UXPA Boston Conference 2020

Join UXPA Boston President for an introduction to the day and some brief remarks on the industry in our current world.

In recent years, UX writing has emerged as a specialized role for the design and development of User Interface (UI) text. Like agile methodologies evolving to support the product development lifecycle, the experience design industry has also evolved to support the technological advances of product experiences. We live in the age of the Internet of Things, where our digital experiences are seamlessly integrated into our lives, and our interactions have become less robotic and more conversational. Crafting the dialogue for these narratives requires a new skill, but it’s also a natural transition from information and experience design. If you’re new to UX writing or curious to learn more, this is the session for you.

UX professionals often struggle to understand why users aren’t using their product the way we wanted them to. Usability testing only gets us so far. How can we gain more precise and actionable insight into what’s holding our users back from getting the most out of our work?

A UX audit can identify the most pressing issues facing the users of your product. In this session, you’ll learn how to synthesize data from different sources to create a multi-layered, multifaceted, and robust depiction of what problems need to be fixed and how to prioritize fixing them. Participants will leave this session ready to run a UX audit themselves or in partnership with stakeholders from different teams.

UX professionals have begun to focus on the how to deliver a highly engaging customer experience. One of the key challenges is to accurately measure a wide range of customer emotions including engagement, joy, frustration, trust, confidence, surprise, and disgust.

In my presentation I will share the results from a case study that focused on measuring customer emotions while using different virtual dressing rooms on three e-commerce websites. I will present biometric data from users, including eye tracking, facial expressions, and galvanic skin response (GSR) to show a more complete picture of the emotional user experience which would otherwise be difficult to detect using analytics, market research, or traditional user research methods.

Usability testing is by far the most widely used usability method. It’s important that we learn from experienced practitioners about this method so we can continue to improve our skills in usability testing and avoid common errors.

Through presentations and interactive quizzes based on video clips, this talk reports how 15 experienced usability professionals and two graduate students moderated usability tests. The purpose of the study was to investigate the approaches to moderation used by experienced professionals. Based on this study, the talk presents some of the characteristics that distinguish good and bad moderation.

Each moderator independently moderated three think-aloud usability test sessions of Ryanair.com, the website of a low-fare European airline. All moderators used the same six usability test tasks. The test sessions were video recorded so that both the participant and moderator were visible.

Key observations were identified by asking other study participants to review a random video from each moderator. Each video was reviewed by five to seven study participants. With this approach, the data, not a single person, author, organizer, or moderator, determines what the key observations are.

This study, which is the tenth in a series of Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) studies, documents a wide difference in moderation approaches. The talk presents important issues in usability test moderation, including time management, building trust and rapport, pilot sessions, design discussions, and how you can keep sharp.

Are you having trouble getting accessibility efforts off the ground? Once underway, do those efforts often feel like they’re stuck in neutral? Perhaps what you’ve been taught about how to make the case for accessibility and what the pursuit of accessibility entails needs to be rethought. The things you hear about over and over again—the threat of legal action, the risk of lost sales, the cost of implementing after-the-fact fixes, and how to craft accessible code—don’t tell the whole story. In fact, they may be the very thing that’s preventing you from achieving the accessibility goals that you’ve set for your organization. It’s time to reassess the very ideas that have been accepted as truisms and reveal a better way of pursuing accessibility.

As the impact of technology on society is gaining attention, user experience experts may find ourselves in situations where our work or impact on a product suddenly comes into question in the public eye. Where one day you are working behind the scenes to improve the companies user experience, the next day you may find yourself in the limelight as a user experience emergency evolves. This talk will cover how to handle a usability emergency and use it to catapult your user experience practice forward. It will cover practical steps including reframing, evaluating, planning, and communicating while the pressure is high. By the end of this talk, you’ll know how to handle anything from a public PR crisis pointed at usability through that executive that tried your product and created an internal crisis to fix usability immediately. 

