UXPA Boston Conference 2020

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.