverage apps and integrations to improve your team’s productivity
• Bring the whiteboard anywhere with Miro Live Embed

Watch the session recording

The best companies build their most innovative products when they give teams problems to solve, rather than features to build, and allow them to learn, test, and iterate rapidly. Everywhere we see the value in less design up front, speaking directly with users, and leaders getting out of the way.

However, how can self-organizing teams be sure that collectively we’re headed in the same direction? How can leaders with limited resources ensure our teams are aligned without disempowering them?

Enter Growth Boards, a lean governance tool to help you find that happy medium between chaos and command and control.

Join today’s speakers for Q&A and discussion of the day’s topics.

This live training event will help you plan for your tests, including outlining a good testing process and defining good test goals including the ability to identify and screen for test participants.

You will also learn techniques for efficiently consuming the data you get from your UserTesting tests and how to move quickly from data to insights. We will focus on best practices for sharing the insights you get including key considerations when communicating findings, as well as creative ways to do so.

Additionally, the workshop will help you understand the utility of moderating testing and the steps for scheduling a Live Conversation interview in the UserTesting platform.

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At Miro, we like to drink our own champagne and leverage the power of an online whiteboarding platform to conduct UX research. During this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Align research goals with various stakeholders
• Take notes during research sessions on Miro, so you can easily debrief and cluster ideas
• Apply advanced research methods like generative research, card sorting, diary studies or co-design directly on Miro

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Storytelling is not just for children or ancient mariners. Learn about stories as a communication tool with business partners, IT, or even UX colleagues. We will discuss tenets of storytelling, learn simple tools for shaping stories, and even a few exercises to share with your team.

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Does a fancy title make a good leader? Does being more seasoned qualify a good leader? Does popularity or persuasive chatter predict a good leader? Everyone working has a boss — you’ve had some good ones and less good ones (and maybe even terrible ones). Sometimes we wonder “how did they even get that job?” Or maybe it’s “if only I could have that role, I’d do it differently.” Design leadership means more than titles, time, and personality…and it needs you right where you are. You are strategically placed. You are not misplaced. In the design industry, let’s talk about what it means to lead when you’re not in charge — for people already leading, and those looking to lead.

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The COVID-19 pandemic spaces has led to a spatial collapse. It may feel like all is lost, but Tricia argues that if we look back to previous moments in history of spatial collapses, we learn that they always produce new ways of thinking that would’ve never been possible before. In each moment, entirely new culture is created. New systems, economies, and tools are born out of the disruption caused by spatial collapse. Pain and creativity are well known bedfellows. Tricia argues that if we want to design services, products, and policies that truly respond to people’s needs, we need to learn how to identify emergent culture. We need to learn how to not rely on outdated data sets. We need to abandon business as usual to thrive in this rapid time of change.

Join Sean McKay, founder and CEO of Handrail to learn about the risks of vapor research and how you can avoid them.

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The events of recent months have only accelerated a trend in the Enterprise space: more people, with increasingly diverse professional backgrounds, are being asked to conduct research.

In a world where the number of designers consistently outweighs the number of researchers in teams, empowering designers to do bits of tactical research can seem like a good solution to ensure that no project lacks customer validation and insight. The question is: how do you start? What research activities make sense to “”delegate”” and which ones do not? Also, how can we ensure the quality and consistency of research across large, distributed, often international teams?

In this session, we’ll explore how quantitative research, through tools like Optimal Workshop’s, can be an accessible first step to scale up the research practice for diversified teams. We will also share advice and best practices on strategies to maximize the adoption of these techniques and the rollout out of tools supporting these research activities.

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Attendees will be involved in an interactive game that asks them to come up with the world’s user experience in a given domain (e.g. Travel Booking Website, Online Banking, etc.). Participants will be asked to share their ideas about the worst possible experience which will in turn inform ways for designers to provide the best possible experiences for users. All attendees will receive a prize at the end of the game.

Most UX designers have experienced that finding strong insights to take to product teams is just the start of their job. From there, they must advocate for their research and build a business case for integrating their findings into products. Unfortunately, in some businesses, it’s difficult to be heard. 

At GM’s First Mile incubator, UX designer Jerra Murphy uses visual storytelling to help data scientists and business leaders synthesize her findings and understand the opportunities she’s uncovered for additional revenue through improved experience. By doing so, she helps align teams on the value of user experience, and ensure that her research is put into action in products. 

In this talk, Jerra will share her approach to advocating for UX research in the enterprise, and attendees will leave with new strategies for putting user experience in the front of mind for leaders.

