Designing with Outcomes in Mind: Transformation in the Enterprise with Lada Gorlenko

Lada Gorlenko, Director of UX Research at Smartsheet in Seattle, is the lead curator of this year’s Enterprise Experience conference.

Lada began her career in prison, spending lots of time with murderers and drug dealers! Not what you think, though: she was a psychologist researching the personality changes caused by long-term imprisonment. The experience led her to a better understanding of how universally transferable the principles of research and design are, whether in a prison or at an enterprise. In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lada shares her career path and the story of how she ended up in UX, and the themes she’s developed for the upcoming Enterprise Experience conference.

Panel: Collaboration Tools

We have all heard the old saying “communication is key” but as the landscape of technology widens so do the options we have for communication tools using that technology. To talk about the challenges and opportunities that our organizations face when solving the communication conundrum, we have invited three people working in three different areas where communication is key for organizations with designers: research insights, workflow management and design systems management. Facilitated by Abby Covert.

Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process

If the past two years haven’t made it clear, researchers and designers absolutely must be prepared to understand and address trauma as a factor in our work and our lives. Social worker, designer, and Advancing Research 2022 speaker Rachael Dietkus joins Lou on the Rosenfeld Review to plumb the intersection of social work, UX, and how these play out in trauma-informed research and design. She shares her approach to applying trauma-informed principles to the research process, and highlights important key factors including:

• Defining Rachael’s three main intersections between design and social work: social work values, design research methodologies, and trauma-informed (also known as trauma-responsive) principles
• The importance of asking how the above three principles meld together in design to foster a humanistically-informed lens
• The ways social work as a care field translates into user experience design, and why this is a necessary step to include in design methodology
• How the concept of “care,” which includes building relationships, establishing rapport, hearing other people’s stories, and more is central to ensuring human-centered design principles
• Addressing the preexisting disconnect between designers (from a process-based perspective) and social workers (from a humanistic perspective), and how collaboration between the two can positively impact end users
• Ensuring the preconditions that need to exist are shared and maintained at the highest level of integrity, and how a safety plan can help bring this to reality
• The importance of assessing risk when building new programs and policies, as well as addressing adjacent process methodology-related contexts
• How engaging with people from a design perspective means engaging with trauma, and why that positively challenges designers to show up in a wholesome capacity
• What it means to weave compassion and understanding into design
• How the trauma-informed approach can serve as a set of preventive measures that can help mitigate potential negative impacts for users

Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey

Teams Work How People Work

You’re part of a cross-functional team dedicated to creating an amazing product experience. You’re an essential piece of a larger puzzle. But how does your piece mesh with all the others? This first-of-its-kind interactive session will blend improvisation, audience participation, panel-style discussion, and more to explore the inner dynamics of cross-functional enterprise teams. We’ll illustrate a few best (and probably a few worst) practices, and you’ll walk away with a new found understanding for your colleagues and a renewed sense of ways to make the fit between your different roles clearer and more effective.

Participating in this session:

– Christian Crumlish, Head of Product, 7 Cups
– Jacqui Frey, Director of Design Operations, MailChimp
– Kristina Halvorson, Founder, CEO, Brain Traffic
– Jamie Janssen, Research Manager for Shared Rides, Uber Technologies, Inc
– Ramya Mahalingam, Associate Design Director, McKinsey & Company
– Adam Penly, Lead Frontend Architect, Capital One

Rapid AI-powered UX (RAUX): A framework for empowering human designers

UX and content designers often find themselves with incomplete research, limited budgets, and the pressing need to validate concepts quickly.

How can you effectively create personas and journey maps under these constraints? Enter the power of AI.

In this session, Noz Urbina will unveil a unique and proven methodology that leverages AI to craft personas and journey maps from incomplete data. Or if you’re blessed with good research, it provides a way to synthesize it to create more and richer personas, maps, and therefore, designs, than you’d ever have time for otherwise.

This approach both helps designers do more with less using AI, and provides a foundation to validate assumptions, rally stakeholders quickly. Therefore putting them in a better place to secure the budget you need for comprehensive human-led research.

What you’ll learn:

• See the transformative power of AI in the realm of UX and content design, making the abstract tangible for designers and stakeholders alike.
• Discover a unique methodology that uses AI to create fleshed-out personas and journey maps from whatever your starting point or budget.
• Learn how to accelerate the creation of initial or draft maps that validate assumptions and engage stakeholders.

How DesignOps Is Adapting (or Not) to Cumulative Crises (Videoconference)

Two years of Covid and endless experimentation with remote and hybrid work models. George Floyd’s murder. And now Russia’s war in Ukraine.

