Redefining actionable insights with Brianna Sylver

Brianna Sylver, founder of Sylver Consulting and speaker at the upcoming Advancing Research conference (March 30-April 1, NYC), joins Lou to break down the importance of insight. At its core, insight is about shifts in perspective and can come from anywhere—user research, market research, psychology, mining big data; according to Brianna, it doesn’t really matter. Rather, she emphasizes the importance of capturing all the threads in one container. Lou and Brianna dive into what an insights container can look like, and best practices for making insights actionable.

Brianna’s shoutouts: Heather Dominick, her business mentor, and the impact of her work with “highly sensitive entrepreneurs”, and Dr. Elaine Aron’s work on “the highly sensitive person.”

Panel Discussion

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.

How Technology Can Empower Marketing: a Chat with Theresa Regli

Does your company struggle to find and use video, audio, and image assets after you’ve created them? Do they disappear into a dark netherworld on your server? In this episode, Theresa Regli, author of Digital and Marketing Asset Management, breaks down what to ask before buying kludgy and expensive software. And which vendors rank highest on her list of otherwise lackluster DAM vendors.

Looking Back…to Look Ahead

Over the past 25 years, Steve Portigal has seen tremendous growth in user research as a community of practice, as an industry, and as a career. Steve will look at some of the changes that he’s experienced and observed—positive, negative, or otherwise. He’ll share some of the potentially overlooked opportunities to advance our field, issues that demand our limited attention and concern. He’ll also share his perspective on the directions we can drive towards.

5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0

The term “anti-fragile” comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” It describes systems, organizations, or entities that not only withstand shocks, volatility, and stressors but benefit and grow stronger from them.

The current state of design is undoubtedly challenging and will continue to be volatile

We need strategies that move us out of defense mode, beyond resilience & mere product delivery, and position us as indispensable during times of transformation. In this talk, we explore five anti-fragile strategies for DesignOps 2.0, that will inspire you: New Work Models & Hiring Strategies, Ops beyond Design, Interconnectivity, Rise of the Chief of Staff, and (Anticipatory) Destination Teams.

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.

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.

[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.

Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation

How do you evaluate designers fairly and effectively while providing a clear path toward career advancement? This is a question our organization has grappled with throughout our eight years as a company. Design can often be left up to gut reasoning by leadership and designers may not have a clear understanding of what their role means and how they may grow as designers.

We’ve developed iterations of different tools and processes over the years to address these concerns and to evolve with our shifting needs as a growing company. All of which has led us to a robust tool that we’ve been using over the past two years which can serve as a model for how organizations can deploy qualitative career advancement.

The session will cover our journey to this point and showcase the tools and processes we’ve deployed to make evaluation and career advancement systematic within a design organization along with surprising benefits and lessons we’ve learned along the way.