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Watch, listen & learn from the world’s best UX experts.

Topic: Strategy

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Alexis Puchek

Building UX Teams

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Alexis Puchek

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
Headshot of Jina Anne
Jina Anne

Design Systems Are For People

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Jina Anne

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
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Bruce McCarthy

Roadmaps Relaunched

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Bruce McCarthy

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.
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Cennydd Bowles

Ethics for the AI Age

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Cennydd Bowles

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.

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Whitney Quesenbery

Getting from Barrier-free to Delightful

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Whitney Quesenbery

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.

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Jared Spool

From UI21: Is Design Metrically Opposed?

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Jared Spool

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.

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Abby Covert

How To Make Sense of Any Mess

Headshot of Abby Covert
Abby Covert

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
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Marty Cagan

Good to Great

Headshot of Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan

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.

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Christina Wodtke

Radical Focus

Headshot of Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke

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.

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Tomer Sharon

UX Luvs PM: 6 Ways to Learn Better Together

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Tomer Sharon

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​
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Laura Klein

Planning Your User’s Path Together

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Laura Klein

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.

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Jeff Gothelf

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

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Jeff Gothelf

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
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Stephen Hay

Maintaining Simplicity

Headshot of Stephen Hay
Stephen Hay

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
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Brad Frost

Working With Atomic Design

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Brad Frost

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
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Chris Risdon

Orchestrating Customer Touchpoints

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Chris Risdon

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.
Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

Is Design Metrically Opposed?

Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

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
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Des Traynor

Product Strategy in a Growing Company

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Des Traynor

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.

Headshot of Marc  Stickdorn
Marc Stickdorn

Service Design: Basic Tools and Insights

Headshot of Marc  Stickdorn
Marc Stickdorn

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
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Nate Schutta

Choosing Which Mobile Experience to Build

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Nate Schutta

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
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Margot Bloomstein

Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy

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Margot Bloomstein

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
Headshot of Bill DeRouchey
Bill DeRouchey

Designing Humanity into your products

Headshot of Bill DeRouchey
Bill DeRouchey

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
Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

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

Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

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
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Joshua Porter

Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users

Headshot of Joshua Porter
Joshua Porter

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.