Maximizing the Impact of Content Design with Jonathon Colman

Jonathon Colman, Senior Design Manager at Intercom and DesignOps Summit 2020 speaker joins Lou to discuss the challenges of developing content operations (and, sure, let’s go there: ContentOps). Should ContentOps stand alone, or be situated as part of a larger DesignOps team? Jonathon also shares how his team sets consistent expectations and defines success metrics across for designers of all stripes, whether they focus on content, product, research, or design roles.

Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem

Government’s digital products and services often impact millions of people. In this session, two team members from Coforma, a digital services firm supporting both commercial and federal government modernization efforts, will discuss how they navigate challenges and foster success in supporting one agency’s effort to relieve over-burdened clinicians and improve patient care. At the center of their work is a suite of tools that enable the agency to advance equitable delivery of innovations in cancer treatment. Julie and Laureen will share their strategies for prioritization within a complex ecosystem of business owners, centering patients and clinicians through a strong UX/Product partnership, and leveraging roadmapping and user story mapping to define, focus, and clarify achievable MVP solutions.

Prayag Narula on AI’s Role in Qualitative Research

Prayag Narula is the founder and CEO of Marvin, a tool for qualitative researchers. Prayag will also be a speaker at the Advancing Research Conference where he’ll share the stage with Rida Qadri, a research scientist at Google.

Humans have been doing quantitative research for thousands of years – well, for as long as math has been around. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is fairly new to human history, emerging only in the 20th Century. And qualitative research has taken a backseat to what Prayag calls “the tyranny of math,” the prevailing attitude that if research is not math-based, it’s not valid. But that doesn’t diminish the importance of qualitative data. Decisions at all levels are made based on qualitative data every day.

Here are some characteristics of qualitative research:
• Qualitative research is scientific and has been used in the social sciences for scientific discovery for six decades.
• Qualitative data is highly variable and semi-structured, so creating software for it has enormous challenges.
• Taking notes and asking questions are inherent parts of qualitative research, and tools that can search and synthesize such data can dramatically enhance productivity and outcomes.

It’s time for qualitative research to be given its due. Enter Marvin.

Software not only gives validity and legitimacy to qualitative research, it makes it more useful. Marvin uses AI to add context to the conversation and to help with analysis. The tool is free for individuals and teams of two researchers.

Prayag is excited about the use of open AI and ChatGBT. He’s not worried about these tools replacing researchers, but they do give researchers another data point, that is, what AI can glean from the data. AI can help us find patterns that we didn’t see before or might give an interpretation of the data or ask a question that hadn’t been previously considered. With tools like Marvin, it’s an exciting time to be in research.

What you’ll learn from this episode
• How software brings legitimacy to processes and data
• About Marvin, a tool that “automates the tedious parts of qualitative research”
• How AI can augment research
• What to expect from Prayag’s upcoming talk with Rida Qadri at Advancing Research – “HCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer” – which will include implementing technologies in a socially responsible way

Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction of Prayag
[01:07] Upcoming talk at Advancing Research March 27-29, 2023
[01:29] Prayag gives a history of his entrepreneurial experience
[05:15] Prayag explains why he felt driven to provide a centralized place for data
[08:53] Does having software to support qualitative research contribute to its perceived legitimacy?
[11:00] On the nature of qualitative research being highly variable and semi-structured and what that means when it comes to writing software
[16:12] Break: Rosenfeld Media Communities
[18:16] Prayag describes the Marvin tool, available for free for individual researchers and teams of two
[0:19:52] The role of AI in research software
[0:25:04] On AI’s ability to synthesize data across various sectors of an organization
[0:29:08] More details Prayag’s upcoming talk with Rida Qadri at Advancing Research in March
[0:32:33] Prayag’s gift to the audience

Erica Jorgensen on Tools and Techniques for Testing your Content

Erica Jorgensen is one of Rosenfeld Media’s newest authors with the publication of her book, Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. With a background in journalism, her book draws on her experiences as a content designer with the likes of Chewy, Microsoft, Slack, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Expedia.

Erica’s book is a toolkit of research techniques for anyone struggling to create content that makes an impact. Not all companies have dedicated research budgets or teams, yet research can save us from redos and yield more targeted, effective content.

Without research, you may be flying blind without even realizing it. We assume the words and phrases on our websites and apps are effective, and a little due diligence can confirm those assumptions or enlighten us about something that was previously completely outside our awareness.

Erica warns us to be prepared because content research will open proverbial cans of worms. False assumptions will be exposed, and what you learn may take your work in unexpected directions. Oftentimes, the whole company will need to get on board when language has to be changed or cleaned up.

In a nutshell, content research will expose problems. But it will help you make progress, and the payoff is worth it.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• About Erica’s career journey in content design
• Case study: The impact of one company’s confusing language, and how content research came to the rescue
• How to incorporate content research into non-research roles
• How to prioritize and strategize content research
• How to harness content audits to highlight what needs attention
• Why it’s important to present your team’s work in the most flattering light possible

Documentation Your Team Will Actually Use

Picture this: You spend weeks writing up your UX Playbook. Your Playbook covers every design and research method your team might use, when to use it, and how. It’s PERFECT. And… no one reads it.

