Be a Cultivator of Ideas

One of the UX Designer’s primary roles to not generate all the ideas, but to cultivate ideas from all of the various stakeholders in a project. Early on in my career, I thought I had to be the source of all the design ideas. I later learned that this was an incorrect assumption because great ideas come from everyone. In this talk, we will learn how to have a healthy perspective of our own ideas, how to make sure other’s ideas are included, and how to successfully work through disagreements over ideas. This talk will be focused on cultivating ideas from within your organization.

Learning Objectives

• Great ideas come from everyone
• How to make sure you include a diversity of ideas
• Tools on how to resolve conflicts over ideas

Your Speaker

Matthew T. Rader is the oldest of six children. He’s originally from San Diego, California, and now resides in Rowlett, Texas. He is currently a Product Designer for Skyllful. He received his undergrad degree from UT Dallas in Emerging Media & Communications. He then earned his Master’s degree in Interaction Design from UNT. Two of his biggest passions are UX design and photography. When he was 13 his family moved to Wills Point, a small rural East Texas town. Having experienced both big city and small-town country life gave him a deep appreciation for the many types of lifestyles and cultures people live. Those experiences gave him a passion for exploring new places and getting to know people from all walks of life.

Matthew has lived in 5 U.S. states, Mexico for 4 1/2 years, and Seoul, South Korea for a year and a half. He also had the opportunity to spend a month traveling around southern India. His father introduced him to photography and design when he was a young teenager. His father used photography to document our lives as they were growing up in the 80s and 90s. His father also did design by volunteering his time to design newsletters for the Boy Scouts and their church’s weekly bulletins. Throughout Matthew’s preteen and teen years, he would sit next to his dad and watch him design those newsletters with CorelDRAW on a Macintosh SE. Matthew started off as a front-end developer of WordPress websites. He then gradually moved into being a front-end developer for data-driven websites built on the .NET framework.

After doing front-end development for nearly 10 years he realized that he mostly enjoyed interacting with people and being involved in the design and strategy side of creating software. So in 2017, he did a pivot to UX Design by requesting his company to change his role and going to get his master’s degree. Since then he was worked as a UX designer and researcher for several corporations that include CBRE and Crowley Maritime. He is now the lead Product Designer at Skyllful, a company that makes mobile training software for front-line workers.