Schedule

“Design It Forward — Teaching and Using Design Thinking for Good”

Design It Forward is a collaboration between IBM Studios RTP, NC State University’s College of Design, and NC State University’s Institute for Nonprofit Research, Education, and Engagement. The course utilizes enterprise design thinking methodologies to solve local, nonprofit organization challenges and promote social citizenship. Together with enterprise designers and professionals, students underwent a 13-week course in stages from design research to final product presentations in front of real stakeholders and business partners.

In this session, we take you behind the scenes to show you how the course came about, the Enterprise Design Thinking framework used, every step of our process as instructors, challenges along the way, and final outcomes. A Q&A portion will be available at the end of the session.

9:40 - 10:25 am, Room 303

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"Innovate Faster and Better: The Value of Cross-functional Design Collaboration and Customer Concept Validation”

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a solid understanding of the problem or opportunity you are trying to solve for your customer. More importantly, it involves collaborative ideation around the solution design. Effective collaboration is well structured and cross-functional in nature. Session attendees can expect to walk away from this session with insights on the following:

• Customer involvement during the discovery, definition, and design phases of product development
• Activities and outputs of the cross-functional team during the discovery, definition, and design phases of development
• The role of a UXer during these phases and activities

9:40 - 10:25 am, Room 304

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“Design Better Features by Solving Better Problems”

Have you ever designed a feature and wondered, “Why are we building this?” Does your UX team spend most of its time making mockups and prototypes for features that “the business” needs to deliver by the end of the quarter?

In this talk, Wren will discuss how UX teams can take a more strategic role in product design by focusing on identifying and understanding customer problems. By asking the right questions and orienting research around problem discovery, your UX team can generate meaningful user insights and bring a more user-centered focus to the design process.

10:35 - 11:20 am, Room 303

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“Product Design Best Practices and Tools for Localization”

Is your product’s design scalable to meet the needs of its expanding marketplace? Staying competitive in a global marketplace includes providing different language options for your app.

This talk will cover:

• The importance of localization
• An overview of how developers implement solutions
• How to approach designing for localization
• UI design best practices for accommodating multiple languages (with good and bad examples)
• Tools, techniques, and resources for designers

10:35 - 11:20 am, Room 304

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“Build Measure Learn is Broken”

The Build, Measure, Learn loop is at the center of the Lean Startup approach, which is becoming increasingly popular among companies of all sizes. While the framework calls for very UX-friendly processes, such as collecting iterative feedback and focusing on building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) required for doing so, the way most companies implement Build, Measure, Learn is broken and reinforces bad old habits of building first, assuming later. Many engineering teams use Build Measure Learn as an excuse to jump into building a skeleton version of a product, assuming that they can only get good feedback once they have working code. While most of us know you should incorporate research earlier, and the Lean Startup approach actually calls for it, it can be hard to change the minds of development-centered thinkers.

In this session, I’ll provide an overview of the Lean Startup and Build Measure Learn framework, pros and cons of these approaches, and tips for teams to utilize these approaches to infuse learning into their process as soon as possible.

11:30 - 11:50 am, Room 303

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“Why Won't They Listen to Me? Building Support for UX in a Business-minded Company”

Designers face frequent challenges when they try to influence business decisions with design expertise. This rapid-fire session will provide a little insight as to why, and a lot of things you can use to increase the influence and respect for design in your organization - whether you're a one-person shop, a team leader, or a brand-new design intern.

11:30 - 11:50 am, Room 304

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“SHUX Y'ALL - Using Shame to Improve the UX”

It's not always enough to have a great UX design, or to run a usability test that reveals a lot of problems. Sometimes, the UXer needs to take the good fight up to another level — to hit them where it hurts — the level of shame. Mark will give examples from his 30 years of usability and UX experience at IBM, BB&T, Toshiba, and Lenovo.

1:00 - 1:20 pm, Room 303

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“Don't Ask Me Why”

As UX professionals, we're constantly focused on "why" — why people do what they do, why certain things are important to them. What we sometimes don't realize is that by directly asking "why" — of consumers, of our work colleagues, of our family members — we build walls and evoke defensiveness. The good news is that there are many easy ways to get at the open and personal communication we seek without using the word "why" in our inquiry. Once you try it out, you'll see an amazing difference in your UX work, as a professional, and as a spouse or parent.

1:00 - 1:20 pm, Room 304

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“Health Care, Sweet Tea, and All Y'all”

The healthcare industry is calling for...begging for improvement in user experience. Patient engagement, physician burnout, opioid crisis, social determinants of health, connected medical devices, wellness apps. The list continues. During the session, we'll review several user experience mess-ups, share a glass of sweet tea (sweet tea helps us get through the mess-ups), talk about psychological principles at the root of the mess-up, and finish with how user experience professionals can prevent future mess-ups.

1:30 - 2:15 pm, Room 303

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“Level-up the Accessibility of your Website with Mushrooms”

Creating an accessible website that passes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is like playing a Mario Nintendo Game. To win, you must beat levels and pass various challenges. Apply your video game prowess to the Web Accessibility game.

1:30 - 2:15 pm, Room 304

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“Tech Ethics for the Rest of Us”

Sociologist Jacques Ellul argues that technological innovation always outpaces society’s ability to adapt to it, often creating more problems than it solves. Headlines made by tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Uber for disregarding ethical concerns daily remind us that innovation is never neutral, despite people's best intentions.

Discussion of tech ethics has gone mainstream, yet designers' opportunity and responsibility to affect change is muddied by leading voices who exhort them to act as ethical gatekeepers in their organizations. In reality, the most important ethical decisions are made in the boardrooms of massive corporations, not on whiteboards at the small-to-midsize companies, agencies, and non-profits where “the rest of us” work.

In this talk, I’ll skip the provocative calls to action to focus instead on how working designers can leverage their vocation to do the most good possible. First, I’ll present a taxonomy of ethical issues, identifying those that digital designers are best positioned to address. I’ll share perspectives of leading design voices and technology critics and draw from my own experience as a Senior UX Designer at Viget, a digital design and development agency. Listeners will learn about the role of design in the broader tech-ethical landscape and leave with ideas about how to act responsibly in response to issues that affect us all.

2:45 - 3:30 pm, Room 303

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“Leading user-centered workshops with cross-functional stakeholders”

More and more, the responsibility of designing and facilitating stakeholder conversations—and creating the harmony necessary to pull them off—is falling to the UX role. Regardless of experience level or title, many UX professionals find themselves in the position of needing to bring stakeholders together to build consensus on UX plans, define product strategy, gather internal insights, and create buy-in for UX resources. This talk provides practical how-to advice for planning and pulling off effective collaborative discussions with the cross-functional stakeholders we need on board in order to most effectively do our jobs.

2:45 - 3:30 pm, Room 304

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