We’re going to pause our “regular” DesignOps Community programming, and spend time together identifying and acknowledging a host of perplexing, unanticipated, and frankly traumatizing issues, and discussing how to get through them in the context of DesignOps work.

• What do you do when, due to a crisis:
• Your team includes people in countries affected by war?
• Your colleague is the target of bias or prejudice?
• You need to identify and find new skills or training to help your people cope?
• A critical tool or platform your team relies upon is suddenly unavailable or supported?
• The communications channels you’ve relied upon to manage DesignOps are no longer functional?
• You can’t stay positive or motivated, and you’re wondering if you should be doing something other than “business as usual”?

How have you addressed these challenges so far? What would you have done differently? And how can you be better prepared for the next crisis?

Join us as we talk about it together. Lou Rosenfeld will facilitate this community conversation, joined by the DesignOps Community curators.

Filling the Void

When we talk about DesignOps, the focus is frequently on scaling existing design systems and supporting established design teams. But the U.S. Digital Service’s Dan Willis will tell a different kind of story about a federal agency that used DesignOps practices to address a multi-million-dollar business problem. With years of system-centric development, the agency had accidentally opened a giant void between the functionality of their enterprise software and the people who depended on that functionality to do their jobs. This talk will explore how to introduce and maintain design operations even where none have existed before.

Middleware in Medicine with Carol Massa

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Imagine being the service design lead of a healthcare network of 88,000 patients. Your team consists of five people. Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? This is the work that Carol Massa does every day at Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare network. She brings her wisdom and experience not only to this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, but to the inaugural Advancing Service Design Conference on December 3-4, 2024.

Starting as a design student at SCAD, Carol’s career path has taken her to management consulting and now to her pivotal position at Northwell’s Enterprise Digital Service division.

Carol discusses her team’s unique approach to service design, acting as translators of human insights for digital services. Her team’s work involves transforming research and data into actionable insights, creating playbooks, and facilitating collaboration across various departments. The focus is on enhancing patient and clinician experiences by streamlining administrative tasks through innovative digital tools.

Throughout the conversation, Carol highlights the importance of building relationships and humanizing interactions. She shares insights on using familiar frameworks to engage clinicians and bridge gaps in communication, ensuring that all stakeholders understand the shared goals of improving patient care.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The Role of Service Design in Healthcare: Understanding how service design can improve patient and clinician experiences within large healthcare systems like Northwell Health
• Collaboration Across Disciplines: How a small service design team collaborates with various departments and stakeholders, including clinicians, engineers, and business strategists, to enhance service delivery
• Translating Insights into Action: Techniques for translating complex data and human insights into actionable strategies and digital tools that address specific needs
• Humanizing Interactions: The importance of building personal relationships and fostering open communication to bridge gaps
• Prototyping and Testing Ideas: How rapid prototyping and testing can be used to validate ideas and improve processes, ensuring that new tools and services effectively meet user needs.
• Adapting Existing Frameworks: Creative approaches to leveraging existing frameworks (like problems, goals, and tasks) in a way that resonates with different audiences, particularly in translating technical language for clinicians.

Quick Reference Guide:
0:00 – Meet Carol
2:02 – Service design at Northwell
7:25 – The makeup of the service design team
9:49 – The operational tools and documentation the team uses
13:46 – An example of incorporating and automating a new operational process
17:36 – Why you need the Rosenverse
20:04 – Action-driven problems, goals, and tasks
24:35 – Breaking into established systems
29:02 – Carol’s gift for listeners

A Roadmap for Maturing Design in the Enterprise

A successful experience design practice will have many familiar characteristics, such as cross-functional relationships, a design system, clearly defined career progression and a seat at the product strategy table. But these realities are rarely achieved all at once and are usually the result of thoughtful evolution as the team grows in people and in practice. This talk will use the UX Maturity model, which highlights an experience design team’s progression from unrecognized to embedded into the fabric of the business, to illustrate how, when, and where to focus incremental efforts towards maturing design in a growing business.

“Accessibility is the Oil Change” with Sheri Byrne-Haber

Sheri is the author of the upcoming book Giving a Damn about Accessibility, and a speaker at Design at Scale 2021 this June 9-11. In this latest Rosenfeld Review podcast, she discusses the critical importance of starting projects and products with a mindset of accessibility. Spoiler alert: it’s far more difficult to go back later.

VMWare, where Sheri is currently an Accessibility Architect, recently launched an Accessibility Champions program, increasing their hires with disabilities and those with interest in specialized training. She and Lou talk through the program and other ways you can scale accessibility—even while acquiring new companies, as Sheri has experienced (more than ten in two years!)

Sheri recommends:
Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School
Lily Zheng, DEI Consultant