So, you need to make a chart. Where do you start? This talk will give you an overview of the decisions that go into choosing the right visualization for your user—and for the data. We’ll talk about which visualization to use when, and how different charts support user tasks. In addition to the basic line charts and bar charts, we’ll also look at some more complicated examples to explore how you can use a design perspective to create more interesting and useful visual forms.

Slides at: https://www.slideshare.net/uxforward/research-ready-to-build-compelling-artefacts-that-speak-your-agile-teams-language-239013572
Communicating design and research results, in a way an Agile development team can best leverage them, is critical to achieve your vision of the user experience. Our teammates have their own favorite methods for making sense of information, which we can adopt to bridge communications gaps. Join our talk to learn several techniques UX designers and researchers can use “speak the language” of business, development, and quality assurance (QA). Success (and failure) stories will illustrate how we have used our coworkers’ methods and vocabulary to engage teammates and deliver great experiences. We show how to make the key points stay with teammates by collaboratively translating them into a scope of work everyone can understand. Our examples cover tactically planning one sprint’s backlog, through a list of related capabilities for a product epic, to strategically planning a multi-year vision roadmap. You will walk away with processes, tips and tricks for better collaborating with Business, Dev and QA, ultimately making research and design insights relevant and actionable for everyone.

Characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, and disability status—whether they are socially constructed, superficial, or highly visible—can have a significant impact on how we experience the world, and how the world experiences us. In my experience as a UX researcher, diversity is the first thing to vanish from the recruit when the going gets tough; I want to show you why that is not okay, and what you can do about it in your own practice. Researchers may already believe that diversity is important in theory, but this presentation will go further by demonstrating why it is imperative for a strong user research study, providing examples of what we miss when we do not insist on diversity, and offering talking points to help make the case to clients, stakeholders, and internal teams.

In this presentation, we will examine the problem space through a sociological lens and talk about what it means to live a different experience based on your demographics and characteristics. Then, I will discuss the results of a survey that asks about how researchers think about and practice diversity recruitment in their screeners; we will look at examples where opportunities were uncovered or completely missed because the researcher did or did not insist on retaining diversity criteria in the recruit. Finally, I will offer suggestions to help researchers make the case for including and retaining diversity criteria in their screeners to ensure that the participants they talk to are representative of the full spectrum of their intended audience.

Having managed distributed teams at several different companies and now working as a completely remote design manager, I’ve learned a lot of tricks along the way. With many organizations going global, even small companies are faced with the need to work in a distributed way. In this session we will discuss how managers and team members can bridge the distance while maintaining a strong design culture. We will talk about what tools to use to work collaboratively with your organization and explore the unique challenges faced by remote and distributed employees. We will discuss some techniques and tactics that bring team members closer together, regardless of time zones and cultural differences. There are also benefits to working this way, as shown by remote first organizations such as InVision. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of remote and distributed work (including knowing the difference between the two) and ideas to implement in their own work lives.

Link to attend

We will set up breakout rooms for our group mentoring sessions. There will be two mentors in each breakout room. Up to 10 people can attend a given breakout room, on a first-come, first-served basis. Note that we will have two types of group mentoring sessions:

• "New to UX" or "Career Changers"
• "Career Development"

Many designers have explored whether they should learn to code or not at one point in their career. Whether we are thinking about career advancement, skill development, or having a greater impact, learning new skills is often the way to achieve that goal.

However, we don’t often explore Product Management skills as a way to navigate friction & disagreement, negotiate with stakeholders, influence the product vision, and balance user struggles with business needs.
With the responsibilities of the Product Manager and the Product (UX) Designer overlapping more than ever before, let’s talk about how you can leverage PM skills to level up your influence, value, and impact.

Chatbots have gained a lot of buzz within the enterprise space with promises of transforming customer service to be efficient and cost-effective. However, many enterprise firms are met with disappointment when the implementation of Chatbots ends up not meeting expectations. Chatbots that were intended to expedite the customer service end up being inefficient and frustrating for the end users leading them to resort to contacting a human representative. How might we address this issue?

