Impactful Service Design: Getting Things Done in Complex Organizations

with Ayesha Moarif

8 hours over 2 days: December 12-13, 2024

This workshop takes you through tried and tested approaches for navigating organizational complexity by orienting around service outcomes and performance measures. You’ll learn how services can support a common language across teams and up the chain, linking delivery to impact.

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From Systems Thinking to Systems Doing: a practical approach for service designers

with Sylvie Abookire

8 hours over 2 days: December 12-13, 2024

If you’re a systems thinker struggling to become a systems doer, join us to learn and apply an approach to systems oriented service design that is practical, yet not reductionist – simplifying the art of stepping into complexity, without simplifying the complexity itself. We will discuss (and question) the barriers identified before delving into the proposed approach. Participants are encouraged to enroll with team members so that they may utilize the session to explore applications of “systems doing” in their own work.

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DesignOps Fundamentals: Tangible Benefits, Measurable Outcomes

with Dave Malouf

8 hours over 2 segments: October 7-8, 2024

This workshop will take you on a journey from developing a custom DesignOps strategy or practice to ensuring its delivery and ongoing assessment. You’ll learn clear methods and techniques to assess the needs of your design team, prioritize initiatives, sequence projects, and measure impact. And you’ll walk away with an approach that enables you to better understand your design teams’ health and performance, and business and engagement models.

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Mastering Operational Models and Metrics for High-Performing Design Teams

with Patrizia Bertini

8 hours over 2 days: September 30 & October 2, 2024

This two-day workshop provides a detailed exploration of how to enhance the performance of design teams. Participants will learn key frameworks to diagnose and build high-performing teams, understand the impact of different operational models on product organizations, and define the optimal model for their specific needs.

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Designing for AI: New Techniques

with Dan Saffer

8 hours over 2 days: July 31-August 1 2024

The success of AI makes it feel like this technology is ripe for innovation. However, today, almost 90% of AI initiatives fail. Current technical innovation approaches don’t work well when applied to AI. The HCI research community has been working on how to improve the process from brainstorming to prototyping to delivery. This workshop takes what is taught at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and adopts it for practitioners.

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AI for UX Research

with Alexandra Jayeun Lee

8 hours over 2 days: June 20-21, 2024

AI is one of the major forces currently driving the fourth industrial revolution in the world, and it’s here to stay. As UX research practitioners, there has not been a more exciting and scary time to work with AI. This workshop will cover when and how to use AI in your research process, how to position your insights for business impact, and how to move from chasing the AI hype to using AI to create meaningful experiences

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Intro to Content Design and AI

with Noz Urbina

8 hours over 2 days: June 13-14 2024

This interactive session will give you a low-tech overview of how the commonly available AI technologies work, and how they can be strategically applied in your content workflows. We’ll look at how to make the most of the technology as well as how different types are limited. Specifically, we’ll look at how to leverage AI to craft personas and journey maps that will improve your designs, even from incomplete data. Or if you’re blessed with good research, it provides a way to create more and richer journey maps than you’d ever have time for otherwise.

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Designing for AI: New Techniques

with Dan Saffer

8 hours over 2 days: June 10-11 2024

The success of AI makes it feel like this technology is ripe for innovation. However, today, almost 90% of AI initiatives fail. Current technical innovation approaches don’t work well when applied to AI. The HCI research community has been working on how to improve the process from brainstorming to prototyping to delivery. This workshop takes what is taught at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and adopts it for practitioners.

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The Basics of AI, for Designers, by One of Our Own

with Christopher Noessel

8 hours over 2 days: June 6-7 2024

Real-world artificial Intelligence can seem overwhelming. It’s a complicated thing and when you try to look into it, it’s filled with intimidating computational jargon. For designers, though, the basics of AI can be made pretty simple. By understanding the basics of data, models, algorithms, and machine learning, you can make sense of almost any AI, separate out what is meaningful for design, and continue with your user-centered practice, mostly as before. (And yes, we’ll cover generative AI.) In this workshop we’ll go over these basics, talk about the interactions germane to narrow AI, and get some hands-on practice in teams.

