There is No Playbook: Leader as Coach During Challenging Times (Videoconference)
Managing others is hard work. Even in the best of times our talent may be restless, anxious, or disengaged. Whether conscious of it or not, people are motivated by opportunities to grow through a sense of purpose in what they do, a sense of autonomy in how they do it, and a sense of achievement for what they get done. When these needs are ignored or the opportunities don’t exist, people management can get even harder.
If you struggle at times to engage effectively with your direct reports, or if you want to amplify your ability to support them on their professional journey, taking a coaching approach can help. Coaching is a mutually empowered and collaborative way to guide individual growth. It is fundamentally discovery-driven, not expertise-driven, so “there is no playbook”.
Session participants will gain an understanding of how coaching differs from mentoring or advising and explore a set of basic coaching tools for improving communications, results, and accountability with their direct reports. They may also discover that these very skills can also improve engagement with peers and clients.
Jenae Cohn on Designing for Learning
Jenae Cohn is executive director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley and, along with Michael Greer, author of the new book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Jenae and Michael’s book helps designers create compelling educational content. Think of it as required reading for anyone designing an online course, webinar, training, or workshop.
Designing a platform intended to educate goes beyond traditional UX design.
Jenae’s book does the following:
• Looks at the science behind learning and articulates how to help someone be a learner
• Helps designers understand the complex array of needs that learners have and create more purposeful learning experiences
Learning is motivated by social interactions and emotions. In fact, the learning process is typically social, and most are motivated knowing that they’re not learning in isolation but in or for community. Designers should capitalize on these motivations.
Tips for making online learning more social:
• Take “temperature” checks throughout the course – for example, a poll or quiz
• Allow comments on shared artifacts and shared annotation
• Prompt discussions and assign roles if needed
• Remember that a webinar will not necessarily create a social experience
As designers get started on creating online instructional material, Jenae reminds them to be kind to themselves. After all, designing for learners is an iterative learning process. Also, it’s critical to create checkpoints and opportunities along the way to garner feedback. With the aid of Jenae and Michael’s book, we can depart from the days of dull online courses and make them truly vibrant spaces of growth.
What you’ll learn from this episode
• Why typical online learning platforms are so dull and what can be done differently to make them more engaging and compelling
• How instructional designers and UX designers can learn from one another
• How designers can make online learning more social
• How designers can know if they’re meeting their goals
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:21] Introduction of Jenae Cohn
[0:01:41] Design for Learning – Why we need a UX book for learning/teaching products
[0:05:17] Why UX designers may be surprised by what they didn’t know about designing with learning in mind
[0:08:58] What instructional designers can learn from UX designers
[0:12:14] Hybrid environments in learning products
[0:15:07] DesignOps Summit – Oct 2-6, 2023 rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2023/
[0:16:13] Learning is social – how to help online learners stay engaged
[0:24:58] How a designer can determine if their learners have had a good outcome
[0:30:40] Advice for designers moving into the learning design space
[0:33:29] Jenae’s gift to listeners
How to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
In our remote world, we as researchers need new ways to help our stakeholders cut through the noise to engage and digest our insights more meaningfully through thoughtful and intentional self-directed learning techniques. In this short session, we will discuss 4 key self-directed learning techniques to help you increase engagement around your insights during our debriefing sessions with your stakeholders.
The Product & Design Equalizer: User Research
Strong cross-functional partnerships make us more efficient and effective at our jobs while ensuring projects are completed successfully. But these relationships, especially those between design and product management, can sometimes be in conflict.
Thankfully, the same thing that helps bring these two teams together is also the same thing that helps build the best products for the company. This talk will focus on how to leverage user research to help make the right trade-offs when you feel pressure to launch quickly but also want to have confidence that you’re designing the right thing for your users.
Chris will draw from his experiences at Google, Uber Eats and now Sprig to show how research can bridge the gap between designers and product managers.
Landing Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products (Videoconference)
Rather than spend all our time validating product decisions late in the development lifecycle, researchers can (and should!) drive innovation. This interactive discussion will set researchers up with tools and product knowledge to impact change in roadmaps. Participants will hear real-world examples and learn how to drive a research roadmap against business strategy goals and KPIs and create stronger partnerships with Product.
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
This presentation addresses the contextuality problem of generating rich yet generalizable observations. It examines the contrasting approaches of qualitative and quantitative research in capturing user context and offers a pragmatic model for building meaningful connections between the two methods using the concepts of the ‘context of discovery’ and ‘contexts of justification.
Remote User Research: Dos and Don’ts from the Virtual Field (Videoconference)
Faced with the coronavirus crisis, the world switched from office to remote work almost overnight. Likewise, many design teams suddenly found themselves having to conduct user research remotely. For some, this wasn’t entirely new. For others, it was the first time going all-out remote, which took some getting used to!
Self-care in User Research (Videoconference)
Exposure to others’ trauma is toxic. This is known as ‘vicarious trauma’ and it’s what happens to people who hear harrowing stories as part of their work.
User researchers are often faced with situations where they need to conduct repeated in-depth interviews with people who’ve had traumatic experiences and who have developed PSTD, mental health issues, chronic illness, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. We believe this repeated exposure puts the psychological safety of user researchers at risk. Training to equip people with the right skills and confidence to prepare for and handle these situations is often absent from user research training.
Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
In this talk, Sofia Quintero – founder at EnjoyHQ [recently acquired by UserZoom] – shares her experience helping teams implement effective research repositories across companies of all sizes. You will learn a variety of change management protocols and best practices in knowledge management to make sure you build a strong foundation regardless of the tool you end up buying.
The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale
As more organizations embrace research we move on to the second generation question – how do we scale this user centered behavior to support demand? There are fairly systemic issues that can undermine our best intentions. At best, it can render our research wasteful and inefficient, and at worst it can introduce significant risks in the decision making that our teams make. This talk considers five of the most likely challenges you’ll rub up against – speed, silos, teams, numbers and failure to mature. We’ll then discuss what causes these and what you can do to mitigate risks for your organization.
