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.
Getting started with accessibility research
In partnership with Fable, watch this panel discussion aimed at UX researchers on how to get started with accessibility research. Featuring industry experts from Discover, LEGO, and Ally Financial, this session demystifies what accessibility research entails, and demonstrates how inclusive design isn’t possible without the participation of people with disabilities. Together, we identify the common barriers, strategies for modifying research methodologies for accessibility, and ways to gain internal buy-in for accessibility research within your organization.
Moderator: Elana Chapman
Panelists: Divyen Sanganee, Li Wen Huang, Annabel Weiner
Humanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
Artificial intelligence (AI) has graduated from science fiction to commoditized widget form, readily able to snap into many processes of daily life. Hence, enterprises of all maturity levels are increasingly eager to explore AI’s roles in their innovation, or outright survival strategies. Concurrently, ethical and responsible development and execution of AI-based solutions will increasingly become critical for purposes of safety and fairness. Ensuring that AI proliferates along the right path will require the infusion of multi-faceted research activities along the entire AI lifecycle. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding this topic in this presentation.
Designing Accessible Research Workflows
What makes us human in human centered design? How can we optimize our workflows to respect our participants?
Phil will talk through his experiences of creating inclusive research workflows which respect participants rights and agency and how they’ve managed to operationalize and scale them for hundreds of researchers around the world.
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.
Efficiently Scaling Research as a Team of One
In this Q&A session, you’ll hear how former clinical researcher and PhD scientist, Clemens Janssen, is running research at 15x speed, supporting the needs of Nutrisense, an health tech company. As the first researcher, Clemens will share how he’s built a research culture with training, standardized processes, and templates.
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.
Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
In our fast-paced, attention-diverting world, swirling buzzwords compete for our time and our focus. We hypothesize that true productivity – creating outcomes and experiences that align with our mission, values, and goals – is about quality over quantity. And the way to achieve genuine quality is to prioritize humanity, especially in how we communicate. In our session, we challenge conventional wisdom by asserting that bringing the human side to communication is essential for achieving meaningful and sustainable success. We will take the audience through our tried and true best practices to craft effective Slack communications that lead to increased knowledge, improved application, and stronger team connections – with a dose of heart.
Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)
Doing good service design is hard. You know what makes it easier? Having a supportive community of smart and generous professionals who are rooting for your success.
In this session, we’ll explore the power of professional communities, what makes them thrive, and help you decide if joining one is the right move for you.
Plus, we’ll share how to start and grow your own community based on the lessons we’ve learned from designing the community for in-house service professionals.
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.
