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Panel Discussion

Learning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict

In a world where change is constant and complexity is the norm, learning is the engine that drives great design. In this session, Jen explores how designers can move beyond just solving problems to enabling adaptation at multiple scales: individuals, teams, and organizations. Jen shares principles from complexity science and real-world practice to help you design the conditions for curiosity, reflection, and meaningful change – for your collaborators and customers alike. Walk away with a fresh lens on your role as a designer – that is, a mediator of collective learning.

Take Aways:

  • A mental model for approaching design in complex systems or volatile domains, shifting from control to curiosity, from solutions to sense making
  • An understanding of the parallels in learning at individual, team, and organizational levels, and why that matters for your design practice
  • Practical principles for creating the conditions where adaptive learning can thrive in your team, product, or organization
  • Inspiration to reframe your role as a designer: not just solving problems, but enabling systems to learn, grow, and evolve

User Science: Product Analytics & User Research with Marieke McCloskey

Want to help make better product decisions? You’ve got to combine qualitative human insights from user research with data analytics and experimentation. Questions about how many users do something goes to analytics, questions about which design might work better goes to user research. But what if you partnered with those other teams to answer the questions together? In her session at Advancing Research 2021, Marieke McCloskey, UX Research Lead at Humu, will share how, as a qualitative UX researcher, she’s partnered with analysts to identify high-growth opportunities and gain a deeper understanding of users.

In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Marieke offers a glimpse into her presentation, and what led her to the insights she will share at the conference.

• Marieke recommends: No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

Curating Conferences: A Chat with the Bureau of Digital’s Carl Smith

Lou talks with Carl Smith, Owner at Bureau of Digital, about the challenges of curating the right content to make design and UX conferences successful for both the owners and the attendees.

10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization

In this session, we’ll explore how a small UI design firm (30 headcount) developed a data-driven DesignOps practice. I’ll demonstrate how we use automation and robust data pipelines to excel in managing and delivering large volumes of work. This talk also shows how we transform Figma’s comment feature into a powerful tool that integrates seamlessly with Trello, enabling our team to achieve high efficiency and precision, and to track everything in real-time without the usual administrative and logistical challenges.

Automation and Custom Tooling:
We leverage automation to ensure every process, from capturing to moving work, is streamlined and efficient. This approach helps us tackle the scalability of thousands of work cards without overwhelming our team.

Data-Driven with a Soul:
This talk addresses concerns around micromanagement and surveillance, illustrating how our methods support consistent delivery (with 95% confidence) without sacrificing the human aspect of our work.

5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0

The term “anti-fragile” comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” It describes systems, organizations, or entities that not only withstand shocks, volatility, and stressors but benefit and grow stronger from them.

The current state of design is undoubtedly challenging and will continue to be volatile

We need strategies that move us out of defense mode, beyond resilience & mere product delivery, and position us as indispensable during times of transformation. In this talk, we explore five anti-fragile strategies for DesignOps 2.0, that will inspire you: New Work Models & Hiring Strategies, Ops beyond Design, Interconnectivity, Rise of the Chief of Staff, and (Anticipatory) Destination Teams.

Beyond Insights: Researchers as Organizational Change Catalysts

Researchers must adeptly navigate a dual remit in organizations. The initial challenge involves delivering insights that matter. The subsequent task requires discerning the necessary adjustments the organization must undertake to effectively act upon those insights. In this presentation, we’ll talk about a model of change and a theory of power to enable researchers to embrace and fulfill their dual mission. It is at this intersection of meaning and action that research can impact lives.

Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture

We’re all ultimately charged with making our products as useful and beloved as possible, but in order to do that, researchers must widen the aperture of user research. Usability, user journeys, and the like are critical, but the reality is that wider cultural factors provide the filter through which people experience your product. We need to dedicate more attention to how wider cultural factors shape what people need from a product experience—the dialogue between the wide and the narrow apertures are crucial to creating beloved, essential products.

In this talk, Neil Barrie, Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, shares his perspectives on research’s role in helping companies build deeper, meaningful relationships with customers based on his work building the brands of the likes of Airbnb, Pinterest, Headspace, Pepsico, Monzo and Bumble.

His talk will address:

  • How culture is the lens through which people experience products
  • Why products are the catalyst to purpose, facilitating behavior changes that can take marketing years to achieve
  • What we can learn from insider cases of culturally driven UX innovation from leading unicorns like Flo Health, Pinterest and Airbnb

[Case Study] Qualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?

Following the emergence of Generative AI as a potential revolution in the UX field, a great deal of AI-driven tools arose to enhance the efficiency of UX research, including data analysis. Qualitative data analysis is a process that conventionally relies on human intelligence to discern patterns, establish connections, and derive actionable insights and frameworks. Many studies have involved comparing the quality of qualitative analyses generated by humans with those produced by AI language models like ChatGPT (Hamilton et al., 2023).

Despite the undeniable appeal of automation and speed, there is ongoing debate about AI’s ability to replace human intelligence in qualitative analysis, which may be unlikely at this moment. Then the question is: To what extent can AI contribute to qualitative data analysis?

In this case study, I delved into the thematic analysis and post-analysis stage, i.e. synthesizing insights into a framework. Framework, in this context, refers to a conceptual structure that illustrates the components of a human experience and how the components interconnect and operate within the structure. It is a concise model that encapsulates the entirety of research insights.

The topic of my case study is “trust relationships between job seekers and hirers in the marketplace,, aligning with the business focus of my company. From my secondary research, I found that, ChatGPT needed multiple rounds of training using diverse prompts to conduct precise and comprehensive thematic analysis. ChatGPT can execute fine-quality thematic analysis under the help of right prompts, yet it falls short in replacing human intelligence for synthesizing insights and crafting frameworks for engaging narratives.

Its limitation lies in lacking the depth of contextual understanding within a company, such as understanding what’s missing from the company’s mainstream discourse to create a human-centered story based on data analysis. To craft a framework that conveys good storytelling and organizational impact, it requires the researcher’s introspection into knowledge gaps in the specific organizational context. Thus, the best practice is to combine human interpretation and AI production. In my talk, I will demonstrate several principles to guide this practice.

Takeaways

We’ll cover principles of how to employ ChatGPT in qualitative analysis, specifically focusing on its application in synthesizing and crafting frameworks that convey compelling and insightful narratives:

  • Effectiveness of ChatGPT in thematic analysis: Learn about my process of training ChatGPT to conduct precise thematic analysis. You’ll gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in providing accurate and comprehensive analysis for framework construction
  • Value of human potential: We’ll address the value of human self-reflection and the ability of interpreting organizational context for crafting engaging frameworks
  • Comparison between human and ChatGPT: By comparing the human-driven outcomes against ChatGPT for qualitative analysis, you’ll see how effective the synthesized frameworks are generated by the researcher and ChatGPT separately.
  • Collaboration between human and ChatGPT: You’ll also learn when and how to incorporate human interpretation with ChatGPT to achieve the best practice in qualitative analysis and synthesis

How Technology Can Empower Marketing: a Chat with Theresa Regli

Does your company struggle to find and use video, audio, and image assets after you’ve created them? Do they disappear into a dark netherworld on your server? In this episode, Theresa Regli, author of Digital and Marketing Asset Management, breaks down what to ask before buying kludgy and expensive software. And which vendors rank highest on her list of otherwise lackluster DAM vendors.