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The digital age continues to impact every level of financial services. Evolving technologies have created informed, tech-savvy customers and placed the customer experience (CX) at the top of the priority list.

Join our session and learn how The Head of UX Research at Charles Schwab has been accelerating UX research activities to gain a pulse on how to improve customer experience.

In addition, learn how to:

• Segment your audience to provide personalized experiences
• Break down UX and Product team silos, and drive research activities for product enhancements and innovations that suit customer needs
• Establish a fool-proof system to withstand crisis

Watch the session recording

Join us for some virtual networking! Let’s pretend it’s pre-Covid and meet and greet face to face (or nearly). Slap an old friend on the back, make new friends, learn from colleagues and get inspired. Or just be silly!  We’ll have paired networking sessions of 10 minutes each, and we’ll even give you some potential talking points for reference.

Hosted by Greg Richards.

Grab your coffee and join the Handrail team to chat about how distributed teams can collaborate on analyzing data from user research.

This session gives you basic, hands-on guidance to using MURAL effectively. We’ll cover a range of topics depending on the audience.

This is geared for new users, but will also include some advanced topics.

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External agencies augment internal enterprise teams by providing fresh perspectives and adding energy. However, often the agency’s capability is not being utilized to its full potential due to poor engagement strategy.

In this talk, Séamus highlights obstacles to “inter-team” integration and presents tactics to prevent engagement issues and empower teams to work better together. We can achieve successful inter-team alignment with choreography, but it involves learning new routines, moving to the same beat, and not stepping on each other’s toes.

Séamus based this talk on real client stories from running an agency for 12 years.

Melinda started her career as an in-house creative consultant, often feeling frustrated with her agency partners who “just didn’t get it”. She went on to spend 10 years working in agencies with large enterprise clients—until she “went client-side” again, this time with a little more perspective on the agency-enterprise relationship.

Melinda will talk about the ways culture, tools and skills differ between enterprise and agency teams, and how those differences manifest themselves in the working relationship. She’ll also discuss ways agencies and enterprises can bridge the gap by using their differences to equal advantage.

Maura Hoven, Sr. Design Manager at UserTesting, will share ways designers on her teams have used lightweight designer-led research to inform their process, using the UserTesting platform.

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Given the shift to working remotely, the approach to user research has had to change considerably. The AMEX team continues to keep their focus on the customer through remote forms of user testing, evolving their back room “labs” to a virtual platform.

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In 2018, the SAP design team needed a better way to work together. That’s when Goran Peuc, Design Director & Operations at SAP, started exploring tools and processes for better collaboration. Goran joins LaShaun Williams, Director of Customer Lifecycle and Product Marketing at Abstract, for a conversation about what the design process looks like at an enterprise company. Goran will share how SAP thinks about the future of design, important elements in enterprise design, and how to collaborate with other non-design teams working on a product.

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We’ve all felt the pain of tool fatigue. When your teammates are working in different applications, you can exhaust yourself hopping from tab to tab, trying to track down information, and keep up with updates. To save time and stay aligned, learn how you can bring all of your project work into one Miro board. Join our interactive session to learn how to:

• Extend the power of Miro through our marketplace
• Leverage apps and integrations to improve your team’s productivity
• Bring the whiteboard anywhere with Miro Live Embed

Watch the session recording

It’s hard to collaborate with clients when some stakeholders continue to move the goalpost on deliverables, consistently contradict their own decisions, and ignore your advice as a consultant. This brand of toxic behavior can have adverse effects on your quality of work, cause strain on professional relationships, and ultimately result in a weaker product or service for your users. Senior Experience Designer Darian Davis will share what he’s learned navigating a previous toxic work relationship, and along the way, uncover the tools to help you navigate, alleviate, and improve toxic work relationships of your own.

Hiring a consultant is no different from hiring talent: you need to look both for hard and soft skills if you want a successful and fruitful relationship. The most commonly used selection criteria, visual impact of the portfolio, same-industry experience, results achieved and price competitiveness don’t necessarily help to make a better selection. This presentation contains samples of the three key skills to look for, how they were critical in project success, and how to look for these skills in a consultancy.

At Miro, we like to drink our own champagne and leverage the power of an online whiteboarding platform to conduct UX research. During this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Align research goals with various stakeholders
• Take notes during research sessions on Miro, so you can easily debrief and cluster ideas
• Apply advanced research methods like generative research, card sorting, diary studies or co-design directly on Miro

Watch the session recording

Join us to find out what we look for in our UX candidates, including the roles, skills and experience we typically look for and the reasons why Nationwide should be your employer of choice.

