Everything is About to Change: Software as Material
It’s a wonderful time for UX people who work in enterprises. We’ve made huge strides—from greater acceptance to concrete impacts—and our opportunities seem endless.
But don’t get too comfortable, as enterprises are on the cusp of a huge and disruptive change. A variety of trends are converging to make it increasingly cheap and easy to develop software. In effect, software is becoming a material, and what enterprises make from it is far more important than how we make it.
UX people can sit by and watch as enterprises figure out what to make out of the new material of software. Or we can be smart and partner with developers to define the coming generation of products and services. Greg Petroff will help us understand thIs new materiality of software and the opportunities for UX people to increase their impact and relevance.
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 an modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
UX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design
Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated the software world––from “smart reply” functionality in email to auto-completed code in developer tools––but it’s only recently that AI has been implemented into creative processes. As AI-driven functionality becomes more common in the design tooling space, questions arise––what is cool? Inspirational? Useful? And what is creepy? Unhelpful? Where is the line?
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.
How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
In enterprise organizations, product development work, and therefore, design work, typically happens within a specific business unit or organization. Dedicated and embedded squads means there is a close and tight feedback loop between team members.
But what happens when your company kicks off an initiative that spans across business units? How do you resource and run a design project with no dedicated designers? This case study will cover how we set out a vision, structured communications, built up an ad-hoc design team, shipped our first cross-organization product and all the lessons we learned along the way.
Data-Prompted Interviews
In this session, Amelia unpacks data-prompted interviews with an emphasis on Experience Sampling Methods. You will learn the essentials of running an Experience Sampling study and how to use quantitative data during interviews to enhance our understanding of daily life activities and experiences.
Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
Namahn has been working on digital inclusion for the Digital Transformation Office of the Belgian federal government for over a year. Since 2020, they have invested in understanding user needs to help administrations improve their services for and with the citizen. In a multidisciplinary team, the team researched the challenges of digital inclusion and explored actionable avenues for federal administrations. In 2019, a study showed that 42% of Belgian citizens didn’t use any online or digital public service. Applying design techniques, the team shaped a profound understanding of people at risk, their struggles, and how governmental services can become more inclusive. In this talk, Yalenka and Marie will outline how they conducted interviews with citizens at risk of digital exclusion during a lockdown and what they learned from those. Additionally, they’ll detail the current experiments that they are launching to ensure public services are conceived in an inclusive way.
Breathing Room for Delight
Over the past few years, the digital team at AusPost has matured into one of the most well-functioning agile trains in Australia. The challenge in this journey to success was to ensure how design and discovery retain their customer centricity in an environment of rapid production. The need was to continue to be proactive instead of reactive in the approach to problem-solving.
Some of the challenges were:
- To ensure there was enough room for the right amount of research for the right problem while ensuring rapid delivery.
- To ensure that all members of the team from Product to Development could collaborate like a true cross-functional team to come up with solutions to problems.
- To ensure the team established the right metrics that spoke to the experience.
The talk will be a case study of how the Design team experimented with various methodologies to create more breathing room for design-led problem-solving in the agile train.
Design Staffing Models
Determining a staffing model for the success of your design teams is one of the key elements for driving success. By reviewing the differences between dedicated and agency (or flexible) staffing models, Alicia Mooty will walk the group through a case study of applying these types of models in her work at Adobe.
You Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
This is a case study of a strategic, enterprise-level IT project that was stalled due to organizational and cultural issues within company. By applying a few familiar research techniques and frameworks (and one unfamiliar modeling framework) towards understanding and solving organizational problems, the project team found its footing and was able to deliver a complex application that will position the company for success.