Join Srikant Chari as he goes over a case study that highlights the insights uncovered from the UX Research studies he has conducted on Chatbots at his company followed by content strategy to make the experience work better for both the end users and the business.

In the UX community, we all know that the answer to complicated questions is usually “It depends.” This doesn’t mean that constructive debate is useless - in fact, it can help us refine our thinking (or perhaps even change our mind) about the methods and processes we often take for granted. In this fast-moving and exciting session, we will take on 3 eternal debates within the UX community. Three bold debaters will argue the affirmative cases below, while 3 contrarians will boldly challenge them. Are you as passionate about one of these topics as our great debaters? Bring your arguments to the session - each round will allow for spirited audience participation.

The 3 affirmative cases:

1. Personas have outlived their usefulness as a UX method. (Eva v. Colleen)
2. High fidelity prototyping reduces design time and makes testing more accurate. (Jen v. Chris)
3. We have lost the core principles of UCD to be Agile. (Mike v. Jeremy)

Ever finished an amazing UX Research study, only to find yourself drowning in interview recordings and incomprehensible notes? When analyzing qualitative research, it’s tempting to take shortcuts, because the analysis process can be so time consuming and hard. However, the rigor of your analysis can make or break the impact of your results and recommendations.

We’ll explore the common analysis pitfalls within UX research and illuminate techniques to improve your synthesis process. Learn how to mitigate the influence of your own bias and transform surface level patterns into nuanced, meaningful insights to level up your research findings.

Have you undertaken UX research - either as a consultant or part of an internal team - that uncovered a critical process, capability or cultural isue for the organization? As researchers, we tend to be the first ones to identify and encounter those sore spots, putting us in a unique position to consider our role and responsibility in highlighting these insights and helping others navigate through them. To help researchers when they encounter these situations, we have developed several frameworks and tools - using the lens of organizational design - to help unpack these problems when they arise, and determine how to move the work forward effectively.

This talk will:

1. Introduce some common challenges when research uncovers misalignments in organizational behavior and culture,
2. Present some organizational design frameworks that will help unpack these sore spots and identify where you might find leverage points, and 
3. Identify strategies and tactics using behavior change frameworks that anyone can use to influence change.

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Link to attend

We will set up breakout rooms for our lunchtime table topics. Two facilitators will lead each topic. Up to 12 people can attend a given topic, on a first-come, first-served basis. These are our topics:

• Agile/Lean UX
• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
• Career Development
• Design for Behavior Change
• Design for Social Change
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Enterprise UX
• User Research
• UX Managers
• UX Strategy 

Many organizations have small UX teams and could benefit from UX researchers training their peers in user research to increase capacity. We have a small team working on a government open data website, with only one experienced UX researcher, so we decided to teach two analysts on the team how to conduct and analyze the data from user interviews. We found the best way to train them was to have them conduct mock user interviews to learn the process by doing. We’ll share what we did, what we learned through the process, and how others can apply our process in their own organization.

We all know that building a user experience practice can be a challenging and rewarding experience. Whether you’re a team of one evangelizing UX throughout your company or trying to keep pace with your company’s rapid growth while scaling a team, there are plenty of challenges that will be thrown your way.

It takes time, patience and resilience to build a user experience practice. It’s as true today as it was over twenty years ago when many of our panelists began in the industry. Sometimes we could walk right into organizations and establish our presence and practice. Other times, we had to prove our worth before we could even start the work. In some cases, we had exposure to c-level executives and leaders, where conversations began with, “Who are you?” and “What do you do again?” And we had the opportunity tell them. We have stories to tell and explaining to do.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for success for this process, which is why we’re bringing together a panel made of people with varied experiences. Our panel has experience building, growing, and scaling UX teams. We have experience working in tech companies like Facebook, HubSpot, NetApp, Rocket Software, SeaChange International and TripAdvisor; financial services and insurance companies like Bank of America, Fidelity, Putnam and Sungard and; large defense companies such as Raytheon; and eCommerce companies like Staples. In this interactive session, our panelists will reveal the challenges they faced, some successfully, some not. We will explore scenarios that we have encountered through the years and offer lessons learned and tactical approaches that have worked. And we will also invite the audience to tell their stories, too.

