Closing Keynote

4:00pm - 5:00pm

Designing for Impact

Finding the entrepreneur within and creating value to the bottom line.

Kim Williams has deep roots in Creative Direction and Branded User Experience Design Leadership. She led major client work at prestigious agencies such as Ogilvy, a global advertising, marketing and public relations agency. Kim also orchestrated Design System and Rebranding teams to pioneer innovations at eBay and Indeed, two highly impactful billion dollar brands in the consumer space.

Kim currently leads a team of designers (interaction, visual, and brand), design technologists, content strategists, writers, design ops, and UX researchers. Her team is deployed across the United States (San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin) and Japan (Tokyo). She oversees Indeed’s core job search experience, shipping the company’s first design system and piloting new native apps.

Kim's work is about leading design at scale to craft experiences that are human, empathetic, hopeful, and trusted. She aims to mold the world’s #1 job search site into an even more meaningful partner in the worklife of people everywhere. Kim's expertise in threading together and synthesizing the vision of brand, creative, and product technologies will be just a few of the insights shared in this session.

When Kim’s not nerding out on color theory or micro-animations, she’s hopping around San Francisco and Oakland with her husband and precocious toddler for playdates and adventures.

3:05pm - 3:45pm

Erik Johnson

Purpose UX

Creating a shared understanding among a team with diverse skillsets, personalities, and values is one of the most challenging parts of product design. In this collaborative talk, you'll learn simple techniques for running effective workshop sessions (either in-person or remote) that build trust among your team, keep focus on the project goals, and lead to successful outcomes.

3:05pm - 3:45pm

La Tosca Goodwin

Allscripts

I will talk about the importance of integrating UX into the Agile process. As part of it, I will walk through several case studies of how the arrangement worked in various environments: working on a main project with remote developers, working on multiple projects as a shared resource with limited inclusion, to our emerging full immersion in the teams we support as part of our Scaled Agile adoption.

I will walk through the courting phase where I build on the relationships that eventually led to our seat at the table for each of these scenarios.

2:10pm - 2:50pm

Jillian Cairco

Transloc

Games can help create an environment where creativity, problem-solving, and team building can happen through collaborative play. This session will be a participatory workshop with short lecture segments to discuss different game techniques for collaboration.

2:10pm - 2:50pm

Sarah Dooley

Durham County Library

The public library is one of the few spaces that are literally open to everyone. In designing the website that functions as the library's virtual branch, how can we aim for that same standard? How close can we get? Where do we fall short?

The Durham County Library website is in the process of its first redesign since 2013, and these are some of the questions we are considering. Through the lens of our redesign process, the UX methods we're using to get insight from our community, and the decisions we're making, this talk will consider what it means to try to make a more inclusive website.

1:15pm - 1:55pm

Joe Gonwa + Ashley Willard

Teamworks / Apiture

Learn how PMs think about work and the motivations/incentives that drive our decisions. Discover tricks to communicate with Product and upper management, how to make arguments more compelling, and how to ultimately work more effectively with these partners!

1:15pm - 1:55pm

Andreas Orphanides

NC State University Libraries

Regardless of your role -- management, development, customer service, etc. -- systems thinking is a critical skill for improving your own work and your organization. Systems analysis allows us to introspect on our work, to recognize incipient failures, to diagnose systemic problems, and to optimize workflows. But how do we get good at thinking in systems? The answer, as with many things, is practice. Luckily, the world around us gives us many opportunities to do so: systems are everywhere, and examining an unfamiliar system is a great way to develop your systems thinking muscles. In this workshop, drawing from real-world examples in our day-to-day lives (from burrito shops to public-restroom paper towel dispensers), we will demonstrate how to tease apart the threads of an unfamiliar system using limited evidence. We'll identify the opportunities to observe and derive insight from unfamiliar systems, and we'll form a broad framework for thinking about systems -- both new ones and those that are familiar to us. Part field guide, part collection of lateral-thinking exercises, this presentation will encourage audience members to look at systems in a new light, to observe the effects of systems design, and to work backward and forward to understand the underlying systems more completely. These skills are directly transferrable to our day-to-day work; by better understanding systems in the wider world, we can gain new insights into our own systems. The audience will come away from this talk with a renewed recognition of and appreciation for systems, a framework for understanding systems and system design choices, and a thirst for puzzling through the systems they encounter both in their work and in the world at large.

12:15 - 1:15

Provided on-site at the convention center.

Snack and beverage service will be provided throughout the day during breaks.

11:35am - 12:15am

Gretchen McNeely + Scott McCall

Accenture / IBM

There are many considerations when designing for voice interfaces, as well as tools that streamline and simplify the process. Among other things, designers must take into account:

• Vocal timbre

• Gender: what do we connote when we select a specific gender for voice?

