Topic: Strategy

Managing Outcomes in Three Easy Steps

What You’ll Learn

• The logical framework and scientific approach to managing outcomes.
• How outcomes over outputs as an approach aligns with our work and goals.
• How to shift your work plan to be outcome focused.

Bringing Back Human-Centered Design

What You’ll Learn

• Measure what matters and not just what’s easy
• Reframe the team conversation around metrics to drive the quality of the user experience
• Build common ground with project managers
• Articulate and act upon your professional values

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.

Advancing Your UX Career

What You’ll Learn

• Keep your design edge as a UX lead or manager
• Use coaching and mentoring as a core part of your work
• Fill out the “Talks and Publications” section of a senior resume
• Embrace social work (meetings and politics at work) and make it count
• Open up your team’s design practice in order to advance it.

Building a Continuous Learning Team: Escaping the Stagnation Sandpit

What You’ll Learn

• Encourage a growth mindset
• Use the stages of learning as a framework to teach and learn
• Learn simple practices to get started

Let’s Talk About Strategy: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Do It Well

What You’ll Learn

• What a good strategy looks like and why it matters
• The key elements to developing a good strategy
• A simple framework to apply to your strategy work

Making the Most of Multicultural Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Understand what diversity in thought is—and why it’s important
• Learn the cultural metrics that provide insight on your team
• Get tools for working with, not against, multicultural differences

Building UX Teams

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the skills your company needs to support its work, and the design talent that can provide them
• Use hiring best practices to uncover the right candidates for positions and build a multi-disciplinary team
• Lift your designers up by creating a culture of support that focuses on their strengths, provides mentorship and growth opportunities
• Keep your designers around by communicating their career trajectory, providing management and other training, and empowering them to do their best work

Which New Skills Should Designers Pursue?

What You’ll Learn

• Determine which coding skills you will benefit from learning
• Integrate your skills with other team members to find the right balance of skill sets and increase team productivity
• Collaborate better with engineers and product managers

Design Systems Are For People

What You’ll Learn

• Build a community culture that empowers teams to make change, work productively, and creatively to solve problems
• Use design principles to inform your design system, lead design critiques, and drive decisions
• Explore materials (documentation) and non-materials (shared language and nomenclature) that encompass a design system
• Why shared ownership of your design system is critical to creating a transparent, collaborative, and inclusive community

Roadmaps Relaunched

What You’ll Learn

• Review the components of successful product roadmaps, from a clear product vision to business objectives, themes, disclaimers, and the use of broad timeframes.
• Establish a product vision using best practices, and learn methods for accurately prioritizing goals and features in your roadmap.
• Hear tips for how to obtain buy-in for your roadmap, presenting and sharing it with teams and stakeholders.
• Learn the dos and don’ts for developing your roadmap and see examples of the many forms that roadmaps can take, from Kanban boards to a slide deck.
• Get access to a free roadmap health assessment checklist, and tips for getting started on your new and improved roadmap.

Small Acts to Shift Big Things: Using Your Voice to Align Organizational Values

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the challenges that each of us face when we try to make change
• Build communication skills to shift conversations around you
• Learn tips for how to speak up and engage in a process

Entering the Immersive Design Evolution

What You’ll Learn

• Define immersive design terminology
• Discover the technology behind immersive design
• Determine the challenges of immersive technology
• Prepare for the future of immersive technology

Selling the Value of User Experience Design

What You’ll Learn

• Define user experience design
• Get strategies for making the case for UX
• Learn how to demonstrate the value of UX in your organization
• Make a plan for building and sustaining momentum

Ethics for the AI Age

Over the next two decades, connected products will demand an unprecedented amount of user trust. Technologists and designers will ask the public for yet more of their attention, more of their data, more of their lives. AIs will know users’ deepest secrets. Co-operating devices will automate security and safety. Autonomous vehicles will even make life-or-death decisions for passengers. But ours is an industry still unwilling to grapple with the ethical, social, and political angles of this future. We mistakenly believe that technology is neutral; that mere objects cannot have moral relevance. And so we make embarrassing blunders—racist chatbots, manipulative research, privacy violations—that undermine trust and harm those we should help. This is a dangerous trajectory. We urgently need a deeper ethical dialogue about emerging technology, and interaction design’s role within it.