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Chateau Montelena Winery was established in 1882 when founder Alfred L. Tubbs built a stunning stone castle carved into a hillside. It was one of the first traditional old-world chateaus in the Napa Valley. Their 1973 Chardonnay won in the white category in the Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976. For over 40 years the talented and dedicated staff produces world-class, elegant, and well-balanced wines. The premise behind the wine is decidedly simple: it’s unapologetically Montelena and a quintessential component of a fine wine collection.

Join us on for an educational session about Chateau Montelena’s rich history, a virtual tour of the 137-year-old estate, and for wine education.

In this talk, Michele Wong will discuss the successes and impediments experienced working with UX vendors and share techniques that have worked for her in-house team. Having productive outcomes when working with external design teams requires a unique mindset accompanied by defined methodologies. She will talk about what has allowed her and her team to deliver really good work for their Tax stakeholders without losing focus on some key components that matter when building enterprise apps—brand consistency, quality and speed. She will share how they have helped vendors help them accelerate the delivery of consistent and excellent work.

Have you ever wondered, “what is the value of design?” In this talk, Shahrzad will not answer that question. Instead, she’ll share the mistakes she made while chasing the question of value across both consulting and in-house design. Through these embarrassing stories, she’ll share lessons learned for how designers and design leaders can own and deliver on their value.

Join today’s speakers for Q&A and discussion of the day’s topics.

Join the Handrail team for a look at how their research management platform helps enterprise teams collaborate remotely.

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Marketing has evolved. The once billboard-dominated industry has been consumed by our global transition to digital. Almost everything can now be done online, and with that has come huge changes. Not only are we spending our advertising dollars differently, we’re also building, developing, and iterating on our products and web experiences differently. Throw in the invention of another X – CX (Customer Experience), and we now have a world where lines are becoming more blurry as marketing teams move closer to product, design, and research teams.

In this session, we’ll talk about why UX and marketing need to be more aligned, what each area of expertise brings to the party and why there is a case for a new role, the “UX Marketer.” We’ll also explore what you think the key skills are for the modern day UX researcher and what they can learn from marketing.

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Attendees will be involved in an interactive game that asks them to come up with the world’s user experience in a given domain (e.g. Travel Booking Website, Online Banking, etc.). Participants will be asked to share their ideas about the worst possible experience which will in turn inform ways for designers to provide the best possible experiences for users. All attendees will receive a prize at the end of the game.

At MURAL, we are determined to help people continue making meaningful connections even when they cannot meet in person. We have teammates around the world who need to collaborate, so we know the frustration and challenges that can arise with remote work. Join remote collaboration experts Mark Tippin and Hailey Temple for a session on:

• Tools you need to build a strong digital workspace

• Different ways to work together when you cannot be in the office

• Best practices for remote work teams

• Establishing and building trust with teammates and managers

• Methods to make remote collaboration productive Everyone who registers will receive our comprehensive guide to building a Remote Work Resiliency Plan to use with their teams.

Grab your coffee and join the Handrail team to chat about engaging stakeholders and socializing research in your organization.

Abbey and Sylas, Product Design Directors at Target, will share first-hand accounts of their trials and victories on how to bring and scale UX to new teams and to a larger organization in Retail. You’ll walk away with ideas on how to adopt these tactics, regardless of your team’s size or level of maturity of your organization.

This is the tale of a Mozilla product team that did user research to understand the goals and processes of organizations starkly different than its own, and how the research findings shed light on discomfiting truths about Mozilla’s own ways of working. The story will detail how the team approached learning about large companies in highly-regulated industries and how the takeaways prompted reflection and re-ordering of business-as-usual at Mozilla.

We will go over best practices of collaborative wireframing and wireframe together in real-time. Join our interactive session to learn how to:

• Create simple wireframes even if you don’t have any design experience to get quick feedback from your team
• Share your initial proposals with stakeholders without getting caught up in details
• Organize workshops to wireframe together and get the best ideas from your team in real-time

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Most of us have recently discovered that suddenly moving an entire team to a remote work environment exposes challenges with leadership, trust, process, infrastructure and more. Join Stephen Gates, Head Design Evangelist at InVision, for an honest conversation about short-circuit creativity, including the real causes, and solutions that can be implemented to overcome barriers to creativity and change.

