Coffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation? (Videoconference)

Some of us are naturals when we take the stage, whether virtual or in person. But most presenters struggle–with time limits, clear storytelling, impostor syndrome, slide creation paralysis, and good old fashioned stage fright. So we’ve convened some of the UX pros who curate Rosenfeld Media’s conference programs and help prepare their speakers–they’ll answer your questions and offer some tips on what makes a good UX conference presentation.

Self-care in User Research (Videoconference)

Exposure to others’ trauma is toxic. This is known as ‘vicarious trauma’ and it’s what happens to people who hear harrowing stories as part of their work. 

User researchers are often faced with situations where they need to conduct repeated in-depth interviews with people who’ve had traumatic experiences and who have developed PSTD, mental health issues, chronic illness, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. We believe this repeated exposure puts the psychological safety of user researchers at risk. Training to equip people with the right skills and confidence to prepare for and handle these situations is often absent from user research training.

The DesignOps Starter Kit

Starting DesignOps at an org feels exciting and daunting at the same time. People who’ve given you the green light are as excited as you – so there’s a bit of pressure to make this work well! In this talk, Michelle will provide a “starter kit” of 10 tips for beginning a DesignOps program—the 10 foundational things she’s learned from establishing DesignOps at her org. Michelle includes how to prepare the program, manage expectations, ensure your success, and keep things sustainable for the long term.

The Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space

A large federal agency was interested in improving the experience that individuals have with their digital services, as well as the velocity at which they were able to improve those services. But through our research, we found that they didn’t have the design roles, tools, or processes in place to support this goal and make it successful.

As a digital services firm that specializes in human-centered design and design ops, we came up with a plan to get them where they needed to be. We started by having a difficult conversation with them about design maturity, what it would take to be successful, and how design ops could help. We then introduced a series of training sessions on human-centered design, which prepared us to have conversations about design roles and processes, as well as tools. And finally, we were able to collaborate with them through a series of engagements to see how these things should work in practice.

Through our experience, we learned this is not an uncommon challenge. There are likely many entities (both public and private) that know they need to evolve their design practices, but don’t know how. By sharing how we introduced design ops to a federal client, we hope to inspire others to help promulgate design ops in a wider variety of sectors and client types.

Do More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity

With the growing turbulence companies face (e.g. recent financial downturns and the pandemic before that), Design with a big D and its sub disciplines (including DesignOps) finds itself deeply and directly impacted by resource reduction and/or resource re-distribution. In this session, we will bring our years of expertise from working with companies of different shapes and forms to explore techniques that help design leadership shield Design Orgs from the impact of uncertainties and be prepared to have those tough conversation when and if needed. Furthermore, we will explore how you can manage the consequences of these events when they become inevitable, but you still need to maintain a strong Design capability.

A Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps

Join panel moderator Maisee Xiong and Salesforce DesignOps practitioners for a conversation about what it means to build values-driven DesignOps programs, tools and relationships in order to cultivate belonging and prepare our global design teams to deliver their best work.

Together we will:

• Discuss practical ways to weave values into our Ops work
• Consider what’s necessary to build community and culture for hybrid design teams
• Understand how effective onboarding tools can help new team members feel welcome
• Identify the design practices and tools that keep teams and leaders aligned

Scaling Learning for the Future

Whether your design team is 5 or 5,000, the goal should be the same: retain designers by providing them the resources they need to grow and develop in their career. What do these resources look like for someone new to the industry versus a 20 year veteran? Or when a new technology or platform emerges, like the metaverse? In this session, you will learn the importance of investing in learning, development and belonging programs and how DesignOps is uniquely positioned to prepare designers to work on the next evolution of the internet– the metaverse.

Breaking Barriers with Empathy

Empathy sticks with you. Applying empathy as a product designer will help keep your customers at the forefront of product design. Ross Smith is the Director of Engineering at Microsoft, and he discusses how he uses stories to engender empathy.

Design at Scale: Behind the Scenes (Videoconference)

For the April 29th edition of our Enterprise Experience Community Call (11am ET), we take a “behind the scenes” look at the creation of the our new conference ‘Design at Scale’. This involves roundtable discussion on “scale”, moderated by Kelly Goto, followed by lightning-style peeks into two speakers’ talks:

• Surya Vanka, founder/chief designer of Authentic Design & formerly UX Director at Microsoft, on his method of “swarms” to foster creativity
• Wendy Johansson, Global Product Experience Leader, Amazon

Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap

There has been an explosion of interest in atomizing research, where researchers stop writing reports and instead tag individual insights in a database. The theory is that this will unlock your insights, making them findable and reusable. But does it work, and should you be doing the same? At Microsoft we tried it: Five years, 40,000 insights, 20+ research teams, and 17,000 unique users. So what have we learnt? We learnt that a structured insight library can be worth the effort. But we also learnt that atomizing insight can be taken too far. We learnt that context is critical. We learnt that short term efficiency is king, and that the required culture change is hard. And through this journey we’ve begun to discover how to blend atomized insight with your traditional research process.