Topic: Design Teams

Design Ops Teams that Matter: Growing a Design Ops Team

What You’ll Learn

• Determine where your newly-formed design ops team should focus first
• Develop a long-term vision for your design ops efforts
• Grow the team’s capabilities and increase team members’ career options

Cloning Yourself (But Not Really): How to Leverage Small Research Teams for Greater Impact

What You’ll Learn

• Leverage a research toolkit
• Increase research participation
• Boost your research team’s impact and show its value

UI23 Keynote: The Evolution of a New UX Design Resolution

What You’ll Learn

• Avoid the dangerous trap of thinking too narrowly about your career
• Understand the relationship between pioneers, settlers, and town planners, when it comes to design craft.

Good Gathering

What You’ll Learn

• Gain a fresh perspective on the potential for group sessions
• Learn the building blocks of great group sessions
• Learn seven nearly facilitation-free methods

Mapping Experiences: It’s the Destination and the Journey

What You’ll Learn

• Initiate The Effort
• Draw the Diagram
• Align and Envision
• Test and Experiment

Collaborative Information Architecture

What You’ll Learn

• Practice information architecture collaboratively
• Learn collaborative facilitation techniques
• Build your UX toolbox with new diagrams and techniques

Change the Story—and the Conversation

What You’ll Learn

• Why the right kind of conversations are the key to culture change
• How to use “dialog interviews” to gain understanding and build relationships
• How to gather teams with real legitimacy and affect your organization’s driving stories
• How to reach consensus on what to make, what’s good, and where you’re going

UX Luvs PM: 6 Ways to Learn Better Together

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

UXers who practice user research and Product Managers have a lot in common. They both want to learn from users and customers and work hard toward developing successful products, features, or services.

However, sometimes they may feel disconnected from each other, perceiving one another as too slow, fast, biased, academic, disorganized, vague, and what not. During this talk, Tomer Sharon, author of It’s Our Research and the forthcoming Validating Product Ideas, will provide six practices—three for UXers, three for PMs—to work better together in researching users and their needs.

UX designers:​

• Be there early to help Product Managers to Shape product roadmap 
• Listen to PMs to identify knowledge gaps
• Let PMs be: invite them to ask users questions

Product Managers:

• ​UXers can make you heroes
• Get feedback on your survey questions ​ ​
• Customer meetings are a rare opportunity to learn​

Sharing our Stories: Designing and Reviewing UX Portfolios

What You’ll Learn

• Discover how designing a UX portfolio can actually change your life
• Represent your experience and value
• Overcome common constraints in telling your story
• Know what to look for when you conduct a portfolio review

Design Systems: From Project Done to Product Sustained

What You’ll Learn

• Manage and support a sustainable design system
• Align team interests across products
• Inspire designers to share their work

Finding the Perfect Fit: Hiring for Building (and joining) UX teams

What You’ll Learn

• Match Your Hiring Plan to Your Real Needs
• Involve the Team to Increase Your Flow of Good Candidates
• Make Better Hiring Decisions with Less Time Invested

Building a Culture of Design

What You’ll Learn

• Define what a culture of design is — and what it isn’t
• Understand the transformative power of design thinking
• Recognize your role in transforming your company culture
• Develop a game plan for effecting change

Cohesive Design Systems for Enterprise

What You’ll Learn

• Inspire designers to unite and share their work
• Unify your design community within your organization
• Illustrate how products relate & work together

Helping Teams Become Design Independent

Abi Jones has always been about independence. She’s been helping folks feel capable from the very beginning—when she taught third grade. Abi’s more recent work on the MySpace redesign team and her current gig as an interaction designer for Google Books support that same goal: giving people confidence to tackle the hard challenges.

She recently worked with a Google team to design a flexible, reliable feedback system. Abi was reminded that jumping into a pre-existing team is hard—especially when it’s a team of engineers and you’re a designer. How do you define your role and create a model that works? How far do you take a design before production? How do you give them the skills to continue once you leave?

In her debut presentation, Abi will share how creating and modeling product principles, scoping iteration, and trusting specialists (like writers) are all part of the magic. You’ll hear about the challenges that reshaped her process.

You’re Hired! Strategies for Finding the Perfect Fit

In the UX world, Kim Goodwin is a big deal. A regular on the UX conference circuit. Bestselling author of “Designing for the Digital Age.” Team builder and UX evangelizer at PatientsLikeMe. Kim knows design—and designers. She’s hired, fired, and coached loads of them for her own teams and for clients, too.

Kim understands the challenges of a competitive job market. The candidate with the most impressive résumé isn’t always the smartest choice. It’s not always easy to tell the diamond-in-the-rough from the shiny-but-fake. But Kim’s figured out how to find the hidden gems.

Kim shares insights that help folks on both sides of the interview table. Learn how to define and articulate the skills you’re hiring for, and how to build a framework for evaluating candidates. Understanding what makes a good hire will help job seekers present themselves to hiring managers in the most effective manner.