Gender identity isn’t binary. But until now, our platform gave research participants two options: male or female. It wasn’t working for our users, our customers, our employees, or our company.

So we took a hard look at how our platform asked users about gender—then talked to ~70 people across the gender spectrum about how we could build a more inclusive experience for our non-cisgender users.

It surfaced design principles for gender-identity inclusion—and insights for any company looking to move beyond the binary. The lead researchers will share:

• How they designed the research—and why we launched it
• What they found from the conversations, research and prototype testing
• How you now can conduct more inclusive research
• How you can use the insights to make your company more inclusive

Link to slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pbQ8eYevqEEk707ldFdPXBYiedJXXN0X54ZeeC-xgSk/edit?usp=sharing

Have you tried the Design Sprint 2.0? It’s an amazing process that hundreds of companies have used to design large-scale projects in a short amount of time. But the Design Sprint 2.0 reaches its limits when you have a large number of stakeholders, some of whom disagree on the project direction. Conflicts arise. Timelines expand. The feedback loop goes on and on. When you finally design the solution, it’s a miracle if it solves the original user problem. At Wayfair, we created the Remote Design Sprint as a natural evolution of the Design Sprint 2.0. The Remote Design Sprint leverages our everyday tools to unlock more creativity, bring in more stakeholders, and spend less time planning. We’ll provide you with an all-in-one toolkit to create any digital solution with as many as 20 stakeholders in just 1 week.

Creating Accessible solutions for people with disabilities, and Inclusive Design has taken the front seat in the last few years. While Accessibility standards exist for more than two decades, it is still a daunting task to follow them as there are more than 70 standards. Often designers, product owners, and developers feel that it's a considerable effort to implement accessibility standards.

In our organization, we have taken the "Shift Left" approach by including Accessibility into the Design Process. The integration of Accessibility in Design Systems has produced multiple benefits. In this presentation, we will share tips to achieve significant results for Accessibility and beyond.

Both presenters have deep expertise in Accessibility and Design Systems, respectively. Both presenters understand the need to answer questions and allocated time for the audience to get clarity on the subject.

Link to slides: http://tiny.cc/eliminatea11ythroughDS

Customer research is typically hard to do for companies who build enterprise softwares, where the development cycle and customer feedback cycle can be long, and also it is relatively hard to find targeted customers to study. Here, we want to share our stories about how we collaborate with other customer-facing departments within the company to schedule customer interview sessions, what kinds of research deliverables we provide, and how we communicate the results to influence product roadmap planning and feature prioritization.

1.   Collaborate with other customer-facing departments to find customers  It is always hard to find customers to talk to for enterprise softwares, so leveraging the help of other customer-facing departments would be very efficient. Those departments can be Customer Success Managers or Account Managers, Pre-sale Engineers, and Support and Services, etc. Some best practices that we’ve learned are:

• Hold regular meetings between PM+UX team and other teams. 

Our PM/UX team have monthly meetings with PSE (Pre-Sale Engineer) team and CSM (Customer Success Manager) team, as well as biweekly feature request review meetings with support/services team. Building great relationship with these teams and communicate often are very important. 

• Set specific goals to schedule interview sessions

 Every week, we aim to have 2 one-on-one sessions with internal people and 1 customer interview session. Setting specific goals helps us to keep moving. 

• Leverage already scheduled customer meetings

We don’t want to overwhelm customers with multiple meetings, so joining the already scheduled meetings (such as regular customer review meetings, demo meeting and user training meetings) would be another good way to make sure that we can interact with customers quickly. Sometimes, we can squeeze our interviews into that session, and other times, just listening to their feedback to our demos or trainings can also give great insights. 
 
