Now published: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey!

Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul

Depending on where you are in the world, there are several reasons why civic design has become a valuable methodology for governments. Within the scope of our work in Istanbul, We will talk about increasing the capacity of institutions producing and providing public services to create innovative services, system design, and adapting civic design models to innovative service development processes for local governments in developing countries.

Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World

Let’s talk about design careers–and about doing design work under the influence of just the right amount of caffeine. These Compass design leaders guide you through a discussion of a day in the life of product designers at a fast-growing enterprise. And they’ll also talk about their journeys getting there.

  • Hear about design and career opportunities in a technology company that is bringing meaningful disruption to real estate.
  • See what it’s like to design beautiful productivity tools for real estate agents and an industry that seems to thrive on complexity.
  • Get insight into how your own career path is reflected in the many paths that lead to good product design.

Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World

Staying connected and learning from your teammates on a distributed team or in a highly siloed organization can be hard. Written knowledge-bases (if you have them) can be dry or become out of date, and replicating hallway conversations where you can bump into new people or share stories (and commiserations!) with coworkers can feel out of reach in a virtual environment. Despite the obstacles, I’ve found that cultivating an engaged remote community and fostering peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is possible. This talk will cover real-world tactics I use at the US Digital Service to engage communities and empower people to be resources to each other, whether they’re in the same room or thousands of miles apart.

Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program

We are excited to welcome Xenia Adjoubei, Research Specialist in territorial analysis, sustainability and emergent tech, and Associate Director at Studio intO to our upcoming Advancing Research session on Wednesday, 29 March at 9:45am-10:15am.

Xenia will share her insights and experiences on a range of topics, including the power of community-led research, the democratization of knowledge, and the impact of new-old tools in promoting social good.

Her talk will be an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the role of research and innovation in addressing humanitarian crises and promoting social justice. We invite you to join us for this inspiring and informative event, and to be a part of the conversation about the future of research and innovation in our communities.

Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government

This session is a panel discussion about what community-centered design looks like in local government. We’ll talk about why it’s important to collaborate with communities, the conditions that are required to practice community-centered design, and what it looks like in action.

The Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 2) (Videoconference)

In this follow-up to our February call, “DesignOps Trends and Forecasts, Part 1,” design leaders Dave Malouf, Patrizia Bertini, and Jon Fukuda join the DesignOps curation team in a collaborative discussion with community members. Reflecting on responses to earlier surveys and conversations regarding the history and current state of DesignOps, the panel and community look ahead to the future, with opportunities for all in attendance to share their own insights and predictions, as well.

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.

Theme 2: Communicate

Delivering products is not enough. We must also COMMUNICATE the needs of our audiences, the value of our practices, and the unique skills we bring to the enterprise table. COMMUNICATE discusses how to make others understand and appreciate UX value, how to convey user insights, and how to find a common language with our non-UX partners within enterprise.

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

While many researchers see the value of a central research repository, how to introduce one in an organization is still a big question. Today we have the chance to learn from two researchers who have done it.

Taylor Jennings, Senior UX Researcher at Chili Piper, and Joe Nelson, User Experience Researcher at MasterControl, will share their process and experience gained from implementing their research repository. We’ll cover how they realized the need for a repository, how they convinced stakeholders, evaluated solutions, and what they’d do differently in hindsight.

Join us live as we leave plenty of opportunities for the audience to ask questions.

HITS, Microsoft’s internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge (Videoconference)

Imagine a workplace where every research request you receive takes into account what your organization already knows. Product teams have the answers to common UX questions at their fingertips, and finding insights has become second nature to everyone. You rarely wonder whether the insights you find are still true because other researchers are always adding new evidence that supports them. In this session we discuss HITS, the human insight library Microsoft uses internally to achieve these goals, and the culture we’ve been working to develop around its use.