Getting from Barrier-free to Delightful

Why can’t we make it easier to be accessible?

Why can’t we aim for great user experiences that are also accessible? Creating accessible technology has to go beyond minimal compliance with standards that meets the law but may not be usable.

We need a bigger goal: creating delight for everyone. We’ll start by exploring what makes a delightful experience and how a good balance small pleasures and anticipated needs supports accessible UX in both big and small ways. Like any UX, this concern for users has to be part of every design decision.

Meetings Are A Design Problem

What You’ll Learn

• Accept meetings as a design problem
• Apply design thinking to specific types of meetings
• Achieve outcomes with the right agenda

The Experience Is The Product

What You’ll Learn

• Organize your design team to be more effective in an agile environment
• Engage marketing and product design to be on the same team, designing for the user experience
• Evolve product management to focus more on the user experience

From UI21: Is Design Metrically Opposed?

The world of metrics and analytics have often been at odds with how designers work. Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. So which do we believe-our gut or the data?

In the world of measures, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators some practices, like the growth hacking approach to increasing Monthly Average Users (MAUs), have hurt the online experience of Instagram and LinkedIn. While alternatives to satisfaction and net promoter score give insight into the design process and help designers have better instincts.

If you’re ready to talk to your teams about what you really need, help management interpret the data, and create analytical experiments that provide design insights, don’t miss this talk.

How To Make Sense of Any Mess

What You’ll Learn

• Illustrate problems and solutions with diagrams that go beyond wireframes and sitemaps
• Find the best taxonomy for your users through testing and iterating on your taxonomic choices
• Choose the best tools and processes that help you make sense of complex subjects and situations
• Communicate with your users consistently through controlled vocabularies

Storytelling That Is Actionable & Accountable

What You’ll Learn

• Develop detailed personas
• Conduct a pre-mortem
• Write a story narrative using reverse chronology
• Draft the buyer legend and execute

Strategic Storytelling

What You’ll Learn

• Construct compelling narratives
• Communicate the heart of the matter

Story First: Crafting Products That Engage

What You’ll Learn

• Understand what story does for people and how it functions
• Apply narrative architecture to digital products
• Think and act like a story-maker

Good to Great

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

Lots of product teams have progressed substantially over the past several years from very weak/novice to generally capable/competent. The dialog has moved from “why can’t we have a product designer or user researcher on our team?” to “why is it that our product manager and product designer are not always working together effectively?” and “why is it that the user research is being largely ignored when they have such seemingly valuable findings?”

This is actually progress, and we can see the improvements in the results, but in the commercial product world, it’s not sufficient to just have mediocre products, at least not for long. Our products have to provide substantial value over and above the alternatives. In this presentation, Inspired author Marty Cagan will focus on raising the game of product managers, product designers and user researchers. He will highlight several of the top issues/problems for these roles, and discuss how you can address each.

Radical Focus

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

Getting a team to work together and achieve a goal can be as much about picking the goal as picking the team. Too many companies fail at making big changes or tackling big problems because they fail to focus, prioritize, and motivate all members of the team.

In this talk, Christina Wodtke, author of the forthcoming Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results, will teach you how to tackle and realize big goals in a methodical way using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). You’ll learn the beauty of a good fail and how regular check-ins can keep you on track to success. Christina has devoted her career to tackling monumental tasks. She’s helped grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the New York Times. Nowadays she works with startups and entrepreneurs, sharing her strategies for success and inspiring them to pursue big goals and outlandish dreams.

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​

Planning Your User’s Path Together

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

Product teams spend a lot of time making decisions about what the customer will experience. UX Designers make journey maps and interfaces. Product Managers build and prioritize roadmaps. Marketing writes copy and gets in front of potential users. Engineers make it all into a product. All too frequently, we do these things separately, which can lead to problems. Engineering doesn’t understand the ideal user flow. Designers don’t know why one feature is being built before a more important one. Marketing has a different vision of the ideal customer. And Product Managers have to run around explaining the vision to everybody on the team.

