Schedule

My talk will be focused on The Iowa Idea – first conceived in the 1920s, at the University of Iowa. The then-revolutionary idea, was to bring practicing artists to campus to collaborate with scholars and students. This idea built a legacy that extends over 100 years, producing the first MFA program, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Iowa’s International Writing Program, and Iowa City’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. My talk will provide a brief history of The Iowa Idea and will examine what I’ve learned launching my podcast interviewing practitioners and craftspeople that represent a modern version of the... Read More

In February 2020, Grannie discovered that she was considered “old and at risk” being older than 65 and living in the path of the Corona Virus. Grannie discovered that she had to rethink some of her most cherished activities: traveling to new places, meeting new people, doing volunteer activities, going to church, and generally socializing with her friends. Grannie had to learn to do all these things virtually and she discovered that no one had ever thought what it would be like to have so many people over the age of 65 suddenly online buying all their groceries, socializing with... Read More

Design professionals must consider various universal design lenses – users on mobile devices, users with physical and cognitive impairments, users with limited technological use – but are we missing an important lens? Just as the designing for accessibility lens makes the experience better for all users, considering “newcomer” needs can improve experiences for all users. As designers, we rely heavily on users’ mental models formed by their own perceptions and past experiences. But what if an experience is entirely new to them? What if they’re an absolute first-time user – a “newcomer”? Priyama Barua is inspired to champion this lens... Read More

A world that’s socially distancing doesn’t mean user research and product development should stop. In fact, the future of User Research consists of more opportunities for remote collaboration & studies. In this talk, I want to equip the audience with best practices for how to make remote research work well. We’ll walk through phases of research (kickoff, planning, conducting, synthesis, reporting), illustrated with remote tips-and-tricks, templates, and case studies. If you are not sure how to collaborate on research planning and synthesis with remote colleagues, or how to host research sessions with remote participants, this talk is for you.

A usage maturity matrix is a design tool used to design for users while working within project constraints. A well-researched usage maturity matrix can also serve as a legacy tool to help us roadmap future projects. Whether we are a user experience team of one, or many, design features and functions need to be scoped and prioritized. Project constraints often challenge our ability to meet user needs. With a usage maturity matrix as our guide, we are better able to focus our design efforts where our users and our business stakeholders need us most. Usage maturity is defined as a... Read More

We are building a future legacy of design thinking and user-centricity at 100-year-old Pitney Bowes. We’ve always had a User Experience Design department, but as our business and market has changed, we saw that great experiences for end-product-users were necessary but insufficient to meet our most important strategic goals. To create a legacy for our next 100 years, our business needed to fundamentally transform the way we think about and relate to customers, users, and our own internal teams. And so, we stood up a Client Experience Center of Excellence and got to work. Despite little budget, 3 headcount, and... Read More

The UX profession has seen exponential interest over the last decade. Every company wants UX and everyone wants a career in the second most in-demand role for 2019 according to the Onward Search Digital, Creative and Marketing Professionals Salary Guide. So how exactly could I explain that I was no longer passionate about my UX career, going through an intense period of burnout, while trying to convince people that I was not just another self-centered Millennial in what has been labeled as the least engaged workforce? The demand for UX and my overachieving personality has come at a cost. Without... Read More

How might we collectively invest in the future of the UX profession through expanding how we think about learning and development for our teams? Drawing from her decade of experience in academia, Carrie Andersen, Ph.D. will share actionable steps for creating a space for discussion-based learning for UX professionals at a fast-paced product organization. First, she’ll explain the ways that this type of learning can build team culture, develop participants’ skills in UX, and build connections among cross-functional teams. Next, she’ll share the process for creating and leading the Content Strategy Development Program at Wayfair (a series of weekly classes... Read More

Serving many unique audiences in digital spaces has necessitated the integration of information architecture and content strategy. This presentation describes the process we went through to go back to the basics of audience, language, identity, and taxonomy to give users a sense of place and purpose on NVIDIA.com. The deep internal work also helped us to not only convey a single clear picture to the outside world in our site structure and navigation, but also provided an internal framework for how we organize and enable findability for future decisions.

Users’ minds take shortcuts to get through the day. Usually, they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? In this talk, I’ll use real-world examples to identify some particularly nasty biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. I’ll then talk about some content strategy and design choices we can use in our apps, designs, and platforms to redirect or eliminate the impact of those biases. Finally, I’ll explore our own biases as designers and some methods to prevent our own blind spots from hurting users. If the future legacy of design is to be worth saving,... Read More

While there have been surveys over the past few years that have looked at the state of UX as a whole, and at UX design, in particular, we have noticed that the state of UX in the enterprise hasn’t been analyzed in-depth or tracked longitudinally. Particularly when it comes to understanding how enterprise companies are conducting UX research and building future legacy. In the past two years, we collected data from hundreds of UX Professionals across industries, globally, and identified four key challenges UX is facing in the enterprise. One of the challenges is about bridging the gap between UX... Read More

Mobile First? In reality, it’s *humans* first. We cannot preach outwardly about empathy for those we’re designing for (re: human beings) if as designers, researchers, architects, developers (and on and on) we’re not supporting each other. The notion of being human-centered has an innate synergy between the design process (and ultimate product) and office culture (and empathetic interactions). To the benefit of both dynamics, those touchpoints are identifiable and exploitable. For example, culturally, the Swedish concept of fika transcends a mere “coffee break.” The value is slowing down – the act of pausing with intent during a typical day –... Read More

When it comes to design, we try to focus on creating the best aesthetically pleasing, functional, and usable designs. It is extremely important that we as designers choose well when it comes to printing or hosting our websites. Sometimes we are so focused on the creation of the design that we overlook if the paper we are using is recycled and eco friendly. Or if we are hosting a website, we overlook if the hosting company is a business that cares about lowering their carbon footprint. In addition, if we are designing an app or a website, there are ways... Read More