From Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme

Explore why UX teams are moving from you-know-who to Voxpopme.

In this fireside chat, Andy Barraclough, Voxpopme’s CEO will explain why his company is experiencing a flood of UX researchers looking for a more efficient, user-friendly UX research platform.

During the talk, he will also give a walkthrough of Voxpopme’s core functionality — screen recording, moderated interviews, respondent recruitment, and AI — and provide a glimpse into its friendlier pricing model.

Co-Creating Operating Models for Design Teams with Daniel Orbach

The best operating models for design orgs are mission-driven, evolving, and team-developed. Those criteria might seem daunting, but Daniel Orbach, Lou’s guest and a speaker at the DesignOps Summit (taking place virtually September 23-25), explains how he facilitates a dynamic culture of co-creating with his team at JP Morgan Chase. Daniel outlines his framework, one where the whole team is involved. It’s a dynamic, fluid process that builds teamwork, creates buy-in, and establishes a framework of periodic review, which encourages continual evolution.

Lou and Daniel discuss the impact of rituals and mission statements on both teams and individuals. They also explore the impact of a team’s operating models on the broader organization and how interactions with various teams can foster shared understanding within the broader context of the organization.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• How mission statements can inspire and drive operating models
• The power of organic rituals and the unusual, unifying ritual of Daniel’s team at JP Morgan Chase
• How cross-pollinating between teams can create a shared vocabulary and increase understanding

Quick Reference Guide:
2:36 – Introduction of Daniel
3:14 – Co-creating operating models with a team
4:33 – On mission and operating models
7:19 – Quarterly impact retrospectives
9:16 – Rituals and mission
12:55 – Co-creating operating models
15:34 – Why you need the Rosenverse
18:39 – Operating models’ effects on broader organizations
21:00 – Shared vocabulary
23:07 – Cross-pollinating in organizations to facilitate shared understanding
25:05 – Operating models and the individual
28:09 – Daniel’s gift for the audience

Three Key Climate Initiatives and How You Can Help

This session will showcase three essential initiatives—Project Drawdown, SustainableUX, and Climate Designers—that UX designers, researchers, and writers interested in addressing the climate crisis absolutely should know about. We won’t just inform you; each panelist will offer you a small yet concrete way you can help them achieve their missions. Join us for this hour-long session and discover how your participation can drive meaningful change in the fight against climate change.

Learn more about SustainableUX, ClimateDesigners, and Project Drawdown in the resources linked on this page!

Sturgeon’s Biases

Every designer has a story about a terrible experience with developers, or product managers, or the business.

Unfortunately the reverse is equally true.

We’ll explore these problems through the lens of Sturgeon’s Law — usually stated as “ninety percent of everything is crap”. And “everything” includes Design!

We’ll see how people inside and outside of a discipline can have radically different experiences of its competencies. Then we’ll work through options to help break down those misconceptions — so we can create happier, more empathic, organisations.

Optimizing for Outcomes: Transformation Design in Systems at Scale

Moving beyond the service blueprint or user journey map, this case study explores some of the more non-traditional outputs and outcomes driven by service design, particularly through the lens of creating long-term transformational change. Stefanie will overview a variety of recipes for achieving transformative outcomes at three levels within government agencies: the product/service experience, program-wide or platform initiatives, and fundamental agency technology operations. The challenges for each layer are unique, but also offer different opportunities for where service designers can achieve sustainable, real impact. We’ll explore specific examples achieved by a breadth of designers, product managers, and engineers working within government before exploring how this model might be replicated across other partner government agencies to achieve our vision of making more government services become as simple, effective, and accessible as possible.

Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences

Healthcare in the United States often struggles to innovate in delivering optimal patient experiences across acute and non-acute settings. However, those service designers who work within large health systems get to experience first-hand on why it is extremely hard to implement changes in a singular or multi-level service interaction across healthcare touchpoints. In this case study, you will hear first hand learnings on how to influence the decision-making process of solutions that shape the patient and the clinician experience.

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

Monthly or even quarterly well-being sessions on caring for your mental heath aren’t enough to create inclusive and supporting workplace environments. In the teams that we cultivate and work with, there needs to be a foundation of care and autonomy that is integrated into the workflow. Equitable well-being should be at the core of creating an inclusive workplace and user experience for your customers and employees. In this interactive talk, we’ll explore the themes of capitalism, hierarchy, classism, and other harmful realities of inequity that hinder true equitable well-being in the workplace to better the employee experience.

We’ll dive deep into how to reimagine a workplace framework and environment that is grounded in overall well-being and inclusion. Through this, you’ll walk away with the knowledge and tools to push toward a dynamic of a more speculative and imaginative future that can be more freeing, and aligned with the well-being of people and all inhabitants, including the land, that can enable contribution to a healthier cyclical work environment.

Meters, Miles, and Madness: New Frameworks to Measure the (Elusive) Value of DesignOps

Measuring DesignOps value is surprisingly complicated. Many practitioners would agree with the sentiment that measuring their impact feels aspirational at best, and theoretical at worst. Anecdotal evidence and praise from partners (“I don’t know what we’d do without you!”) is nice, but doesn’t add up to proof that DesignOps is a worthy return on investment.

In this talk, we’ll share two novel approaches to measuring DesignOps success from our upcoming book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. These methods–the “Jobs to Be Done” and “HEROES” frameworks–can be used to uncover and define measures of value that more accurately capture the impact DesignOps (and design) has on a business and its stakeholders. We will also share some tested rubrics that DesignOps can use to prioritize and implement these new measures.

Developing and Deploying Your Design Operations Strategy

As Design Operations leaders, we are constantly playing a game of breadth verses depth. It can be easy to get caught diving deep into fire drills or one-off problems, and never having time to scale your efficient operations to the greater team.

In this talk, Cassandra will guide you through the process of defining and deploying an operational strategy. With this strategy, you will scale the impact of design operations without increasing the size of your program management team. She’ll provide tips on how to get buy in from your key stakeholders to ensure their investment and guarantee their adoption of your strategy as their own. With this practical toolset, you can define your operational vision, empower yourself and your partners to deploy it, and finally get yourself the bandwidth you’ve needed to be more strategic.

Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: A Chat with Steve Portigal

A couple of researchers walk into a bar. After a few drinks, they fess up their most embarrassing tales of research gone wrong. In this podcast, Steve Portigal talks about how that one night at the bar (and cat pee) sparked the idea for his book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Learn why Steve believes in the value of failure stories, and how he convinced a skeptical Lou to publish the book.