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Quantitative Methods for Qualitative UX Researchers: Triangulate Your Way to Holistic Insights and Stronger Storytelling

with Archana Shah and Subhasree Chatterjee

8 hours over 2 days: May 8-9, 2024

Many UX researchers often rely on familiar qualitative methods such as interviews and usability testing, overlooking the potential benefits of combining these with quantitative methods through triangulation. Depending solely on one set of tools can result in blind spots, limiting researchers’ ability to provide comprehensive insights. This workshop aims to address these challenges.

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Interviewing Users: Uncovering Compelling Insights

with Steve Portigal

8 hours over 1 day: March 27, 2024

In this highly interactive workshop, Steve Portigal will teach you crucial techniques for successful user research, and give you an opportunity to practice and reflect in a supportive environment.

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Quantitative Methods for Qualitative UX Researchers: Triangulate Your Way to Holistic Insights and Stronger Storytelling

with Archana Shah and Subhasree Chatterjee

8 hours over 1 day: March 27, 2024

Many UX researchers often rely on familiar qualitative methods such as interviews and usability testing, overlooking the potential benefits of combining these with quantitative methods through triangulation. Depending solely on one set of tools can result in blind spots, limiting researchers’ ability to provide comprehensive insights. This workshop aims to address these challenges.

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AI for UX Research

with Alexandra Jayeun Lee

8 hours over 1 day: March 27, 2024

AI is one of the major forces currently driving the fourth industrial revolution in the world, and it’s here to stay. As UX research practitioners, there has not been a more exciting and scary time to work with AI. This workshop will cover when and how to use AI in your research process, how to position your insights for business impact, and how to move from chasing the AI hype to using AI to create meaningful experiences

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UX for AI: A Framework for Product Design

with Greg Nudelman

9 hours over 3 segments: December 6-8, 2023

Discover the path to AI project success in this practical workshop. Drawing insights from 32 UX for AI projects, Greg will equip you with advanced UX Design skills to lead your next AI project.

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Survival Metrics

with Adam Thomas

8 hours over 2 segments: November 30-December 1, 2023

In this workshop, product strategy expert Adam Thomas outlines how product teams can leverage the three pillars of survival — being fast, data-informed, and politically safe — to plan for change to avoid ambiguity and get all stakeholders excited to move forward.

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SaaS Design Strategy Intensive: Stop Being a Paintbrush, Start Being a Visioner

with Catt Small

8 hours over 2 segments: November 30-December 1, 2023

In this workshop, you’ll learn and practice techniques to become a more strategic SaaS designer. Catt Small, an industry leading Staff Product Designer, will draw on her experience at Etsy, Soundcloud, and Asana to help you identify and navigate the political roadblocks that keep many designers stuck in the ideological playpen at SaaS companies.

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DesignOps Fundamentals: Tangible Benefits, Measurable Outcomes

with Dave Malouf

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

This workshop will take you on a journey from developing a custom DesignOps strategy or practice to ensuring its delivery and ongoing assessment. You’ll learn clear methods and techniques to assess the needs of your design team, prioritize initiatives, sequence projects, and measure impact. And you’ll walk away with an approach that enables you to better understand your design teams’ health and performance, and business and engagement models.

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Big Problems, Small Solutions: Considering Accessibility in DesignOps

with Emory Edwards

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

Almost everyone has heard about accessibility—the practice of making information available and systems functional for people with disabilities. However, for DesignOps practitioners in particular, there are a dizzying array of considerations involved in operationalizing accessibility. In this workshop we’ll create a framework for the many ways accessibility issues can present themselves when looking at the DesignOps and ResearchOps of an organization.