2.    Customer research methods and deliverables
Though we’ve used various research methods such as interviews, surveys and usability testings, the 2 most effective methods are through 1-hour customer interview sessions and Salesforce customer case analysis, since they give us the most valuable and actionable insights.
Most of our customer interview sessions are done through web meetings, where we usually ask the customers to share their screen, walk us through how they currently use our products and also share what they are trying to accomplish. Sometimes, we would ask customers to share their own roadmaps when possible. These details are super helpful to understand customer goals and use cases. Typical deliverables that we’ve provided are:

• In-depth customer profile & use case report
• Persona use case summary (Once we talk to enough customers with particular job roles, we would summarize the patterns. One thing to notice that we don’t provide generic persona description, but provide detailed use case patterns, which we found more useful.)
• Experience Journey Map / Task flow (This journey map includes not only the flow that how customers use our product, but all the other products customers are using and integrating with.)

The deliverables from customer interview sessions have greatly helped the whole company to better understand our customers, not just at the feature level, but more on the fact WHY customers need to do certain kinds of tasks.
Another effective research deliverable is summarizing customer feature request cases from Salesforce. Often times, when we’ve heard lots of complains about one problem area (both from internal team and customers as well), we would run a Salesforce report and do a deep analysis of all the cases. Our summaries have driven the product team to raise the priority of these problems in order to fix them quickly.


3.  Communicate the results effectively
How to communicate the results and provide actionable insights also need careful consideration, since people usually don’t have the patience to read a long ppt file. Two important best practices that we’ve found are: have a one-page summary and visualize the results as much as you can. Thus, even just from a glance, people can still get what your report is trying to say. And one last small tip, always include a screen capture of the one-page summary in your email, for those people who don’t even want to download your report!

The demand for user experience professionals continues to rise steadily, expanding into areas such as AI and IOT. College grads and career changers are joining the ranks of UX Teams in increasing numbers each year. Often, there is a gap between book knowledge and experiential knowledge. Studies show that a structured onboarding program leads to higher rates of new hire productivity, engagement, and retention.

In this talk, a case study of the onboarding program created by the UX Services group in Corporate IT will be showcased. Best practices for addressing the onboarding needs of new hires and internal career changers will be covered. You will walk away with strategies to empower new team members, increase productivity on future projects, and build a strong, supportive UX culture on your team. The presenter has years of experience in creating onboarding strategy and curriculum for UX in corporate and academic environments. The best practices shared offer useful ideas for creating UX onboarding materials for your team.

An organization’s website is often the first point of contact for customers, and good user experience in that initial interaction is crucial. This is particularly true of library websites, which serve as both a source of information about the library itself and a portal into the vast network of resources it provides. If these services and resources aren’t easily findable on the website, they may as well not exist as far as our users are concerned. Despite the importance of gathering user feedback to inform information architecture and design, resources to carry out this work, such as time, staff, and money, may still be limited.

In our talk, we will share our experience as two librarians without formal backgrounds in UX or design, navigating a web redesign project from scratch, and without a big budget. Coming from the perspective of a medium-sized University library, we will talk about our approach and how we’re balancing this work with our other full-time roles. We will highlight lessons learned and provide practical techniques that will set you up for success, such as:

• How to build necessary skills to lead a redesign project and leading without authority
• Strategies for user recruitment
• Information gathering methods and the importance (and difficulty) of listening to your users without providing “expert guidance”
• Strategies for creating and managing opportunities for involving other staff in the process and building buy-in
• This session will benefit anyone who is embarking on a web redesign project, or are new to user research and want to get a user experience project off the ground with limited resources.

Even the smallest interface decisions can have a seismic effect on business. Yet digital product teams continually miss the little things. Why? Join me on a tour of seemingly insignificant interface design quirks that have changed history, caused mass panic, otherwise upended society, and completely ruined my sandwich.

