Shaping design, designers and teams
Jason will share the latest of his work over the past decade developing visual frameworks for design teams, leaders and designers to map their skills and define their future professional development.
Through his role as a team leader, and with workshops he runs with the community and his clients, he has seen how valuable it is for designers to self-reflect on who they are, and project the areas in which they feel like they should develop. Whether that’s within, or beyond the context of the organization in which they work.
Demystifying Multimodal Design: The Design Practice You Didn’t Know You’re Doing (Videoconference)
Did you know that you’re probably designing multimodal experiences? Most designers today are working in a multimodal environment, but haven’t been trained to make the most of the many capabilities the latest generations of devices provide. Your customers have a small universe of devices, and they now come with the ability to handle far more than traditional haptic input like keyboards and mice. Gestural input, from swipes to hand gestures in video calls to stylus input, is becoming more common. Audio input and output are becoming more important in a world where digital assistants are poised to make a second surge powered by large language model AI. Visual output has become much more nuanced, and sometimes spans multiple devices. How do you wrangle all of this, optimize for great experiences, and still keep the human at the center? By becoming more consciously aware of the different inputs and outputs we’re working with – and the many ways these inputs and outputs include and exclude our customers – we can build more resilient, more inclusive, and more powerful next-generation experiences.
RFPs Without Tears: Writing Inclusive RFPS that Don’t Scare Away Talent
Agencies and organizations spend an enormous amount of time putting together RFP documents that can scare away agencies, especially small ones. If we want to increase talent for civic projects, we need to commit to crafting more inclusive and effective RFPs and procurement processes.
Bellweather Chief Strategy Officer Emily Lessard will share lessons learned from working both within and outside government agencies. Her knowledge spans responding to 143 RFPs and reading countless others. She will share ten lessons for writing more engaging and equitable RFPs, along with a link to download a sample file to get you started.
The Importance of Accessible Design Systems
A design system is a set of repeatable components and standards guiding the use of those components. Standards can come in the form of documentation, videos, blogs, discussion channels, meetups and office hours just to name a few. A design system may be built internally within an organization, or there are hundreds of open source design systems that can be downloaded and used. However, only a small percentage of those open source design systems are set up such that they can be successfully implemented in a manner that results in software that is accessible to people with disabilities who use assistive technology to interact with technology. This talk will discuss the importance of accessible design systems and a high level overview of the ten best known open source design systems.
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Many organizations struggle with justifying and prioritizing accessibility. One of the primary reasons is because they’re thinking about accessibility all wrong. Instead of a checklist, a list of legal requirements, or a set of shackles holding designers and developers back, it’s time to start thinking of accessibility as what it is: an opportunity to innovate!
In this presentation, Fable will draw from our expertise helping organizations like yours start the accessibility journey, to change the way you think about disability, assistive technology, and accessibility. We will demonstrate that accessible products are more flexible, customizable, and useful for all users. We’ll also show you how accessibility is directly tied to the creation of many of the most exciting and innovative technologies of the last 50 years, and how it’s changed the entire world for everyone. This presentation will inspire you with the information and ideas you need to accelerate your accessibility journey.
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Many organizations struggle with justifying and prioritizing accessibility. One of the primary reasons is because they’re thinking about accessibility all wrong. Instead of a checklist, a list of legal requirements, or a set of shackles holding designers and developers back, it’s time to start thinking of accessibility as what it is: an opportunity to innovate!
In this presentation, Fable will draw from our expertise helping organizations like yours start the accessibility journey, to change the way you think about disability, assistive technology, and accessibility. We will demonstrate that accessible products are more flexible, customizable, and useful for all users. We’ll also show you how accessibility is directly tied to the creation of many of the most exciting and innovative technologies of the last 50 years, and how it’s changed the entire world for everyone. This presentation will inspire you with the information and ideas you need to accelerate your accessibility journey.
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Many organizations struggle with justifying and prioritizing accessibility. One of the primary reasons is because they’re thinking about accessibility all wrong. Instead of a checklist, a list of legal requirements, or a set of shackles holding designers and developers back, it’s time to start thinking of accessibility as what it is: an opportunity to innovate! In this presentation, Fable will draw from our expertise helping organizations like yours start the accessibility journey, to change the way you think about disability, assistive technology, and accessibility. We will demonstrate that accessible products are more flexible, customizable, and useful for all users. We’ll also show you how accessibility is directly tied to the creation of many of the most exciting and innovative technologies of the last 50 years, and how it’s changed the entire world for everyone. This presentation will inspire you with the information and ideas you need to accelerate your accessibility journey.
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in a modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
How do you create an agile, customer-centric team of designers, developers, product managers, and user experience specialists whose instinct is to make, not talk? How do you ensure that this team’s output remains focused on business goals, not the technology of the week? And most critically, how do you successfully integrate this team of do-ers into a larger, more traditionally structured organization? In this talk, Husani Oakley shares tips and best practices honed over 20 years of building teams that build best-in-class experiences for clients large and small.
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
– Jana Sedivy (Principal, Authentic Insight): A Story about Stories (VIDEO)
– Carla Pileggi (UX Architect, Design System Lead, Pitney Bowes): A Sympathy Card for a Front-End Developer (VIDEO)
– Ramya Mahalingam (UX Architect, Cardinal Solutions): The Road to Being a Bridge Is Not at all Paved (VIDEO)
– Audrey Crane (Partner, DesignMap): Thoughts on Vulnerability (VIDEO)
– Lada Gorlenko (Director of Research, Smartsheet): Make My Day (VIDEO)
– and a horror story from Adam Polansky (XD Strategist, Bottle Rocket Studios) (VIDEO)
