Now published: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey!

Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Videoconference)

Why do some project teams work well, while others just can’t seem to get it together? Why do some teams have a strong sense of culture while others feel like a group of strangers working on the same task?

When a team comes together, whether it’s for a short-term project or ongoing long-term operations, a culture emerges: you can see it in how the team works toward common goals and how they interact with one another. Although you can’t force team culture, you can design for it. Through an enterprise project case study, we look at onboarding techniques and methods that can be used to deliberately build strong team cultures.

How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up

Shipra Kayan, the former head of insights at Upwork, will present the origin story of Upwork’s hugely successful and long-running VoC program. From the moment that triggered the formation of a VoC initiative, the ups, and downs of experimenting with its operating model, to why this program is still going strong 7 years after it was launched. She will field questions like “Who owns the VoC?”, “What is its purpose?”, and “Will we just create another presentation that won’t have any real impact?”

– 15 minutes Upwork VoC case study

– 15 minutes for Q&A

Digital Medicine Design (Videoconference)

Can a software only mobile solution outperform a pharmaceutical drug in clinical trials? Is it possible to create an app only available via a doctor’s prescription? The answer to both questions is a responding YES!

In this webinar, Dan walked through several medical product case studies he has consulted on. The first is the WellDoc BlueStar solution for type 2 diabetes patients. BlueStar was the first instance of Digital Medicine invented. BlueStar received both an FDA class 2 certification and a prescription drug code for insurance reimbursement. Legally speaking this 100% software only solution is a medication. In clinical trials it has proven to reduce high-risk type 2 patients A1C levels by more than 1.8 points, outperforming many commonly prescribed medications. The second case study is Bigfoot Biomedical’s artificial pancreas for type 1 diabetics. It has completed its first clinical trial rounds but is not yet in the market. This solution uses an amazing combination of AI, big data and IoT embedded in the human body to automate insulin delivery 24/7. The primary UX resides on the patients’ phone. Interfaces for doctors and insurance companies will complete the end to end system experience including an innovative direct to patients supply chain. In addition to these amazing case studies this webinar described the similarities between digital medicine design and Enterprise UX. You will be surprised to see how much they have in common as well as what else you need to know to enter this cutting-edge UX domain.

Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization? (Videoconference)

Companies are spending millions of dollars on shadow design teams (aka non-designers doing design work). This session shares the concept and the tools we’ve used to measure how much shadow design is happening in a client’s organization. Plus, a case study with some surprising results, and how a design leader used it to grow her team after months of banging her head against a wall.

An interesting and perhaps more productive way to approach the “ROI of Design” conversation.

Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design (Videoconference)

Retail presents a uniquely exciting environment in which to discover service design journeys at the intersection of physical and digital spaces. What role can store employees play in the development of new technological processes? How can we engage with this environment and its people in a meaningful, impactful way? In this community videoconference, we cover approaches from a UX research and strategy lens with REI as a case study, and reflect on the challenges faced in this space.

Augment the Human. Interrogate the System.

Designers stand at the verge of a great professional opportunity: artificial intelligence. This technology enables computers to study the world and make predictions using unstructured data. We can speak to machines—and machines can speak back. We can gesture to devices, expressing emotion and intent, and machines can respond meaningfully. We can look to computers not just for interaction, but for companionship. How can designers adapt and thrive in this evolving terrain? How might we map out new brands, platforms and experiences between human and machine? What dangers must we address? What destructive ideologies must we reveal? What possibilities for a better future might we explore and prototype?

The Science of Creativity for DesignOps

For the past 20 years, Dr Karl K. Jeffries has been fascinated by the study of creativity. In this presentation, he shares some of what he has learnt about creativity and how it applies to DesignOps professionals. Whether you consider yourself creative or not, the science of creativity has much to offer professional design practice in all its many forms. As a critical 21st-century skill, having an informed understanding of creativity is crucial to navigating the next five years. In this presentation, Dr Jeffries begins to explore a few insights to ignite your interest in creativity for DesignOps.

Getting in Flow with Your Team

A design process is only as good as the people who run it, no matter how “efficient” the process claims to be. This talk will cover the circumstances of a case study and the strategies that took place to establish and maintain momentum on a product that didn’t have a direction. With the collaboration of a team in “flow,” the work seemed (sometimes unbelievably) natural, enabling and empowering everybody not only to trust each other, but also to trust themselves in their own decision making and their own exploration of their craft and strengths with mutual trust and respect.

A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach to User-Centric Maturity at Scale

User-centric design and development mindset and maturity has been low in an enterprise context. UX departments struggle a lot to gain momentum and help organizations create better products in various different ways with RoI of their efforts being low. How might we increase the user-centric maturity and mindset of the enterprise in a more organic way and help as many product teams as possible while having insufficient UX specialists?

Vasilieos will present a case study for top-down and bottom-up approach taken at LEGO with practical information, learnings and reflections so far.

Delivering Amazing Experiences

ServiceNow builds enterprise products that help companies and their end-users work smarter, faster, and easier. As a team, we strive to create product experiences that people love and make work, work better for people.

In this presentation, George and Joy, designers at ServiceNow, will explore what it means to deliver amazing experiences throughout the design process focusing on our end-users. We will share a case study that empowers designers on building great, sustainable products that are user friendly, visually beautiful, empowering and super charge productivity.