ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace
Monthly or even quarterly well-being sessions on caring for your mental heath aren’t enough to create inclusive and supporting workplace environments. In the teams that we cultivate and work with, there needs to be a foundation of care and autonomy that is integrated into the workflow. Equitable well-being should be at the core of creating an inclusive workplace and user experience for your customers and employees. In this interactive talk, we’ll explore the themes of capitalism, hierarchy, classism, and other harmful realities of inequity that hinder true equitable well-being in the workplace to better the employee experience.
We’ll dive deep into how to reimagine a workplace framework and environment that is grounded in overall well-being and inclusion. Through this, you’ll walk away with the knowledge and tools to push toward a dynamic of a more speculative and imaginative future that can be more freeing, and aligned with the well-being of people and all inhabitants, including the land, that can enable contribution to a healthier cyclical work environment.
Design Ops Metrics
This session will detail how we are capturing metrics on product development and resource allocation. We will discuss how we are capturing people’s time on task to get us to a standard set of recipes that we can use when planning and budgeting for new products. We will discuss how we captured and identified tasks that could be handled by a 3rd party offshore vendor to free up our in-house designer who needs to be focused on strategic and innovative work.
DesignOps–Leading the Path to Parity (Videoconference)
Why and how are creative agency leaders and traditional graphic designers finding their way into DesignOps? What is the future of DesignOps within traditional design agencies?
Most who are looking into the DesignOps space know it for its focus on the Ps: People, Process, Practice — mostly for technology, and mostly for Product design.
Do More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
With the growing turbulence companies face (e.g. recent financial downturns and the pandemic before that), Design with a big D and its sub disciplines (including DesignOps) finds itself deeply and directly impacted by resource reduction and/or resource re-distribution. In this session, we will bring our years of expertise from working with companies of different shapes and forms to explore techniques that help design leadership shield Design Orgs from the impact of uncertainties and be prepared to have those tough conversation when and if needed. Furthermore, we will explore how you can manage the consequences of these events when they become inevitable, but you still need to maintain a strong Design capability.
Stereotyped by Design: Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural User Research
Today, technologists design for a diverse, globalized world. To reach untapped markets at home and abroad, design researchers are increasingly examining how “culture” influences user behavior and mental models. However, common approaches to cross-cultural research can underestimate user diversity and promote stereotypes that have little explanatory power for design. Using examples from research projects with immigrant communities, this talk explores various cultural frameworks that can help product teams produce meaningful insights about users who don’t share the same background.
The Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change
Design systems have become an integral part of product-driven organisations, promising consistency, efficiency, and improved collaboration.
Amidst the success stories, there are risks, challenges, and failures bound to accompany their implementation and adoption. Why do some design organisations thrive despite it, and others fail miserably?
Because of the pandemic of productisation, strategic product decisions are driven by product managers who want to build fast and break things, and user advocates are cut off from discovery, becoming mere feature producers who pass on unvalidated requirements to the design system. Designers working on the product side claim that the design system hinders their creative process and stifles innovation, when it should enable it, while the design system team prides itself on setting standards of excellence that has become a purpose on its’ own. The pace at which the design system can deliver upon product requirements often leads to it being perceived as a bottleneck by both designers and product managers, and testing their outputs with end users is a no man’s land. So what is the true role of design systems? How can we use them to drive change?
Embarking on a design systems journey is a rollercoaster ride for the entire organisation, not to mention the team that runs it. The success of a design system will depend on many factors beyond the UI inventory or tech stack — they will manifest themselves differently in each organisation, by amplifying communication and collaboration patterns for better or worse.
As an experienced design systems leader, I will share practical insights from my own journey, wins and mistakes, on how to manage design systems that add tangible value to the organisation and initiate positive and transformative changes in our approach to collaboration, design, development and UX. I will share how we can use design systems to drive meaningful conversations, build bridges and create new paradigms.
AI of the now: Designing for Agents
AI agents are on the rise: people are talking about them, getting excited, and putting infrastructure into place to support them. You may be asked to design agents soon—or you may want to think through your product as an agent in order to get a leg up on your competition. What’s different about designing for agents? Are you ready?
Rosenfeld author Christopher Noessel published Designing Agentive Technology back in 2017, and it seems like the world is just now catching up. Join Chris as he recaps the core ideas from that book, how agents have evolved since publication, and what it all might mean since the explosion of generative AI. Takeaways include…
- What is an agent?
- How do agents differ and complement other modes of interaction?
- Why are people getting excited about it now?
- What does generative AI bring to the agentive table?
Keeping Design Weird
Within large rigid corporate cultures, Design is encouraged to accommodate the dominant practices of business and technology. While some accommodation is necessary to successfully partner with other functions, going too far risks leeching the humanistic power from the practice, reducing Design to a mechanistic function.
Design Ops may inadvertently enable this accommodation with the business demanding it focus on increasing effectiveness and efficiency. However, DesignOps is underutilized in this capacity as it is uniquely positioned to protect and advance design practices, culture and growth.
In this session, we’ll advocate for how Design Ops can provide a deeper connection and commitment to championing the sparkle and verve of actualized Design practice through business and cultural practices, programs, and structures.
What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
Video can be so much more than just a presentation aid and a way to engage stakeholders; it can also be a means to explore, understand, and convey deep human truths. Through the lens of documentary filmmakers and visual ethnographers, film can be a powerful medium with which to capture context and emotion, and tell nuanced stories. In this fireside chat with three design researchers who have extensive experience working with video and documentary techniques, you will hear how they integrate documentary filmmaking approaches and methods into their research practices.
What UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions on what UX research “maturity” looks like. Participants then engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Lada Gorlenko.
“Absent a strong baseline level of data fluency, product teams struggle to harness the power of insight in their work. As UX and UXR leaders, we are uniquely positioned to define what fluency looks like for our organizations and help teams transform to achieve it.”
– Megan Blocker
“Research has come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Our future success rests on two pivotal aspects of maturity: our leadership’s proximity to power and the use of ‘Strategic Research Programs’ to deliver value beyond Design and Product.“
– Fatimah Richmond
“Does UX maturity matter in the age of Generative AI? Is your ability to do well as a team going to depend on your UX skills? Or your tech or people skills?”
– Molly Stevens
