Adopt and Adapt: A Jump-Start Strategy for Driving Experience Culture

Designing for Dignity — effectively, consistently, and at scale — requires a full toolkit of experience standards, governance, and training. The problem? Developing such a toolkit consumes tons of time and energy. In practice, most teams end up putting “real work” first. Try our Adopt/Adapt method instead!

Adopt existing free/open/public domain principles, methods, guides, and toolkits, then Adapt them to your organization’s needs. This flexible Adopt/Adapt strategy moves your experience practice forward by leaps and bounds — while making an immediate difference for your users and contributors. We’ll share a case study of how we’re leveraging Adopt and Adapt to provide UX direction, create momentum, and drive culture change at the City of San Antonio.

In this talk, you will learn:

• LEAP BARRIERS – Identify and overcome resistance, drive awareness, connect silos and allies, create buy-in, evolve and change the culture while getting work done
• FILL THE GAPS WITH ADOPT AND ADAPT – leverage the many high-quality, free, open, public domain (and paid) resources — and then build on them.
• DELIVER MVEs (Minimum Viable Experiences) – Create a culture where perfect isn’t the enemy of the good. Move your organization forward one experience, one project, and one stakeholder at a time.

Your Speakers

Louise Craig is the first-ever Experience Architect for the City of San Antonio. She provides guidance on user experience, information architecture, and usability. Previously, she managed the City’s Web Design Team and led them through hundreds of transformations and redesigns since 2009. A Certified User Experience Analyst (CXA), Louise has provided UX services at Fortune 500 brands such as USAA and H-E-B.

Louise has a broad spectrum of experience. She has served in the U.S. Coast Guard, has many theatre and film credits, and been a technical instructor. She enjoys mingling art and science, creating fused glass artworks using sound waves that make these unseen patterns visible.

Susan Price leads UX and systems thinking at enterprises, corporations, governments and nonprofits to make the online world better for users, while making the design community stronger and more influential.

In addition to her roles as lead experience strategist at USAA and CEO of Firecat Studio, Susan organizes San Antonio’s TEDxSanAntonio, World IA Day and World Usability Day events. An original UX pioneer, she works to influence the future of the Internet, including usability, the semantic web, data rights and privacy.