If you can design an app, you can design a community

What if we applied our experience design and research skills to a new domain: designing communities?

Historically, UX hasn’t paid attention to community as a solution space. And yet… at a business level: products, brands and creators build community to deepen their bonds with users and customers. At an organisation level: the best teams are modelled on communities. At a personal level: community brings meaning to our world, in our neighbourhoods and our personal interests.

In this session, we’ll explore what’s involved in creating and sustaining healthy communities. We’ll draw on the wealth of knowledge in fields as diverse as economics, network theory, social work and the design of cities, and on case studies of community efforts like Burning Man, Parkrun and Meetups.

At the end, you’ll have a good idea of how you might apply your skills to creating communities, whether in your organization, your brand, or your life outside of work. We’ll introduce our toolkit, and show you how you could get involved in our project.

Finally…let’s acknowledge that many people in UX are demoralised about their work right now. They’re in roles that underutilise their skills, they’re feeling undervalued, or are working on products they don’t love. Using your skills to build community might be just the change you need.

Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango

Listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts!
Apple podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio

What happens when two brilliant minds from the world of information architecture team up to create a podcast that’s part leadership playbook, part intellectual high-wire act? That’s exactly what Harry Max and Jorge Arango set out to explore with their new podcast, Traction Heroes. Lou Rosenfeld chats with two and learns how they envision their project and how their podcast differs from traditional interview formats.

Instead of scripted discussions, Traction Heroes features Harry and Jorge reading thought-provoking passages from books to each other—without prior preparation—sparking impromptu, insightful conversations. The goal? To decode complex ideas and turn them into actionable advice for leaders and decision-makers. The pair leverage their complementary strengths: Harry’s applied, results-driven approach, and Jorge’s deep, theoretical mindset. Together, they aim to help listeners gain traction in their careers and lives, all while keeping the dialogue engaging and accessible.

Launched in January 2025, the podcast avoids technical or siloed jargon, and focuses on practical tools for structuring decisions and creating meaningful outcomes. Available on major platforms and at TractionHeroes.com, the show promises a fresh take on leadership and decision-making.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The story behind Jorge and Harry’s collaboration and how Traction Heroes came to life
• How their unique podcast format fosters unscripted, thought-provoking conversations
• Why they’ve chosen to avoid technical or industry-specific jargon to reach a broader audience
• What inspired their focus on leadership, decision-making, and practical insights
• How they plan to make complex ideas accessible and actionable for listeners

Quick Reference Guide:

0:00 – Meet Jorge and Harry
2:35 – Introducing Jorge and Harry’s podcast
6:20 – How this podcast will be different
11:03 – The broadness of information architecture
15:25 – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
18:18 – The format of the podcast
26:46 – Traction Heroes
28:38 – Gifts for listeners

UX Research Excellence Framework

A multidisciplinary research team needs a well-crafted framework to guide their behavior, nurture their growth, and cultivate their culture. Otherwise, they feel stuck in growth and unmotivated to collaborate. Through a participatory design, the authors established a three-pillar excellence framework at Uber. First, it focuses on the research impact on product experimentation, products, roadmaps, and the company/organization. Second, it promotes creative research methods that successfully prioritize work, produce and scale rigorous insights, and empower other researchers. Third, it recognizes true partnership cross functional teams and beyond their own product area. This framework worked well at Uber for years, and recently was applied by the authors in Booking.com and Course Hero with some modifications. As this starter framework, they hope all researchers and research leaders can build their own ones based on their situations.

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

Building Trust Through Equitable Research Practices

User research helps you engage the people who will use the service you’re building, increasing the likelihood that you’ll create something that truly meets peoples’ needs. But equitable recruitment—ensuring that you’re engaging users from all walks of life—can be difficult to achieve.

Traditional user research practices often exclude people like those who don’t have access to the internet or can’t take time off work, but who might most need to access a service. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for promoting equitable research, we aim to share inclusive and respectful research practices that foster trust with research participants and government stakeholders.

Attendees will gain an understanding of Nava’s approach to conducting user research, lessons learned, best practices, and how our work contributes to more equitable access to public services for millions of people and vulnerable populations across the country. Participants will hear examples from Nava’s research and walk away with concrete practices they can implement in their work.

