Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
We’re all ultimately charged with making our products as useful and beloved as possible, but in order to do that, researchers must widen the aperture of user research. Usability, user journeys, and the like are critical, but the reality is that wider cultural factors provide the filter through which people experience your product. We need to dedicate more attention to how wider cultural factors shape what people need from a product experience—the dialogue between the wide and the narrow apertures are crucial to creating beloved, essential products.
In this talk, Neil Barrie, Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, shares his perspectives on research’s role in helping companies build deeper, meaningful relationships with customers based on his work building the brands of the likes of Airbnb, Pinterest, Headspace, Pepsico, Monzo and Bumble.
His talk will address:
- How culture is the lens through which people experience products
- Why products are the catalyst to purpose, facilitating behavior changes that can take marketing years to achieve
- What we can learn from insider cases of culturally driven UX innovation from leading unicorns like Flo Health, Pinterest and Airbnb
What Digital Leaders Need to Know: a Chat with Tony Byrne
Throwing money at technology won’t automatically make your company more innovative or productive. So how do you pick the right tools for your organization? In this episode, Real Story Group founder Tony Byrne talks about what digital leaders need to do to make tech buying decisions that drive success.
Closing Comments
After a very full day of expanding our minds, we’ve reached the end – of the program, that is. We’ll take a moment to reflect and hear some closing words of wisdom from Christian.
We’ll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech’s Nobility Complex
(Originally titled “Making Uber More Efficient through Informed International Insights”)
Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global Research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs and aspirations. At Uber, the Global Scalable Research program is intended to influence product teams at HQ and around the world, to design and test in global regions: currently Mexico, India, Brazil. In this talk, I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Our Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today.
DesignOps Community Sensing Session (Videoconference)
Join us to explore the future of the DesignOps role, as well as the joys and challenges folks are facing in that role.
Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
COMMUNICATE: Discussion
Communicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
When introducing DesignOps as a new function to an organization, the first few months are critical as you set the stage for how the organization familiarizes itself with your new team.
In this session, Brennan will cover how DesignOps can partner with other functions, how to pick the right programs to tackle first, and how to measure a new team’s success. He will showcase tools that are useful to help establish your team’s newly formed brand within your organization.
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
Inviting the Whole Org to Come See For Yourself
So all of a sudden, everyone at your company is interested in going into the field, meeting with clients, and “building empathy.” What could possibly go wrong? At ADP we created a program of ethnographic (lite) research designed to harness this excitement for exploratory research, enable anyone in the org to participate in conducting research, and help stakeholders think outside of their own product or screens. Secretly, our program was carefully designed to also teach our partners what it means to do Research: listen thoughtfully, analyze holistically, and truly understand client feedback before jumping to solutions.