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DesignOps with Jira: Advanced Program Management and Metrics

with Farid Sabitov and Daphne Bourne

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

In this workshop, we’ll dig into the complexity of managing design operations within Agile environments using tools like Jira. We’ll discuss how to harmoniously integrate design within Agile frameworks, maximize the utility of Jira for managing design workflows, leverage design metrics for insightful program management, oversee multiple design projects concurrently at scale, and effectively map dependencies and staff projects.

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Design at Scale: Establish a Design System Practice that Lasts

with Dan Mall

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

In this workshop, Design System University founder Dan Mall will walk you through the 7 different kinds of design systems, new workflows for tighter collaboration between designers and engineers, how to measure success, and a lot more.

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DesignOps for High-Performing Teams: Aligning Design and Product Operations to Maximize Value Creation

with Patrizia Bertini

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

This workshop addresses challenges in establishing internal operating models for design teams and external engagement models with cross-functional collaborators. And it provides practical insights to transform your design org into a high-performing team. Together we’ll explore the benefits of alternative operational models and their impact on both the design team and cross-functional engagement models.

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From Ladder to Trellis: Building Flexible Career Architectures for UX Teams

with Peter Merholz

8 hours over 2 segments: October 5-6, 2023

In this workshop, Peter will share with you his approach to building flexible career architectures, enabling growth paths that respond to each individual’s specific professional desires. We will dig into building the four components of a career architecture, skills taxonomy and competency rubrics, practices, leveling framework, and role descriptions. You’ll walk away from this workshop with a detailed understanding of how to apply this framework to your organization.

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Data Visualization for Great Dashboard Design

with Dan Rosenberg

8 hours over 1 segment: June 8, 2023

In this workshop you will learn the key theory and practical methods underpinning UX data visualization and apply this knowledge to analyze and improve a real world FinTech dashboard drawn from a specific case study.

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Designing for Complex and Trustworthy Experiences

with Carol Smith

8 hours over 1 segment: June 8, 2023

In this workshop you will discover tools for UX practitioners to support their work and to embolden teams to critique the work more closely, protecting people from misuse and abuse systems.

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Information Architecture at Scale: Delivering your Enterprise Information Layer

with Bram Wessel and Gary Carlson

8 hours over 1 segment: June 8, 2023

This workshop is designed to arm IA practitioners with better tools in order to solve modern-day, large-scale IA challenges, as well as to help them build internal support that unlocks technology efficiencies, drives sustainable returns, and creates better overall experiences for an enterprise’s customers, employees, and business units.

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Becoming Trauma-Informed: Applying Theory, Care, and Practical Skills for Research and Design

with Melissa Eggleston and Carol F. Scott

10 hours over 3 segments: April 4-6, 2023

With trauma on the rise, it’s inevitable that we will conduct research with and design products for people with trauma histories. A trauma-informed approach to research and design can help prevent or mitigate these harms. In this workshop, you’ll learn all about trauma-informed work, including trauma theory, trauma impacts and types, and its evolution.

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Research Repositories that Deliver

with Jake Burghardt

8 hours over 1 segment: March 30, 2023

**As of March 10, this workshop is sold out. You can join the waiting list by filling out this form.**

In this workshop, we’ll discuss the state of research knowledge management in tech, and dig into what success could look like beyond making assets findable, including: driving product goals, integrating into backlogs, initiating design concepts, and more. We’ll then unpack how to plan your next research repository effort based on the increased impacts you want to see.

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Quant UX Research for Qual-Focused Researchers

with Paula Bach and Anna Wu

8 hours over 1 segment: March 30, 2023

**As of March 10, this workshop is sold out. You can join the waiting list by filling out this form.**

UX researchers often rely on a common toolkit of qualitative research methods, such as interviews and usability testing. But more complex research problems require us to employ quantitative approaches side-by-side with our qualitative tools, combining them in powerful new ways that can be immensely impactful.In this workshop, we will cover common quantitative approaches to UX research for qual-minded research professionals who want to uplevel their quantitative skills.

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Research that Influences

with Dave Hora

8 hours over 1 segment: March 30, 2023

What does it take to build research into an influential and indispensable fixture of the organization? It’s not just doing the work: these days, technical execution and research capability are table stakes. In this workshop we’ll learn to sense, model, and target key areas for research growth in the organization.