Some things are so important that they need to be created, shared, and understood by the whole team together. The User Lifecycle Funnel is one of those things. In this talk, Laura Klein, author of the forthcoming Build Better Products, will share a framework and a design thinking exercise for making sure that everyone on your team—including Product Managers and UX Designers—is united in their vision for just what exactly it is that you’re building. You’ll learn a quick, hands-on tool that will help you combine qualitative and quantitative data to determine and measure every step of your customer’s journey.

There is No Such Thing as UX Strategy. There is Only Product Strategy.

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

UX strategy is part of product strategy. It is not its own thing. Calling it out as such further isolates designers from their colleagues in “the business” and in Product Management. It does nothing to actually drive the value of a holistic user experience into the org’s mainstream conversations. Instead, designers should work closely with Product Managers to inform a product strategy conversation that considers not only the UX but the business’ and product’s success factors as well.

In this talk, Jeff Gothelf—co-author of Lean UX and the forthcoming Sense and Respond—will teach you:

• Why carving out a separate “UX” strategy is detrimental to team and product cohesion
• How collaboration between product managers and ux designers can help frame a holistic product strategy
• How to divide strategic responsibilities between product managers and ux designers so that everyone has their seat at the table

Measuring The Customer Experience Using Top Tasks

What You’ll Learn

• Task Identification
• Task Performance Indicator

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

Customer Journey Mapping and CX Research

What You’ll Learn

• How to evaluate your journey map options and select the appropriate one
• How to create a structured, cross-channel ethnographic research plan
• How to ensure solid data results using triple triangulation
• How to get better results faster—and with lower costs

What Video Games Teach Us About UX

What You’ll Learn

• The value of writing real content before there’s an interface
• Why voice and tone at each interaction is vital to engagement
• The broad-to-narrow flow for introducing users to new content or interactions
• How to apply content-first UX design and contextual learning

Building a Winning UX Strategy Using the Kano Model

What You’ll Learn

• How to identify your customers’ basic expectations
• How adding features today creates more work for teams downstream
• How to focus the team on real customer problems, avoiding the problem of experience rot

Boosting Research and Design Adoption

What You’ll Learn

• How to identify your organization's decision-style archetype
• How hidden values drive decision making in your organization
• How to use those values to develop more effective project plans
• How to share your progress and results in ways that boost buy-in from stakeholders

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

The Why and How of Successful Style Guides

What You’ll Learn

• Make a case for style guides
• Explore the various flavors of style guides
• Use Atomic Design to craft a pattern library
• Safeguard against style-guide apathy and abandonment

Maintaining Simplicity

What You’ll Learn

• What simplicity means and how to watch for the human conditions that lure us to the dark side of complexity
• How leaving content decisions until the end and adding features is like choosing a vehicle before knowing the route
• Why the baggage that comes with designs, clients, designers, and developers doesn’t solve the right problems (yours)
• How to use a three-step zero-based approach to achieve simplicity

Working With Atomic Design

What You’ll Learn

• Identify the basic design elements that make up your website
• Use these elements to create smart, scalable, maintainable designs
• Convince everyone back at the office to ditch ad-hoc design and embrace a pattern-based workflow
• Unite disparate teams and departments to build designs that deliver a consistent experience across multiple platforms

Orchestrating Customer Touchpoints

What You’ll Learn

• Learn how to design experiences that take place over time and across platforms
• Reimagine the customer journey holistically—not just as a single touchpoint
• Synthesize best practices and methodologies from different disciplines
• Use human experience mapping to create cross-functional collaboration within your organization.

Is Design Metrically Opposed?

What You’ll Learn

• What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate and time-on-page, actually tell us about our users’ experiences
• How we construct true KPIs that can predict the future patterns of users
• Why advanced techniques, like a money-left-on-the-table analysis and the CE11, show us how metrics can impact design
• Why asking, “Would you recommend this?” isn’t an ideal way to measure brand engagement

Orchestrating Experiences: Strategy & Design for Complex Product Ecosystems

What You’ll Learn

• Reimagine touchpoints for the holistic experience
• Define the framework for mapping
  human experiences
• Understand how people experience the whole journey
• Learn how to design experiences that unfold over time and space

Product Strategy in a Growing Company

Des Traynor cares about the details. He has to—he’s responsible for customer happiness! He’s consulted with over 100 growing companies to help them shape a product strategy around their core features. He co-founded Exceptional (now part of Rackspace) and Intercom, where is currently VP of Customer Success.