Taking Inspiration from Instructional Design for Research

UX research takes plenty of inspiration from anthropology and design principles, but what about our friends in Instructional Design (ID)? Contrary to popular belief, ID is way more than creating school curriculums and offers a whole new perspective on what it means to drive truly meaningful insights. ID’s time- and lab-tested principles all drive towards creating measurable change in students (or users), and its lessons are easy to adapt into the user research world. In this session, you’ll learn about basic ID process and learning theory, how to apply that to research projects, and finally how ID can help you rethink the classic UX heuristics evaluation. By diversifying the disciplines we pull from, we’ll become stronger and more flexible researchers who can tackle any kind of problem

M.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder

The most successful UX researchers Mackenzie has had the gift of working with traverse some of the most non-linear, seemingly meandering career paths and life journeys imaginable. Yet job requirements and research career ladders, if they exist at all, seem to expect and even demand a linear trajectory, all too often focused on tenure as a main criteria for growth. This session will suggest new criteria for evaluating the maturity of one’s research practice as well as propose a focus on one’s researcher identity. Mackenzie wants to explore how we might better recognize transferable skills and capabilities and explore more inclusive frameworks that can house the wide variety of lived experiences that so clearly leads to success in the UX research space.

Research Democratization: A Debate

No topic within the insight industry has drawn as much impassioned debate and existential questioning about our future, value, and craft as that of research democratization. It raises fundamental questions about our practice and raison d’etre:

• Should knowledge be owned or controlled?
• Is research art, science, or craft?
• How much research is too much?
• Can anyone ever not be biased?
• What does it even mean to be a researcher anymore?

Join us for a head-to-head debate between a passionate defender and a fervent detractor of democratization. They’ll engage in strong but respectful dialogue about the rights, wrongs and pitfalls of democratizing research.

Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process

If the past two years haven’t made it clear, researchers and designers absolutely must be prepared to understand and address trauma as a factor in our work and our lives. Social worker, designer, and Advancing Research 2022 speaker Rachael Dietkus joins Lou on the Rosenfeld Review to plumb the intersection of social work, UX, and how these play out in trauma-informed research and design. She shares her approach to applying trauma-informed principles to the research process, and highlights important key factors including:

• Defining Rachael’s three main intersections between design and social work: social work values, design research methodologies, and trauma-informed (also known as trauma-responsive) principles
• The importance of asking how the above three principles meld together in design to foster a humanistically-informed lens
• The ways social work as a care field translates into user experience design, and why this is a necessary step to include in design methodology
• How the concept of “care,” which includes building relationships, establishing rapport, hearing other people’s stories, and more is central to ensuring human-centered design principles
• Addressing the preexisting disconnect between designers (from a process-based perspective) and social workers (from a humanistic perspective), and how collaboration between the two can positively impact end users
• Ensuring the preconditions that need to exist are shared and maintained at the highest level of integrity, and how a safety plan can help bring this to reality
• The importance of assessing risk when building new programs and policies, as well as addressing adjacent process methodology-related contexts
• How engaging with people from a design perspective means engaging with trauma, and why that positively challenges designers to show up in a wholesome capacity
• What it means to weave compassion and understanding into design
• How the trauma-informed approach can serve as a set of preventive measures that can help mitigate potential negative impacts for users

Therapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems

Service designers can struggle to define our impact in complex organizations. This resistance can emerge because service design involves delving into root issues and encouraging transformative change. This approach can feel overwhelming or even unwelcome in environments unprepared for deep shifts; at other times, the problems are so tangled and complex that progress can feel elusive, leaving service designers questioning our own impact.

In these cases, the key to impactful work lies in a subtler approach: creating conditions for connection and growth rather than pushing direct solutions. Inspired by the roles of therapists, coaches, and grandmas, this talk explores three techniques for “bringing the dots closer together” within complex systems. By holding space, mirroring insights, and gently reframing perspectives, service designers can guide organizations toward meaningful change while honoring their pace and readiness. Let’s meet organizations where they are with understanding, trust, and gradual transformation!