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.

When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org

TIn their first 60 days at Zendesk, Briana and Christina, a 2 person design ops team, conducted a Program Manager Audit looking at these 3 key areas: People, Process, and Portfolio.

90 days later, Product Design has transformed from a siloed, disjointed team into a well-organized, collaborative environment with a unified tool strategy, inclusive team spaces and more focus on design craft.

In this talk you will learn how to not only conduct a thorough and data-centric Program Manager Audit, but how to come in H.O.T. (Humble, Orchestrated, and Timely.)

Puzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges

How do we coordinate people for complex challenges? Certainly not with traditional work structures, designed to optimize for performance. Rather, we need new ways of working—new structures—that have been specifically designed to coordinate people for understanding. We’ll look at a framework that can be used by teams, organizations, and other groups of humans working on complex problems.

Stephen P. Anderson is a speaker and author who spends too much thinking about visual collaboration, how people learn, and board games; not necessarily in that order. Oh, and he’s on a mission: To make learning the hard stuff fun, by creating ‘things to think with’ and ‘spaces’ for generative play. This mission has led Stephen to MURAL, where he facilitates design strategy and innovation. Stephen’s newest book, Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding, has been described as both “required reading for designers and anyone else who needs to explain things” and a book that will “change the way you see the world.”

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.

Cross-Functional Relationship Design

As designers, we all know that the majority of our time is spent on people, not on designing. Nearly every designer has experienced some kind of “people problem” at work – such as a cross-functional partner that won’t collaborate. In this talk, Alla will offer an introduction to relationships – what they are, how they work, and how designers can create relationship interfaces so they can be 10 times more effective at work.

Are My Research Findings Actually Meaningful?

You should not be doing research for the sake of doing research. Research takes time and needs to be well throughout. More importantly, you need to determine if your findings are actually meaningful to the organization. In this session we will look at the idea of statistical significance and meaningfulness when reporting research findings.

How to create actionable insight in the face of politics and silos [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)

Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions on creating actionable insight in the face of politics and silos. Pariticipants then engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Robin Beers.

“In organizations that may not incentivize informed decision-making, researchers need to study power dynamics, cultivate their political influence, and consistently communicate their value to the business.”

– Sonja Bobrowska

“AI tools will change the way people consume researchers, relying more and more on receiving personalized summaries. This will only exacerbate silos and lead to miscommunication. To avoid this, the best skill researchers can learn is creating compelling visual frameworks rather than weighty reports.”

– Mujtaba Hameed

“The best report and presentation ever do not necessarily mean your findings will be adopted. Insights virtually don’t exist if you aren’t able to make them stick by putting them to work.”

– Josh Morales

Failure Friday #3: Ethics, Startups, and the Dolly Parton Test

At April’s Failure Friday, Jane Ruffino shares a tale of her own misstep in a high-stakes startup environment. A battle with a CEO? Check. Profits prioritized over ethics? Check. Pushing for a feature that could have exploited financially vulnerable users? You got it!

Jane will candidly discuss how she underestimated the CEO’s motivations and ignored warning signs, including her ingenious “Dolly Parton Test” for assessing someone’s openness to new ideas. Join us to explore how to recognize when to stand firm, when to walk away, and how to build genuine relationships rather than trying to “manage” stakeholders. It’s a powerful reminder that failure can be a catalyst for growth, and that sometimes, the best lessons come from the toughest fights.