• Ways that "uncanny valley" manifests in voices 

• Appropriate metaphors as we think about interface capabilities and limitations

• Accent and dialect

• Syntax: words matter

• Humor

• Cultural references

• Inclusion of non-binary pronouns for the singular third person

• Empathic elements

The technology that enables it -- how we access it, how it's supported over time, and how it interacts with other info environments

Scott and Gretchen will walk through the importance of sensitivity to these elements, as well as introducing the audience to tools that help designers "meet people where they are" as voice interfaces become more ubiquitous in our field.

11:35am - 12:15am

Mark Ferencik

Optum Technology

At a time when the US auto industry was resting on past successes, the new chief engineer for the Toyota Sienna drove 53,000 miles across North America across all sorts of roads and situations with all sorts of people in the car. One of the key insights: Great minivan success is more about the kids in the back than the people in the front.  Sienna minivan sales jumped a whopping 50% in just one year based on his team’s insights!

Are you frustrated when your great user research insights and designs get dismissed by your business customers? The issues are deeply rooted in the origins of the auto industry and the way Alfred Sloan managed General Motors. His ideas spread through major business programs and explains a tremendous amount of why so many leaders often ignore the insights UX researchers are telling them. This interactive session will take a quick stroll through history of how these business practices came to be. Then we’ll explore some effective ways to get our leaders to sink old stinkin’ thinkin' and pony up the support needed for awesome UX and even better products.

10:40am - 11:20am

Leah Kaufman

Lenovo

Most usability tests are conducted with a single individual; focus groups have, well, groups. There's a sweet spot right in between where testing pairs, trios or even a small group, can yield richer and deeper understanding of someone's reaction to a UI. My session will examine this approach to testing, including a live demo of two people participating in a usability test together.

10:40am - 11:20am

Michael Weslander

GroundLift.io

Do you sometimes feel like your best work gets lost in translation when handed off to the developers? This session will cover a few techniques for developing and using design systems to help your team communicate and build more consistent interfaces efficiently.

Key Points:

How we use component cut up sessions (essentially UI audits) to get the whole team to share ownership and speak the same language. How we separate the style from functionality when building scalable UIs and some tricks for understanding the development mindset. Why we build a style guide (especially in code) and a few tools we use to keep them up to date. We'll discuss some of the tradeoffs of design systems for UX (the users and the profession) and help deepen the audience understanding of the corresponding tradeoffs for developers. Lastly, we'll have a heart-to-heart about locus of control, intention, and how we try to foster empathy between our clients and partners.

9:45am - 10:25am

Matt Kubota

Willowtree

In the summer of 2018, my girlfriend was admitted to a hospital in New Orleans with a rare neurological disorder that left her temporarily paralyzed and unable to speak. The only way we could communicate with her was with a poster board with the alphabet written on it, saying letter by letter to her until she tilted her head for confirmation. I came back to Durham thinking that there must be a better way to allow those experiencing both paralysis and aphasia to communicate. Throughout the next few months, I collaborated with a couple talented developers at my company during dedicated innovation time to create a head and eye tracking proof-of-concept app. Without my company’s culture of experimentation and the willingness to help from others, this project would never have been realized. The technology has barely been explored by other developers and speech pathologists are excited about the potential impact it can have on their patients. We are currently still working on it and are excited to get it to those that need this affordable solution. Through this talk I want share its origin story, effective and ineffective methods I used to recruit collaborators, and share what’s to come. I also want to share how difficult it was to bring something so personal to my life into a work setting, but how glad I am now that I did. It can build empathy with others and offer a chance for real solutions to be explored with the expertise of others.

9:45am - 10:25am

Vince Conzola

Red Hat

Many organizations, including Red Hat, are embracing neurodiversity as part of a diversity and inclusion strategy. Learn about different aspects of neurodiversity and why it's important to consider neurodiverse individuals when collaborating with co-workers and designing for end users.

Opening Keynote

8:30am - 9:30am

Design for Cognitive Bias

Using Mental Shortcuts for Good Instead of Evil

David Dylan Thomas, creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast, has developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. He serves as Principal, Content Strategy at Think Company, an experience design consultancy, and helps organize Content Strategy Philly. He previously consulted at the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy and is the creator, director, and co-producer of Developing Philly, a web series about the rise of the Philadelphia tech community. He has given standing-room-only presentations at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, UX Copenhagen, and the Wharton Web Conference on content strategy and emerging content trends.

7:30am - 8:30am

Check in, grab your swag and buckle up!