I’ve been there! I’ve led or contributed to 4 Playbooks, 2 toolkits and uncountable miscellaneous “how to” docs in my 8 years as a UX Designer and Operations Manager. In this talk, we’ll cover how to: avoid common pitfalls in documentation, discover what your team needs most, apply a design process to your documentation efforts and deliver incremental value through documentation your team will actually use.

Decentralizing Power through Design with Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin

Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin will be speakers at the upcoming DesignOps Summit on October 2-4, 2023. Their talk, “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration,” will showcase the intersection of care-centeredness and design operations.

Lauren has wanted to be a designer since she was in third grade. What kind of designer? An “everything” designer! From a young age, she embraced the idea that “you can design anything” from fashion to environments to moods and feelings. Today she employs ethical research practices and co-design to shift power and amplify youth voices, design toys, and bring play into her work at Ideo Play Lab.

Mayed has a social service and social impact background. Through a community-oriented storytelling approach, they co-lead strategy and research at Cause and Affect, a relational design consultancy in Canada.

Lauren and Mayed’s partnership began with conversations and exploration about what they could do to shift power dynamics and create more cohesive and engaging designs for all. The biggest hindrance, say Lauren and Mayed, is power hierarchies. Design leaders need to critically think about social identities, institutional positions, and other complexities and dimensions. How power shows up in our practices is always shifting and changing, and decentralizing power has to be an ongoing and emergent process.

And it all starts with ideas and conversations. Mayed and Lauren have found that speculative design is a powerful way to reflect on the “now” and dream about what the future could look like. All real-world shifts begin with ideas, relationships, and conversations. These elements are at the heart of design.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Lauren and Mayed’s backgrounds
– How their partnership came about
– About the talk titled “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and
– Collaboration” that they will deliver at October’s DesignOps Summit
– About power hierarchies in design and what design leaders can do to help decentralize power
– About the role and potential of speculative design

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin
[0:01:03] Mayed and Lauren’s backgrounds
[0:05:53] The working partnership between Mayed and Lauren
[0:08:45] Power hierarchies and design
[0:11:56] The DesignOps leader’s role
[0:15:26] Alternative means of engagement
[0:18:36] DesignOps Summit, October 2-6, 2023
[0:19:59] A care-centered approach to the future through establishing patterns
[0:24:37] Mayed and Lauren’s gifts for the audience

Translating UX Terms into Business Contexts

UX practitioners often overlook the fact that UX terms do not naturally translate into business contexts, particularly when high-stakes decision-making and unclear communication become barriers. In this session, Shan Shen will highlight instances where UX terms consistently hinder collective problem-solving between UX and product teams.

But Do Your Insights Scale? with Katy Mogal

When stakeholders have access to real-time data about millions of user interactions, how can qualitative researchers articulate the value of small-sample studies for product and business strategy?

Katy Mogal, UX Research Lead at Google Assistant, joins Lou to offer a preview of the case study she’ll share at Advancing Research 2021, including learnings about how human-centered researchers can effectively collaborate with functions like data science and business strategy, and how to persuade analytically-minded stakeholders to embrace rich qualitative data about people’s needs and motivations as an input to business strategy.

Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics (Videoconference)

In Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities, Jayne Engle and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook assemble visions for how spirituality and sacred values are essential for reimagining how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and nature. Join us for a discussion with Jayne and Tanya on what it looks like to design for the next seven generations. 

Optional: read Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities in print or open access!

[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features

AI tools like ChatGPT have exploded in popularity with good reason: they allow users to draft, summarize, and edit content with unprecedented speed. While these generic tools can generate any type of content or perform any type of content task, the user needs to craft an effective prompt to get high-quality output, and often needs to exchange multiple messages with additional guidance and requirements in order to improve results.

When you’re building an AI-powered text generation feature, such as a product description or email writer, you typically can’t expect users to craft their own prompts. And unless you’re building a chat interface, you’re unlikely to offer the ability to iteratively improve the output. Instead, your feature needs a robust prompt skeleton that combines with user input to produce high-quality output in a single response.

For the designer, this means building an interface that helps users provide the exact information that creates a successful prompt. This process is more complex than simple form design or a mad-lib prompt completion tool. The user input, often including free form text fields, might be required to fill in prompt variables, but it also could change the prompt structure itself, or even override base instructions.

The effectiveness of the user input significantly influences the quality of the output, underscoring the need for designers to be deeply familiar with the backend prompt architecture so they can design the frontend.

Drawing on recent text generation projects, I’ll demonstrate how the interface design can respond to and evolve with the prompt architecture. I’ll talk about how to determine which prompt components to make invisible to the user, which to provide as predefined options, and which should be authored by the user in free-form text fields.

Takeaways

1. How prompt structure can impact user interface design and conversely, how design can impact prompt structure
2. Techniques to provide effective user guidance within AI generation contexts to ensure consistently high-quality output
3. Real-world examples and learnings from recent generative AI projects in an e-commerce software product