The Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX (Videoconference)

Directors of UX are navigating an overwhelming set of explicit and implicit expectations in their work, leading to frustration, anxiety, burnout, and leaving the field altogether. In this freewheeling discussion with guest Peter Merholz, organizational consultant and leadership mentor, we’ll address how we got into this situation (layoffs requiring those who remain to manage more people; botched agile transformations requiring UXers to lean into product management; immature organizations not knowing how to value the work), and identify paths forward out of this mess.

A New Vantage Point: Building a Pipeline for Multifaceted Research(ers)

The world is evolving. By 2044 the U.S. will be a majority-minority population. Africa and India are projected to fuel the world’s population growth over the next 30 years. With demographics shifting under our feet, how will we generate accurate and relevant insight if the interpreters are not cultural natives to the new demographic mix. This presentation will explore strategies to create pipelines for the next, most diverse generation to have open pathways and onramps to the next chapter of research, insights, and innovation.

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

There is nothing more frustrating than dedicating your blood, sweat, and tears to developing a product, only to see it shut down for no particular reason. We still lack standards for measuring potential opportunities and solutions—so leadership continues to base decisions on intuition, personal experience, and other factors that often barely correlate with success. Organizations large and small need agreed-upon measures of potential product-market fit for their concepts and solutions, ones that help establish unmet needs and lead to designs that users understand and want to use.

The DesignOps team at Athenahealth has solved this problem by creating a standardized measurement framework—including qualitative and quantitative instruments—that helps product teams measure their concepts and solutions early and often. These are measures that leaders can use to make informed investment decisions across the larger portfolio, and that free product teams to be awesome at what they do: designing, managing, and developing products that lead to better experiences for users.

How Your Organization’s Generative Workshops Are Probably Going Wrong and How to Get Them Right

Generative workshops are a critical generative component of any product development process. But in my 20+ years conducting product user research, I have seen more product harm come from so-called “workshops” or “design sprints” than good. In this tutorial, I will share more about my experience and what I’ve found are critical components of generative workshops — whether they last five hours or five days.

Contrary to popular belief, a design sprint is a highly structured and carefully designed series of exercises, not a brainstorm, design jam or free-for-all. The whole point is to drive a cross-functional team to the right outcome, and this requires a set of structured exercises which weave the thread of user needs, behaviors and attitudes throughout. This involves more than reviewing the research at the start and then moving on to create without that research in context.

A true design sprint takes us from user insights — even broad user insights — to user-evaluated concepts or designs. The generative phase of a product is deeply impactful, and design sprints are a fantastic tool for driving this needed impact. However, many are practicing brainstorms or design jams rather than true design sprints. One can make a mismatched concept extremely usable throughout the product development process, but that will not remedy the fact that it is not the right concept.
Researchers are ideal design sprint organizers and facilitators, but researchers are sometimes not even considered a critical component of the sprint. It’s important for knowledgeable researchers to drive design sprint impact.

Design Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)

A Design system is not only about standardizing the UI or accelerating design. In the big picture, it can streamline collaboration between design and development. With this goal in mind, an effective Design system is available to both designers and developers in a format that is native to each discipline. However, getting to this point takes time. But what if we can skip ahead with a starter Design system containing both design and coded components that are ready for use?

Join our activity sessions to see how you can transform your pixel-perfect designs into pixel-perfect code for modern web applications with Indigo.Design. We will also revisit the typical developer handoff by introducing a re-imagined workflow that minimizes rework. In the end, this approach can free up our focus to run Design-Ops better and deliver value sooner.

Part 1 (Thursday): Introducing a starter Design system, and Indigo.Design overview
? Part 2 (Friday): Reimagining developer handoff, and introducing App builder
Part 3 (Friday): Indigo.Design overview and exploring the developer workflow

Design Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)

? Part 1 (Thursday): Introducing a starter Design system, and Indigo.Design overview
Part 2 (Friday): Reimagining developer handoff, and introducing App builder
Part 3 (Friday): Indigo.Design overview and exploring the developer workflow

Design Systems To-Go: Indigo.Design Overview and Exploring the Developer Workflow (Part 3)

Part 1 (Thursday): Introducing a starter Design system, and Indigo.Design overview
Part 2 (Friday): Reimagining developer handoff, and introducing App builder
? Part 3 (Friday): Indigo.Design overview and exploring the developer workflow

Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking (Videoconference)

Join us for this session with Sean McKay, Founder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant at Whole Product Thinking.

Why is it so hard to align everyone so we can deliver products that our customers love? It’s a question that will steal your soul (and your job) if you let it. I believe it’s more important now than ever that we transcend the nagging industry debates, power struggles, and process wars that are blocking us all from doing our best work for our customers. In this session, I’ll share a new “Whole Product Thinking” framework I’ve been developing. It’s intended to help structure conversations and align teams around the fundamental concepts needed to deliver human-centered products that are meaningful to users and effective for business. My approach centers on the ‘what’ and ‘why,’ deliberately separating the ‘how’ to allow organizations the freedom to choose approaches and methods that align with their unique contexts, development philosophies, and company culture.

Climate Design Product Showcase (Videoconference)

If you’re interested in seeing the impact user experience designers can have on products tackling climate change, please join us for a free “show and tell” session. Moderated by Michael Leggett, we’ll hear from Manos Saratsis from Station A, Marissa Cui from MIT, and Rachel He from Stripe. They’ll recount the problems, their design solutions, and what they learned along the way.

Three Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research (Videoconference)

We know how things are at the start of 2024, and the long term future? That’s anyone’s guess. But what might the not-so-distant future look like for User Research? That’s a horizon that’s just around the corner—and one that you start planning for now. Join us for a free discussion with some UX research thought leaders who have some opinions you’ll want to hear about the near future of our profession—and bring your own! We’ll be hearing from Sam Proulx of Fable, Lija Hogan of UserTesting and Milan Mijatovic; moderated by Lou Rosenfeld.

This Talk is Sponsored by Fable, an #AR2024 Virtual Sponsor.