Conference Program

In this sponsored session, Billy Carlson, a Design Educator from Balsamiq, will walk through how to use low fidelity designs combined with storytelling to convince product leadership to green light your next big product or feature idea.

Building on his seminal Enterprise UX 2016 keynote, Greg Petroff will revisit the meta-trends facing the product development community, and their implications for User Experience practitioners.

Many designers are recognizing the limitations of the design thinking process and acknowledge the need for systems thinking. In this talk, the audience will learn key concepts of systems thinking, as well as prompts that help them get started on their systems thinking journey. Sheryl will share frameworks that designers can take action with in order to incorporate systems thinking in their day-to-day decision-making.

Design systems are essential for creating cohesive and scalable products. By providing a shared set of design guidelines, components, and styles, design systems help ensure consistency and efficiency throughout the design process. In this talk we’ll go through the best practices when creating and maintaining a Design System including different strategies, approaches to token creation, making good use of overrides, setting up principles and guidelines and how to scale a design system so that it becomes useful for design a dev teams alike.

In this talk, Boon will share learnings from understanding systems thinking at a deeper level, and how this has shaped and improved his approaches to large, messy problem spaces as an senior individual contributor working on product / service design and strategy in the enterprise.

Boon’s perspectives on systems draw from a mix of systems perspectives, which include Checkland’s soft-systems methodology, Capra’s systems view of life, and Ricigliano’s Systems Practice approaches. He’ll also share some of the practicalities and challenges of learning and applying systems thinking (which hasn’t been simple), while having to deliver on UX outcomes at the same time.

When products and services change fundamentally, the practice of Design must change fundamentally, also. What has become of Design in the 21st century, and what is the role of Systems? What does leadership mean and what is innovation, really? Language, conversation, diversity, responsibility, ethics, experimentation are in the necessary mix for today’s organizations.

At the heart of any organization, people are the driving force.

And the past few years have not been easy on any of us. The pandemic, the great resignation, tech layoffs, bank collapses, among other significant changes, have challenged workers in ways like never before.

Fortunately, there is a cure to the human energy crisis, and that cure is: a culture of psychological safety.

Join Alla Weinberg, a leading culture designer for organizations undergoing change, for this masterclass and you’ll leave with practical ways to increase psychological safety on your team or organization.

In this masterclass, you will:

• Understand the neurological root cause of the human energy crisis
• Learn why psychological safety is the cure to burnout and exhaustion
• Learn how to effectively communicate change

As we shift into a mobile first world, are you struggling to conceptualize and design accessible mobile experiences? While screen readers are included on both IOS and Android, it can be difficult and overwhelming for designers to learn about them. This session will help you get started! Samuel Proulx, Fable’s accessibility evangelist and a life-long screen reader user, will guide you through the ins and outs of screen readers on mobile. This interactive live demo will show you what an excellent mobile experience can sound like, give you some ideas of things to keep in mind during design, and help you make the case for bringing the voices of assistive technology users into the training and testing at your organization.

Right Thing? Designed Right? Built Right? How do you know it’s designed right?

The answer: Effective design planning and management. Our session introduces a design planning and management tool and discusses how it can empower enterprise teams with clarity and data at every altitude, so you know you are designing the right thing right. Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at design information management and tooling that will help you execute UX at scale.

As designers we want to reach people’s experiences, make their lives better, and ultimately contribute to a better condition of humanity and our planet. But something is getting in our way. Instead of delivering breakthrough experiences we are relegated to feeding bits into downstream implementation and operations. The enterprises we work for make us chase arbitrary, short sighted goals, and chase after the next release. Meanwhile, the key business decisions that determine the outcomes of our efforts have already been made.

Enterprises are made of individuals forming great teams, applying a diverse set of skills, knowledge and experiences to ambitious projects. In order to bring this enormous potential to fruition, we need one thing: a shared understanding, appreciating each other’s viewpoints and backgrounds, tracing and translating decisions for greater impact on the whole.

Milan will introduce you to EDGY – a language designed to achieve just that, relying on your core skills as experience designers and information architects: understanding enterprises as systems embedded in a wider ecosystem and navigating their multifaceted nature. You’ll take away an approach for co-creating their future working with elements, dynamics and dependencies, and radically increase your impact on the outcomes they produce for people.

Over the past 10 years, there has been an a ground swell of knowledge systems. Knowledge systems stand on the shoulders of information systems…not only delivering information, but delivering that information in the context of the user’s needs. The user experience for these systems has not kept pace with the rapid proliferation of technologies that support knowledge systems (artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge graphs).

Let’s take a survey of these the technology and landscape of knowledge systems, and discover strategies and best practices for implementing knowledge systems. You will:

• Gain an understanding of the different type and purposes of knowledge systems, and their characteristic advantages and disadvantages
• Discover the needs of users
• Methods to implement UX strategies for knowledge systems

Enterprise IA problems are rarely caused by tricky information architecture. Instead, people and organizational problems manifest in bad IA. Sarah will share tools you can combine in different ways to help move your individual IA strategy forward.

Looking for a fun and unique way to connect with others? Then this one’s for you!

Whether you’re looking to expand your network, meet your next client or connect with collaborators, this is the perfect opportunity to make it happen.

“You will connect. Cozy Juicy Real is the best way to foster connection online.”
– Marcia Goddard, Chief Culture Officer, The Contentment Foundation

Cozy Juicy Real has been played in 71 countries and has proven to create stronger team bonds at some of the world’s most successful organizations – including Google, Adobe and the UN.

You’ll get to know others in the Advancing Research community in a fun and interactive way that’s sure to leave a lasting impression.

Curious? We look forward to seeing you at the event.

RSVP now!

?️ Teams edition

❤️ Friends edition

? Upcoming Kickstarter

⭐️ Top-Rated on Trustpilot

About your Hosts

Meet Jed and Sophia, the dynamic duo behind Cozy Juicy Real. These group facilitators and board game designers are on a mission to bring the world a little closer – one conversation at a time.

With their passion for fostering connection and building trust, they’ve created a game that’s helped some of the world’s most successful organizations – including Nike, Zoom and Hubspot strengthen team bonds and truly connect.