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Holistic Insights: Collapsing Functional Silos for Maximum Impact

with Jill Fruchter

8 hours over 1 segment: March 30, 2023

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to pose and answer unasked questions to fill the information gaps that challenge your ability to deliver impact-driven insights. We’ll explore the unique role of the researcher in “data-driven” environments to engage and practice a mixed methods mindset.

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Survival Metrics: How to Pivot With Strategy, Instead of Against It

with Adam Thomas

8 hours in one segment: December 7, 2022

Survival metrics gives you the tools to create metrics framed as stop, pivot, and invest to clearly communicate when you need to change direction. You’ll learn how to make change stick, and how to do it in a fast, data informed, and politically safe way.

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Plain Language: Civic Design’s Must-Have

with Katherine Spivey

8 hours in one segment: November 15, 2022

As we center design on the people using a site, we also center the words. We question language and wording choices. We change how we arrange the words. Join Katherine Spivey for a full day focusing on content and information design using plain language to increase your site content’s impact and meet your audiences’ needs.

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Radical Participatory Research

with Victor Udoewa

8 hours in one segment: November 15, 2022

This workshop will start with a short, general introduction to Participatory Research methodologies, and then specifically introduce a type of relational research called Radical Participatory Research (RPR), a meta-methodology. We will explore ways to transition to RPR, team recruitment, bias awareness, transitional facilitation, intersectional research, asset-based methodologies, compensation, evaluation, and RPR advocacy.

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Make Design Systems People Want to Use

with Dan Mall

12 hours over 4 segments: September 29-30, October 6-7, 2022

SuperFriendly founder and CEO Dan Mall will walk you through the difference between component libraries and true design systems, new workflows for tighter collaboration between designers and engineers, how to measure success, and a lot more.

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Measuring Impact in DesignOps

with Farid Sabitov and Z

10 hours over 3 segments: September 20-22, 2022

The most challenging part of DesignOps is actually helping the design department to communicate impact at scale. Together with Z and Farid, we are going to help you to create your own story of how different practices and teams within your organization can put more focus on outcomes based on the real metrics.

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The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint: Building from the Ground Up

with Natalie Marie Dunbar

10 hours over 3 segments: September 14-16, 2022

You’ll learn the five components to the practice building process that comprise the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint, detailed in Natalie’s recently published Rosenfeld Media book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice.

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From Ladder to Trellis: Building Flexible Career Architectures for UX Teams

with Peter Merholz

8 hours over 4 sessions: September 12-15, 2022

In this workshop, Peter Merholz will show how the integration of a robust Skills Taxonomy and Leveling Framework enables a “corporate trellis” career architecture across disciplines (design, research, and content) and leadership types. Learn to  shape these flexible career architectures into HR-friendly tools that succeed even in highly bureaucratic environments like financial services.

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DesignOps Fundamentals: Tangible Benefits, Measurable Outcomes

with Dave Malouf

10 hours over 2 segments: September 14-15, 2022

This workshop will take you on a journey from developing a custom DesignOps strategy or practice to ensuring its delivery and ongoing assessment. You’ll learn clear methods and techniques to assess the needs of your design team, prioritize initiatives, sequence projects, and measure impact. And you’ll walk away with an approach that enables you to better understand your design teams’ health and performance, and business and engagement models.

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Taking your DesignOps to the Next Level

with Kristine Berry and Jenny Price

10 hours over 3 segments: August 29, 31 and September 1, 2022

Enabling DesignOps at scale brings the promise of effective transformation for design teams—their capabilities, performance, and business outcomes. But what does it take to operationalize this within your organization and within your team?

Jenny Price and Kristine Berry, two IBM DesignOps leaders, will lead participants through a series of IBM Design Thinking exercises and assess their DesignOps Capabilities that will ultimately result in a customized roadmap of opportunities that participants can bring back to their teams.

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