Closing Keynote: Design at Scale
More than 50 years ago, Thomas Watson Jr., the second President of IBM declared, “Good design is good business”. Today, the global company continues to operate on the belief that human experiences drive business. Doug Powell, Distinguished Designer at IBM, will expose what it means to practice design at the global tech company, exploring the inner workings of the largest UX design operation in the world. He will also elaborate on a new Forrester Research study examining the value of design and the design thinking practice at IBM.
The Future of ReOps as a Strategic Function: A Roadmap for Getting There
Imagine a future where UX Research Operations (ReOps) is not just part of research execution, but a pivotal force driving business performance and competitive edge. In this session, we will explore the hidden and often untapped superpowers of Strategic Programs already available in your team. Discover how ReOps can evolve from a supportive function for research alone to a strategic linchpin that fuels your business competitive position, at scale. Through engaging case studies, actionable program plans, and measures, this session will equip you with a practical roadmap to assess the current research lifecycle, effectively advocate for resource gaps with research intelligence, and creative approaches to your research hiring & people strategy. Don’t miss the opportunity to transform your approach to Research Ops into a strategic pillar of business strategy. This evolution will lead to a significant shift in research perceptions, excellence, and maturity.
Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
We’re all ultimately charged with making our products as useful and beloved as possible, but in order to do that, researchers must widen the aperture of user research. Usability, user journeys, and the like are critical, but the reality is that wider cultural factors provide the filter through which people experience your product. We need to dedicate more attention to how wider cultural factors shape what people need from a product experience—the dialogue between the wide and the narrow apertures are crucial to creating beloved, essential products.
In this talk, Neil Barrie, Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, shares his perspectives on research’s role in helping companies build deeper, meaningful relationships with customers based on his work building the brands of the likes of Airbnb, Pinterest, Headspace, Pepsico, Monzo and Bumble.
His talk will address:
- How culture is the lens through which people experience products
- Why products are the catalyst to purpose, facilitating behavior changes that can take marketing years to achieve
- What we can learn from insider cases of culturally driven UX innovation from leading unicorns like Flo Health, Pinterest and Airbnb
Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences with Cheryl Platz
Cheryl Platz—Rosenfeld Media author, emcee of our Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience conferences, puppeteer, and Principal UX Designer at Gates Foundation—shares the inspiration that drove her new book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences (published December 2020). If you’re an interaction designer, you’ll want to listen as Cheryl dramatically expands our understanding of one of interaction design’s final frontiers.
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
Under biometric privacy laws like BIPA and CCPA, user research recordings containing users’ faces or voices can put your company at risk for lawsuits and fines. Legal departments are increasingly requiring more stringent redaction, and in some cases banning recording outright. This comes at a high cost for UX teams who are already being asked to do more with less, as losing access to recordings can increase duplicative research effort and reduce the accuracy of results.
AI offers new solutions for UX teams who want to keep research recordings longer without violating biometric privacy laws. In this demo, we’ll show how we used off-the-shelf tools to intelligently redact users’ voices, faces, and bodies in research videos. By removing biometric identifiers, you can compliantly archive research recordings indefinitely, enabling your team to mine them for insights for years to come.
Learning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
In a world where change is constant and complexity is the norm, learning is the engine that drives great design. In this session, Jen explores how designers can move beyond just solving problems to enabling adaptation at multiple scales: individuals, teams, and organizations. Jen shares principles from complexity science and real-world practice to help you design the conditions for curiosity, reflection, and meaningful change – for your collaborators and customers alike. Walk away with a fresh lens on your role as a designer – that is, a mediator of collective learning.
Take Aways:
- A mental model for approaching design in complex systems or volatile domains, shifting from control to curiosity, from solutions to sense making
- An understanding of the parallels in learning at individual, team, and organizational levels, and why that matters for your design practice
- Practical principles for creating the conditions where adaptive learning can thrive in your team, product, or organization
- Inspiration to reframe your role as a designer: not just solving problems, but enabling systems to learn, grow, and evolve
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
In this session, we’ll explore how a small UI design firm (30 headcount) developed a data-driven DesignOps practice. I’ll demonstrate how we use automation and robust data pipelines to excel in managing and delivering large volumes of work. This talk also shows how we transform Figma’s comment feature into a powerful tool that integrates seamlessly with Trello, enabling our team to achieve high efficiency and precision, and to track everything in real-time without the usual administrative and logistical challenges.
Automation and Custom Tooling:
We leverage automation to ensure every process, from capturing to moving work, is streamlined and efficient. This approach helps us tackle the scalability of thousands of work cards without overwhelming our team.
Data-Driven with a Soul:
This talk addresses concerns around micromanagement and surveillance, illustrating how our methods support consistent delivery (with 95% confidence) without sacrificing the human aspect of our work.
Rise of the Machines: Talking Tooling with Elizabeth Churchill
How will “smart” technology and AI impact work for humans? Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, director of UX at Google, talks to Lou about how she sees AI providing a creative counterpart to work done by humans, not as a means to supplant it. She discusses the difference between coordination tooling and skills tooling, and how both are primed to be invaluable components of the EUX toolbox.
We’re ecstatic to have Elizabeth as our opening keynote speaker at the 2017 Enterprise UX Conference.
Healing Toxic Stress
From the pandemic to mass layoffs to burnout, designers have been enduring years of crisis and toxic stress. For some people, living through these kinds of events can be traumatic. Resmaa Menakem defines trauma as “anything that is too much, too soon, too fast, or for too long without being attended to by something reparative or healing.”
DesignOps professionals and people managers are perfectly positioned to learn about trauma and re-shape their organizations to be spaces for healing, instead of harm. In this talk, participants will understand the prevalence of toxic stress in the workplace, be able to start identifying signs of trauma within themselves, and walk away with three practical ways to create an environment of healing.
Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
Healthcare in the United States often struggles to innovate in delivering optimal patient experiences across acute and non-acute settings. However, those service designers who work within large health systems get to experience first-hand on why it is extremely hard to implement changes in a singular or multi-level service interaction across healthcare touchpoints. In this case study, you will hear first hand learnings on how to influence the decision-making process of solutions that shape the patient and the clinician experience.