Principles, Values, and Effective Design Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Identify core values and tie them to UX for an easier sell
• Understand the lack of enthusiasm for UX and how you can help
• Become more effective by adapting your project approach to your organization’s decision style
• Develop shared values and principles that help guide project decisions

Mapping Your Success with Objectives and Key Results

What You’ll Learn

• Commit to bold objectives and key results
• Fine-tune your objectives with wins and fails
• Establish a pace for measuring and tweaking results
• Cascade objectives and key results throughout your organization

Making UX Work with Agile Scrum Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Learning from teams who’ve “been there, done that”
• Increasing the value of UX in your organization
• Getting scrum teams involved in UX

Defining a UX Design Strategy

What You’ll Learn

• Defining what strategy is and isn’t
• Developing a repeatable framework for decision-making
• Using the UX Strategy Blueprint
• Pitching your UX strategy to others

Lean UX: Forming & Testing Hypotheses

What You’ll Learn

• Start with a hypothesis instead of requirements
• Write a typical hypothesis
• Go from hypothesis to experiment
• Avoid common testing pitfalls

Design Studio: Building Design Consensus Early in Your Process

What You’ll Learn

• Prepare for your Design Studio
• Kickoff your Design Studio
• Start with individual contributions
• Collaborate to identify which ideas are most important

Designing Effective Content Marketing

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the value of content marketing
• Work collaboratively with cross-functional teams
• Find a starting point for measurement
• Measure how your content boosts revenue

Discuss Design Without Losing Your Mind

What You’ll Learn

• Methods for doing critique, plus how it can make us better communicators
• Tools for focusing and facilitating discussions, even with difficult people
• A sense of where critique falls in your design process
• Tips for shaping feedback into powerful design iterations

Axe Requirements-driven Product Design

What You’ll Learn

• The time/money/risk realities of typical requirements definition processes
• How to recognize assumptions, then find the right solutions faster
• Methods for translating your backlog of features to testable hypotheses
• Ways to make cross-functional collaboration a part of your process

Hold Meetings That Aren't Excruciating

What You’ll Learn

• A starter kit to run better meetings about UX, design, research, and more
• Methods for collaborating with on-site and distributed teams
• Techniques to facilitate creative discussions and record emerging themes
• Fun experiments that play off how our brains work with visuals

Get More From User Research

What You’ll Learn

• A non-awkward process for preparing and involving your teammates
• Tools like journey maps to get user insights without needing direct answers
• A method for translating those insights to design priorities
• Techniques for communicating your research findings effectively

Do Great Work from Anywhere

What You’ll Learn

• A painless workflow for remote designers and usability engineers
• Techniques for empowering team members, wherever they are
• Corporate philosophies that form a solid foundation for remote cultures
• Processes that encourage creativity without constricting freedom

Designing with Remote Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Overcome common challenges of remote design
• Focus on communication
• Give your team the means to succeed
• Provide opportunities for people to bond

Hiring the Best UX Designers

What You’ll Learn

• Recruit great UX designers
• Identify top applicants
• Drop the junk that turns off great candidates
• Invigorate your entire team by involving them in the process

Using Experience Maps to Unite Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Visually capture what a holistic experience looks like for your product or service
• Highlight the good, bad, and ugly of a user’s journey with your organization
• Demystify data visualization so you can fold it into your work
• Envision and communicate a more seamless experience for your customers

Sketching for Understanding

What You’ll Learn

• Get started with sketching basics
• Critique in a way that brings out the best in everyone’s sketches
• Plan a collaborative Design Studio
• Run a productive Design Studio

Your Toughest Design Challenge

What You’ll Learn

• Levers you can use to influence change—and how to identify which ones to pull
• Tools to help individuals and high-level stakeholders start implementing change
• Identifying effective approaches that will work in your unique culture
• Ways to approach individual communication to more effectively change minds

Discussing Design: The Art of Critique

What You’ll Learn

• Structure projects to include more feedback loops
• Listen to stakeholder comments with increased objectivity
• Separate problem solving from critical thinking
• Give and receive critiques differently, and for the better

Good Design Faster

What You’ll Learn

• Liberate yourself (and your team) from seemingly endless design processes.
• Iterate quickly on constructive input to achieve approvals faster and earlier.
• Create more meaningful designs by starting with low-fidelity visuals.
• Hear “no” as an opportunity to learn and strengthen your work.

Experience Leadership

What You’ll Learn

• Get to a common view of your problems, letting scenarios drive your thinking.
• Apply scenarios to cross-channel design, using stories to describe the experience.
• Slip scenario techniques naturally into your existing design process.
• Drive the vision of your design by breaking the problem into small pieces.

Kicking Off Projects Right

What You’ll Learn

• Put together an effective kickoff workshop.
• Get your team working together quickly with easy facilitator techniques.
• Become a compelling agent of change for your team.
• Beat down the defeatism and fear that comes from traditional kickoff meetings.

Lean Methods for the UX Team of One

What You’ll Learn

• Self-document. As you’re working, you’re also creating the pieces that you need for the deliverable. Nothing is created that can’t be shared and used.
• Discourage time wasted on perfectionistic polishing of deliverables. Lowest fidelity necessary.
• Understand where 20% of the work will bring 80% of the benefit. Designed to help you prioritize.
• Understand that lean methods are those that do one thing at a time and do it well—answer a question, communicate a concept, establish a next step. Bite sized and with a purpose.

Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head

What You’ll Learn

• Analyze the transcripts
• Look for patterns
• Plan your logistics
• Analyze alignment and gaps

Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less

What You’ll Learn

• Gather field research
• Analyze the data
• Build personas and their scenarios
• Integrate personas into the development process