Session type: 45 minute talk

The primary function of design is to make something useful. Unfortunately, most products are not accessible to everyone. For adults and children with non-typical cognition and learning styles, technology can help even the playing field. Design can combat negative stereotypes, and take into account an individual's deficits while capitalizing on their cognitive strengths. We will look at design solutions targeting specific conditions like ADHD, dyslexia, and autism, in addition to exploring the core problems technology is trying to solve. We will then widen the lens to compare how many of our most commonly used devices and apps use the same tactics to achieve universal accessibility for all.

The President’s Management Agenda names “Improving Customer Experience” as a major goal. But many government agencies and other organizations around the world have yet to enter the most important gateway to successfully increasing customer satisfaction — formally designing a voice of the customer (VoC) program. Join two CX strategists working to raise awareness for the importance of collecting useful customer feedback, and learn how to design a VoC program that integrates with your planning and design processes. We'll show you how we got started with VoC programs at USDA and the National Cancer Institute.

IA projects often need approval from gatekeepers who don’t fully understand your complex project. In this talk, a product manager and a taxonomist will present a case study of the tools they used to convince executives, engineers, and analysts to buy into a complex data and IA project. Learn how a team of 4 people with no engineers or designers made a business case to launch sitewide filters on Etsy.com. After hearing our story, you'll walk away with a toolbox of tips and techniques from product management and analytics that will enable you, your product team, and finally, your company to say yes.

When you structure your content well, legacy content becomes a strength rather than a challenge. Once upon a time, our team built content for social media using beautiful imagery and engaging messaging, but even the best content was forgotten once it fell off people’s timelines. After more than five years on Facebook, we restructured our website to bring in this high-performing content. Two years after that, that structure was able to drive an API to use that content in a chatbot. This is the story of the National Cancer Institute’s Smokefree Chatbot, and how one team used structured content across the years. Learn how planning ahead by structuring your content is one of the best gifts you can give your future self.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” --Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO As information architects and designers, privacy is part of the legacy we will pass down to future generations through the systems we build today. We influence social norms on what personal information can be (or should be) shared by whom, when, how, and for what purpose. Therefore, we have an ethical responsibility to make these privacy design decisions purposefully and based on evidence. In our talk, we will build the case for why we need a gateway that deliberately bridges the gap between academic research and design practice as it relates to end user privacy in social technologies. Dr. Jen Romano Bergstrom, President of UXPA and Director of User Experience at Bridgewater Associates, will give an industry-based perspective of the importance of privacy to the fields of information architecture and design based on her own experience and on recent news media events (e.g., Cambridge Analytica, 23andMe, GDPR). Drs. Xinru Page and Pamela Wisniewski, two privacy researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction academic community, will present an overview of relevant research from their field that connect to these recent events. They will engage with the audience on how we might work together to create this gateway in a collective effort to respect end users’ privacy and promote a sense of joint social responsibility across industry and academia.