#NUX7 UX & Design Conference 2018
https://2018.nuxconf.uk/ Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester ~ 19th Oct 2018 ~ 9.00am-5.30pm
Steve Portigal - The Designer is Present
Synopsis
Therapists, as part of their education, must go through therapy themselves. They are expected to achieve a certain level of insight about themselves – their biases, their discomforts, and so on. While we are not therapists, we go out and study people without that level of self-insight! A lack of self-insight sometimes manifests itself as passion, commitment, or being driven by a mission. While those have their place, it’s easy to become blinded by what we can’t let ourselves see. Sometimes this shows up as discomfort at the micro level, when we react to something a user might tell us about themselves; sometimes it’s a macro issue, when we’re uncomfortable with people who hold different values, preferences, or beliefs than ourselves. And it crescendos as know-it-all douchebaggery, when we think our job is to tell other people what’s best for them – when phrases like “frictionless sharing” fall from our lips as naturally as “what time is dinner?”
In this interactive talk we will delve into the concepts of presence and mindfulness and develop an understanding of how this informs how you engage with the world around you, as a designer, a professional, and a person.
About Steve
Steve Portigal helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights.
He is principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: The classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and new, Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.
He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.
He makes his home in California, on the foggy coast south of San Francisco.
Christina Wodtke - It’s Complicated. Designing in The Age Of Emergence
Synopsis
The problem with unexpected consequences is that they are unexpected. The time of “move fast and break things” is over, as we have broken everything from hearts to democracy.
It’s time for designers, along with their partners – engineers and business – to embrace a new long term approach to bringing change into the world, that focuses less on disruption and more on evolution. In this talk, Christina will explore various approaches to designing more robust and compassionate change.
About Christina
Christina has helped grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Zynga, the New York Times and numerous startups throughout Silicon Valley. She’s the author of the business fable book Radical Focus, which uses the power of story to build a new approach to OKRs. Christina currently teaches at Stanford in the HCI program in Computer Science. She speaks worldwide about humanity, teamwork, and the journey to excellence. Find out more information (and get your Focus worksheet) at cwodtke.com.
Jane Austin - 10 Easy Ways to Irritate Your Design Team
Synopsis
How can good design be integrated into your business profitably? Jane will answer this question by considering the ‘anti-problem’. She will share 10 ways designers and business people can guarantee their behaviours and activities will ensure they never see eye-to-eye, their efforts will be wasted and everyone involved will know it is not their fault.
You will probably recognise most of these techniques in action in your own organisation. That is the anti-pattern.
If things are going to change for the better, do the opposite.
About Jane
Jane is an award-winning designer and has spoken and given keynotes at conferences all over the world (she once flew to Chile for the weekend to do a talk – ask her about the earthquake).
She loves building high performing design teams and helping make companies, big or small, more customer centred.
She currently works as Director of Product Design at Babylon Health, whose mission is to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth.
Prior to this she led the design team at MOO, grew the team at The Telegraph from one to twenty, at the same time as leading the redesign of the website and several apps, and has worked at GDS (home of gov.uk), in an online trading firm, in start-ups and in agencies.
Kate Tarling - How to Re-Shape Projects (without antagonising people)
Synopsis
How often have you seen a pipeline of work, a brief or a backlog and thought ‘what does this even mean? What’s actually being built and why?’ How organisations describe work and measure projects is too often only inward-facing. It reflects the internal view of something that should be built or bought, rather than clarity about what that organisation is trying to solve or achieve for its users or for itself.
Having impact with good research and design is hard when work is already shaped from the inside out – especially when the team is then up against a deadline to deliver ‘something’. It also makes it hard for the organisation to anticipate problems or to know how to judge whether a project has been successful from any kind of outside perspective. For example, how users might be affected by a change, potential support costs, demand, efficiency, effectiveness, missed opportunities or unwanted effects.
Kate will talk about some ways we can work constructively as part of a team, to not just re-shape projects for success, but how to evaluate them. In doing so, we move from being ‘the one’s designing other people’s ideas and products’, to being a core part of the team deciding where we need which products or technology – and just as importantly, where we don’t.
About Kate
Kate Tarling works with governments and other large organisations to establish a strong foundation for radically improving services, as well as to help them scale transformation efforts organisation-wide.
Working with some of the largest government departments in the UK she has lead on service design, leadership and management, bringing about significant and lasting change for organisations like the Home Office. Previously she worked with Government Digital Service alongside teams delivering major programmes of work to re-design high profile and critical services. She has helped design and deliver life changing products and services in healthcare, most notably for the award-winning Peek Vision.
