A Civic Designer’s Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation
As civic designers, we are adept at listening well, understanding complex interactions between people and within systems, and identifying creative opportunities. Working on teams that often comprise many disciplines, perspectives, and motivations, we must approach teamwork with intention and importance. While differing opinions and interpersonal dynamics are inevitabilities of collaborative work, our civic design superpowers uniquely position us to navigate conflict skillfully.
While tackling some of our communities’ toughest, most intractable challenges, we must care for ourselves and our teams too– so that we can live well and serve sustainably. This session will begin with guided self-reflection. We will then explore conflict navigation through a lens of mindfulness, systems-thinking, and human-centered design.
Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
Learn about the concept testing methodology and various approaches available, when to use them, the types of decisions they can support, and the process to conduct good concept testing with mixed methodologies in mind.
Surveys That Work with Caroline Jarrett
Caroline’s book “Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys” is a decade in the making — and finally coming in July 2021! Here, Caroline shares some glimpses into the methodologies and tricks she’ll share in the book, and how it evolved along the years.
Caroline recommends:
Mentor Black Business founded by Akil Benjamin
More about the book:
Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.
Promise Theory with Jeff Sussna
Lou and Jeff Sussna, author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy, examine the relationships between Design and Operations, DevOps and DesignOps, and DevOps and Agile before wending their way to promise theory, which looks at the “promise” made between a product and its user. Color Lou convinced on the promise of product promises!
Partnership Playbook: Lessons Learned in Effective Partnership
How often have you found yourself wondering how to begin or improve the partnerships necessary within Enterprise environments? Trusted partnerships are a key ingredient of effective design teams when navigating large enterprise-level organizations. Through practical examples, find out how to get started or expanded your practices with partners as you all work together to realize and deliver valuable products and services.
Coffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book? (Videoconference)
Everyone feels like they have a book in them—and UX designers, researchers, and (of course) writers are no exception. But having an idea and making it into a book are entirely different things. If you’ve ever wondered what’s involved in the process, how it differs from other types of writing you’ve done, whether your idea even merits book treatment, or other authorial considerations, well… here’s your opportunity to have an informal conversation with a real live publisher of UX books.
Applying The Lean Product Playbook: A Talk with Dan Olsen
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen has revolutionized the way start-ups get their products to market. But what if you don’t work in a startup? Dan reveals to Lou Rosenfeld how the lean philosophy can be applied to companies of all shapes and sizes–even enterprises. Learn what the common challenges and solutions are to bringing the lean philosophy into an established company.
Donna Lichaw on Leadership Superpowers and Kryptonite
Not too long ago, Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey, was helping companies solve product problems by organizing the experience of a product or service into a narrative arc where the user is the hero.
Then she ran into a question that she couldn’t shake — a question that, once answered, would morph her business from product development to leadership development. The question unveiled a people problem rather than a product problem.
“We don’t have problems bringing products into the world. We have problems getting along with everyone, feeling good about our work, building team morale, dealing with internal fighting. We’ve been helping our customers be heroes. How can I be a hero?”
Over seven years of researching how to help leaders be heroes, she found inspiration in a variety of places, including Gestalt therapy, narrative therapy, and executive and somatic coaching.
Her conclusion can be found in her new book, The Leaders Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary. Think of the book as a map for people to become the natural leaders they already are and can be through a process of radical acceptance that leads to real, lasting change. People grow into superhero leaders when they fully embrace themselves — strengths and weaknesses.
Donna’s approach to leadership is a refreshing departure from the typical advice of talk louder, take up more space, and listen more. This is a different — a journey that is unique to each individual.
• Discover your superpowers. When you’re not leveraging your superpowers at work, you’re not as powerful as you could be. When you contain your superpowers, you’ll feel sad, depressed, and restricted.
• Know your kryptonite too. When you understand the “why” behind your weaknesses, you’ll often find a superpower underneath. By embracing your quirks and appreciating how they serve you, you’ll open yourself to insights about how to move forward.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
• Why Donna felt compelled to transition her business into leadership coaching
• About the two books Donna has written for Rosenfeld Media
• Why one-size-fits-all leadership programs are a dead end
• How appreciating your weaknesses can lead to self-discovery and growth
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:51] Introduction of Donna Lichaw and a brief summary of her book The User’s Journey
[0:02:23] About the origins of The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary, Donna’s new book
[0:03:10] Donna recalls leading a workshop that raised an important question
[0:07:44] Looking for inspiration and resources to answer the question, “How can I be a hero?”
[0:11:24] Finding value in everything, yet recognizing what is less helpful
[0:13:57] Dealing with leadership stereotypes and churn
[0:19:10] Enterprise UX 2023
[0:21:15] All leaders have superpowers and kryptonite
[0:26:06] Leaning into your personal kryptonite
[0:30:25] How the adult film industry and literary smut fit into all of this
[0:35:06] Donna’s gift for listeners – access to her work!
The Lens of Language: authors Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts on why Writing Is Designing
Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of the new Rosenfeld Media book Writing Is Designing, get meta and discuss writing about UX writing with Lou Rosenfeld. They also stress the importance of looking through the “lens of language,” when solving problems – reworking your existing language to make things clear from the outset, rather than fixing problems by adding more copy later. Their book will help those responsible for digital copy communicate more effectively—from designers to marketers who might never have considered themselves “UX people.”
Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are the co-authors of the upcoming Rosenfeld Media title, Writing Is Designing, available January 14, 2020.
Crafting Metrics for UX Success with Kate Rutter
After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success.”
In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!)