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How often have you found yourself wondering how to begin or improve the partnerships necessary within Enterprise environments? Trusted partnerships are a key ingredient of effective design teams when navigating large enterprise-level organizations. Through practical examples, find out how to get started or expanded your practices with partners as you all work together to realize and deliver valuable products and services.

In 2018, Best Buy re-branded. The impact of this otherwise ordinary corporate event went far beyond getting a spiffy new logo and a custom font. This talk will tell the story of how our effort to re-brand kicked off a profound cultural transformation at the company. It will cover:

• How rolling out the brand led to the creation of a CX vision that helped make it real for each of our 125,000 employees
• How this catalyzed the need to centralize our experience design organizations into a unified force
• How the company continues to use the guiding behaviors created in the rebrand to enable experiences our customers and employees will love

This live training event will help you plan for your tests, including outlining a good testing process and defining good test goals including the ability to identify and screen for test participants.

You will also learn techniques for efficiently consuming the data you get from your UserTesting tests and how to move quickly from data to insights. We will focus on best practices for sharing the insights you get including key considerations when communicating findings, as well as creative ways to do so.

Additionally, the workshop will help you understand the utility of moderating testing and the steps for scheduling a Live Conversation interview in the UserTesting platform.

The business model canvas is a classic tool for organizing the various aspects of your product or solution. We want to share how we use this tool in a human-centered way at Nationwide to generate research plans that lead us to creating delightful solutions for our users.

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Drawing inspiration from the conference themes, share your ideas, new learnings, and expertise during a virtual unconference session. The rules are simple:

• You set the agenda and topics (anything you want to talk or learn about!)
• Engage in meaningful conversations while networking with your UX peers
• Walk away with newfound relationships and ‘Aha’ moments

Watch the session recording

Does a fancy title make a good leader? Does being more seasoned qualify a good leader? Does popularity or persuasive chatter predict a good leader? Everyone working has a boss — you’ve had some good ones and less good ones (and maybe even terrible ones). Sometimes we wonder “how did they even get that job?” Or maybe it’s “if only I could have that role, I’d do it differently.” Design leadership means more than titles, time, and personality…and it needs you right where you are. You are strategically placed. You are not misplaced. In the design industry, let’s talk about what it means to lead when you’re not in charge — for people already leading, and those looking to lead.

Watch the session recording

Join today’s speakers for Q&A and discussion of the day’s topics.

As experience designers, we know the ins and outs of how to design for change in a product or service: talking to end-users, interviewing subject matter experts, and then working collaboratively within a team to come up with workable solutions to the problem.

The extent of the #BlackLivesMatter movement has encouraged a mixture of protest, self-reflection, and openness to learn. However, many people want to take action but don’t know how. Why not apply our skills as experience designers to approach a small, workable issue that supports equality?

Join Denise Jacobs as she and a team of SMEs share stories related to the issue, so that participants can work together to share ideas and start the process of designing social change.

Join Sean McKay, founder and CEO of Handrail, as he shares a framework for scaling research at the enterprise level.

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With the increasing number of teams working remotely, conducting research with customers face to face, has become an impossibility. We’re all now involved in a unique experience of navigating and adapting UX research in the current times. This includes COVID-safe research, remote testing tools and techniques, and virtual participant management. In this short session we’ll talk about how we at Optimal Workshop have seen the research world change and give participants a contextual demo of how Optimal Workshop Reframer tool is fit for the task.

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Most UX designers have experienced that finding strong insights to take to product teams is just the start of their job. From there, they must advocate for their research and build a business case for integrating their findings into products. Unfortunately, in some businesses, it’s difficult to be heard. 

At GM’s First Mile incubator, UX designer Jerra Murphy uses visual storytelling to help data scientists and business leaders synthesize her findings and understand the opportunities she’s uncovered for additional revenue through improved experience. By doing so, she helps align teams on the value of user experience, and ensure that her research is put into action in products. 

In this talk, Jerra will share her approach to advocating for UX research in the enterprise, and attendees will leave with new strategies for putting user experience in the front of mind for leaders.

Watch the session recording

The digital age continues to impact every level of financial services. Evolving technologies have created informed, tech-savvy customers and placed the customer experience (CX) at the top of the priority list.

Join our session and learn how The Head of UX Research at Charles Schwab has been accelerating UX research activities to gain a pulse on how to improve customer experience.

In addition, learn how to:

• Segment your audience to provide personalized experiences
• Break down UX and Product team silos, and drive research activities for product enhancements and innovations that suit customer needs
• Establish a fool-proof system to withstand crisis

Watch the session recording