With some 15 years’ experience in user centred design and strategy, Kate has directed major design programmes for large organisations including EE, Vodafone, Transport for London and AXA. She also spent 5 years in-house directly managing operational services in the telecoms and gaming industry, responsible for significant improvements to product and service performance and efficiency, as well as design.
Kate is director of a consultancy she founded in 2012 and frequently shares practical advice and guidance on the design and management of good services, providing tools and guidance for leadership, teams and individuals. She also coaches tech startups through the global tech accelerator Techstars.
Alison Coward - Great Workshops, Great Teams
Synopsis
Workshops are an essential part of our projects for gathering information and generating ideas. But sometimes the energy and motivation is lost soon after they finish. How can you make sure your workshops have a longer-term impact, to influence the way your team works together throughout a project?
In this talk, Alison will share her practical tips for designing and facilitating workshops that generate concrete outcomes, and how to keep the momentum going that contributes to a collaborative team culture.
About Alison
Alison Coward is the founder of Bracket, a consultancy helping teams in the creative and digital sectors to work better together, with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups. She is a strategist, trainer and workshop facilitator and the author of “A Pocket Guide to Effective Workshops”.
With over 15 years’ experience working in, leading and facilitating creative teams, Alison is passionate about finding the perfect balance between creativity, productivity and collaboration.
Lisa deBettencourt - Good Intentions and Bad Actors: Unleashing Our True Design Superpowers
Synopsis
As experience designers, we have unique superpowers to craft products and services in ways that can be wonderfully beneficial to people and integrate seamlessly into their lives. We are able to leverage our understanding of the human condition to transform technology into offerings that make millions of dollars for companies, while remaining idealistic about our goals of making people’s lives better. But there’s a gap: we don’t verify that we did move the needle. We don’t consider what things might just go sideways. We don’t invest in analyzing what might happen if our work is abused or consider how to prevent it. We just move onto the next problem statement and let the business figure it out.
I think this borders on negligence. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our profession, our customers, our colleagues, and the businesses who employ us to forecast the impact of our work at scale. And we need to develop the tools and the processes to do so properly. It’s time we hold our selves accountable and start to proactively identify the potential outcomes and unintended consequences of our work – both good and bad – as a regular phase in our design process. With this, we must also be prepared to influence the decision making bodies (including ourselves) to consider ways of mitigating those identified risks. This strategy, in my opinion, will allow us to engage our product and business colleagues as equals, thereby raising our own value as true business partners.
About Lisa
Lisa was most recently the VP of Design at Confer Health, a biotech company building the first ever clinical-grade diagnostic testing for use at home, where she led the user experience of IoT hardware, consumables, and software. Prior to that, she built and grew the UX design team at Imprivata, a healthcare IT security company. Ferrari, Bose, Autodesk, Walgreens, Harvard Medical School, and Partners Healthcare are some of the other organizations who have entrusted her with leading the design of solutions for their customers. Lisa contributed to the O’Reilly book, Designing for Emerging Technologies: UX for Genomics, Robotics, and the Internet of Things and currently teaches about designing for emerging technologies in the Digital Media graduate program at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Christopher Murphy - Everything Connected
Synopsis
It’s been nearly thirty years since the birth of the web and in that time our role as designers has changed dramatically.
In the 90s we designed for a desktop context, focused primarily on standalone experiences. A decade ago, with the launch of the iPhone, our remit expanded, embracing the challenge of designing for both desktop and mobile contexts. The recent emergence of a ‘connected landscape’ has transformed our industry once again. The challenge we now face as designers is to build ‘connected ecosystems’, considering: hardware and software; desktop and mobile; web and native….
As we race headlong into the future, I’ll explore the exciting opportunities ahead for designers working in a connected culture, identifying core principles we can embrace to keep up with the ever-shifting digital landscape.
About Christopher
A designer, writer and speaker based in Belfast, Christopher works with purpose-driven businesses, helping them to grow and thrive. He encourages small businesses to think big and, just as importantly, he enables big businesses to think small.
The author of numerous books, he is currently hard at work on his eighth – ‘Designing Delightful Experiences’ – which focuses on the user experience design process from start to finish.
As a design strategist he has worked with companies, large and small, to help drive innovation, drawing on over 25 years of experience working with clients including: The BBC, Booking.com and Adobe.
http://mrmurphy.com
http://tinybooks.org