Because screen-based interfaces are central to modern life, our day-to-day design work has great purpose and value. We banish interface rage. We help businesses save and make serious money. We keep people safe from disaster and yes, even pickles. You hardly need a better reason to get up in the morning.

Link to attend

We will set up breakout rooms for our group mentoring sessions. There will be two mentors in each breakout room. Up to 10 people can attend a given breakout room, on a first come, first served basis. Note that we will have two types of group mentoring sessions:

• "New to UX" or "Career Changers"
• "Career Development"

How does a large eCommerce company implement a new visual language to create a more cohesive user experience?

Over the course of a single calendar year, our experience design team went from using out-of-date sticker sheets to implementing a mature design system – enabling us to roll out a new look and feel across multiple eCommerce brands and create a new, more cohesive experience for our users. Learn how we partnered with dozens of separate product teams, measured design system adoption over time, optimized our communication model, and rebuilt our whole platform in the process.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”. If you recognized this principle from the Agile Manifesto, kudos to you! But did you know that the Agile Manifesto was written 20 years ago? What does it mean to be Agile in 2020?

This panel of UX leaders will discuss the unique attributes of Agile UX, key differences from a more traditional approach, how they evolved Agile UX practices in various organizations and some of the challenges to practicing Agile UX. Finally. They will also share recommendation for those who want to enhance their agile way of working.

Whether you are a deep agilist or agile-curious, join the conversation! There will be actionable take-aways for everyone, whether you work in a start-up, corporate or non-profit environments. Audience questions, friendly debate and banter will be encouraged!

Whether by nature or by training, user researchers spend time listening to others, learning, and caring about their needs. It’s an occupational hazard to take on the issues, burdens, and concerns of others. This can become a problem when we become emotionally involved in what really belongs to someone else, or when others take advantage of our caring stance. This presentation gives practical advice for how to spend time listening to others’ stories and still maintain our own healthy selves.

Cross-cultural team working can be fraught with misunderstanding, bad communications and missed opportunities. But done well, a diverse team can be a powerful resource to design robust products and services that are more evocative, desirable, and delightful. If well managed, a diverse and collaborative team can have a positive impact on the organization: boosting productivity, creativity and overall company performance.

In contemporary working environments, collaborative teams are often composed of people from different cultures, nations, religions, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Now more than ever, there is a growing need to understand and embrace differences. Yet, many teams fail in this endeavor because they lack the tools to harness the power of diversity.

In this session, you’ll learn tools and techniques to build team cohesion, and surface deep understandings using evocative objects to facilitate those difficult conversations. We’ll share our experiences helping teams to communicate more effectively by building common ground and shared understanding amongst diverse individuals.

We’ll share real-world cases that we have worked on to demonstrate how designing your organization’s difficult conversations can help revitalize the workplace environment, and improve morale and productivity. Using research and techniques you already know — like participant observation, interviews, cultural probes, participatory design and workshops — we’ll show how understanding cultures through objects is an effective method to improve understanding in a cross-cultural team.

Research and design needs to live at the beginning of the product life cycle, so energy is spent on building the right thing, not fixing the built thing.

With limited resources, UX teams need to be focused. UX has helped companies learn about what their customers want and need. But too many skip the next, crucial step of discovery and jump straight to building a solution.

We’ll share 3 case studies on when hypothesis-driven design has helped mitigate risk while still getting the product out the door as quickly as possible. Listen to the key challenges in this unique phase and learn how to overcome them, including: setting realistic goals for this phase, determining scope, getting team support, and earning stakeholder buy-in.

Most researchers rely on their empathic abilities in their day-to-day work with the presumption that we're all equally capable of developing and applying empathy but here's the problem - we're not. Not only is the researcher's experience of empathy improbable - but empathy does not scale. Together we'll learn how to make our empathic impulses observable and readable within our organizations and for our users. If you're ready to engage the possibility that empathy may be unavailable in research and design, let's dive in and move in a new direction: forward.