Customers have opinions about how a product should evolve. It’s tricky to know when to go for it and when to draw the line. Without a strategy, products are forced into a feature matrix to win imaginary comparison wars. It’s a vicious cycle that hatches the biggest product, but rarely the best.

Strong product management requires frequent hard decisions and compromises, based on a healthy balance of data and intuition. Join Des to plan a product roadmap that focuses on growing the value—not the feature list—of your product.

The Complexity of Simplicity

What You’ll Learn

• How simplicity lies on the other side of complexity
• Why forcing users to conform leads to artificial simplicity
• What really causes complex products (it’s not always what you think!)
• How to recognize and avoid complicated products and solutions
• What tools designers can use to achieve simplicity

Service Design: Basic Tools and Insights

What You’ll Learn

• Journey mapping: effective tools to visualize experiences and ecosystems
• Customer experience across channels: a deeper understanding of the importance of seamless experiences across channels and silos
• Service ecosystems: how products and services are connected and how interactions within an organization can affect each other

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

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

Choosing Which Mobile Experience to Build

What You’ll Learn

• Find out why mobile is something your company can’t afford to ignore
• Hear the pros and cons of various approaches, including the implications of each
• Get key mobile stats that will give your team fuel to make better, faster UX choices
• Ask questions of your stakeholders — ones they’ll actually be able to answer

Essential UX Techniques for Creating Delightful Products

What You’ll Learn

• Rethink the components of your product
• Discover best practices for involving all stakeholders early in the design process
• Facilitate teamwork and collaboration on your product team
• Collect insights to inform your products

Design as a Business Tool: From Research to Experience Roadmaps

What You’ll Learn

• Make a business-decision framework work for design
• Utilize research to inform long-term decision making
• Create a strategic roadmap using design tools
• Map the design process to the business outcome

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

Mobile Flowidity

What You’ll Learn

• What’s disruptive to flow in mobile design
• Why we should be thinking about experience rather than tasks
• How you can make sure your users aren’t losing flow because of things your design forces them to do or not do

Experiencing Delightful Content

What You’ll Learn

• Why we need to go beyond the roles of UX Designer or Content Strategist
• Who is the best at making their content delightful
• Where the world of content strategy is colliding with experience design

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

A Content Strategy Roadmap

What You’ll Learn

• Create, deliver, and govern your content
• Determine how content serves your organization
• Design for your content
• Establish and maintain a repeatable process

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.

Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy

What You’ll Learn

• How curated content will help you execute a content strategy
• Why a solid point-of-view drives your strategy
• Where automated publishing tools often work against you
• Why storytelling cultivates content for your target audience
• How to utilize storytelling techniques to craft the best experience
• How to avoid trouble when curating

UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited

What You’ll Learn

• Tailor your UX design process to the culture of your organization
• Conduct research with minimal time and budget
• Get useful design feedback from stakeholders
• Make your case in organizations that don’t prioritize design

Designing Humanity into your products

What You’ll Learn

• Avoid the formal tone, creating an imbalance of power in the company-to-customer relationship
• Take a step forward, creating slack in your relationship with customers, and learn why that’s key in having a solid brand
• Show customers there are real people looking out for them, making the products they use
• Be the most human when your customers are the most challenged and need the most help

Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It

What You’ll Learn

• How to get free, high value, experience from the failures of others
• How to separate interesting and necessary failures from stupid ones
• Lessons from research on the most common psychological, skill and organizational failures designers face
• How to motivate people to experiment and learn

Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand

What You’ll Learn

• Recognize the two important outcomes of branding efforts -- affinity and dispositional returns
• Understand why 'message' branding doesn't strengthen engagement, but 'experience' branding does
• Understand the important role that user experience research plays in the design process for branding
• Measure brand engagement to show the effects of a design

Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users

What You’ll Learn

• Why creating powerful social software is not as simple as adding features like a "friends list" or a "product review".
• How Flickr, Craigslist, and MySpace take advantage of social design principles, including the notion of designing for constant change.
• How knowing a little about social psychology can go a long way toward providing valuable social environments.
• How the most successful sites and applications balance personal value for users with the opportunity to provide social value for others.