Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams
This is the tale of a Mozilla product team that did user research to understand the goals and processes of organizations starkly different than its own, and how the research findings shed light on discomfiting truths about Mozilla’s own ways of working. The story will detail how the team approached learning about large companies in highly-regulated industries and how the takeaways prompted reflection and re-ordering of business-as-usual at Mozilla.
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
Now that you’ve collected that great design research, integrated qualitative with quantitative, and put it to work into making products and services better, it’s time to get double the mileage (influence) from those same insights and use them toward corporate strategy. The missing element from the traditional business strategy process is the critical insights that come from (mainly, qualitative) user research. Our peers use qualitative market research that misidentifies business opportunities (and solutions) because they have an incomplete frame. With the right tools, processes, and framing, your research can influence decisions of WHAT products and services get green-lit.
What would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
If you look across all disciplines, the one person whose achievements got to the heart of a behavior in nature was the 20th century mathematician Emmy Noether. While geniuses in physics received accolades for figuring out conservation laws in physics, she went an extra step, and this was a step most people didn’t even know was there. She figured out where conservation laws came from.
In this presentation, we are going to look at where Emmy would fit in high tech today.
Today, our world is filled with a plethora of templates, one day courses, agile and lean approaches, blogs on how to get “quick wins” and many other forms of content directly or indirectly trying to satisfy our appetite for speed in high tech. This is reflected in a desire to get to key takeaways or insights as quickly as possible.
Many times, these “lean” approaches can be incredibly useful, but not always. Sometimes in the rush to answer or iterate, something fundamental is missed. Insights that could have been discovered with just a little more up front thought and formalism of the problem space.
Asking one more “why” question.
And asking it like the kick*ss 20th century mathematician Emmy Noether.
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
Designing “at scale” assumes conceptual consensus on what the particular levels of that ‘scale’ actually are. In the last few years, UX professionals have specialized into UX researchers, product designers, service designers design strategists, etc. Nowadays, we’re also witnessing the debut of a new term: “system designers”. But do we really understand how these job titles and subthemes of UX fit within that scale of complexity in design?
In this presentation, we’ll introduce the basic levels of a scale of design, articulate how common UX job titles fit on the scale, and map how the work we commonly tackle in both research and design should also be informed by the scale of the problem we’re addressing. We’re also going to critique the (somewhat misguided) ways the current world of UX is handling the widespread growth in the complexity of our work.
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
At the July Civic Design Community call, hear from Deanna Zandt (she/her). The term “self-care” is thrown around a lot these days but there’s a more complicated picture than just taking a bubble bath and hoping for the best. In this call we talk about what’s missing from our conversations about self-care. We also discuss how human experience is fundamentally messy, but designers (and coders) like to make everything clean and neat. We’ve got to start reckoning with that. Our goal is that you walk away with a sense of the care structures that you have and need in your own lives, and a sense of what designing care into our systems could look like.
About our speaker:
Deanna Zandt is a writer, artist and award-winning technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. She spent 15 years working at the forefront of social justice, technology and media; after she burned out for the third time, she realized that maybe that work didn’t suit her particularly well. Currently, she spends her time: supporting other very impressive people and organizations behind-the-scenes with their technology; writing & drawing when she feels like it; walking and playing with her two dogs and their friends; connecting with humans near and far; and figuring out how to exist with meaning, fulfillment and as many giggles as possible. We’ll be talking (and very likely giggling) about her zine that traverses the constellation of self-soothing, self-care, community care and structural care.
The Compass Mission
Greg Petroff, the SVP of Design at Compass & UXR, talks about the Compass mission and how User Research and Design play a crucial role in building a groundbreaking platform for real estate agents.
Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem
Government’s digital products and services often impact millions of people. In this session, two team members from Coforma, a digital services firm supporting both commercial and federal government modernization efforts, will discuss how they navigate challenges and foster success in supporting one agency’s effort to relieve over-burdened clinicians and improve patient care. At the center of their work is a suite of tools that enable the agency to advance equitable delivery of innovations in cancer treatment. Julie and Laureen will share their strategies for prioritization within a complex ecosystem of business owners, centering patients and clinicians through a strong UX/Product partnership, and leveraging roadmapping and user story mapping to define, focus, and clarify achievable MVP solutions.
What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
Join the moderator, Andreas Huebner (User Research Manager), as he runs a Q&A session with Amy Takata (User Researcher), and Craig Brookes (Staff Product Designer) to discuss life at Compass, the team culture, and the reasons for joining the Compass team.
[Case Study] Don’t botch the bot: Designing interactions for AI
It seems like every company is adding a conversational AI chatbot to their website lately, but how do you actually go about making these experiences valuable and intuitive? Savannah Carlin will present a case study on a conversational AI chatbot—Marqeta Docs AI—that she designed for a developer documentation site in the fintech industry. She will share her insights, mistakes, and perspectives on how to use AI in a meaningful, seamless way, especially for companies like Marqeta that operate in highly regulated industries with strict compliance standards.
The talk will use specific examples and visuals to show what makes conversational AI interactions uniquely challenging and the design patterns that can address those challenges. These include managing user expectations, handling errors or misunderstandings within the conversation, and ensuring that users can quickly judge the quality of a bot’s response.
You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies involved in designing interactions for AI, along with practical advice you can apply in your own design processes.
Take-aways
- What to consider before you add AI to your product to ensure it will be valuable, usable, and safe for its intended workflows
- The interactions that are unique to conversational AI experiences and the design patterns that work for them
- Common challenges in designing conversational AI experiences and how to overcome them
Designing for Liberation, Rehearsing Freedom
Amahra Spence will speak on the themes of the conference, reflect back key insights that emerged over the course of the three days, and leave us with critical questions we can carry forward as a community, and individuals after the conference is over.
