Session type: Main Conference Talk

No other role at your company spends time and effort evangelizing themselves. Developers aren’t making PowerPoints to explain to execs why it’s important to hire specialized, trained developers. QA isn’t holding meetings to ask for enough time to cycle through their complete and important process. It’s just us and it’s making us look weird and whiny. More importantly, it’s rarely working. This workshop will examine the pitfalls of evangelism and what actions we can take instead. We’ll be focusing on who and how many UX experts we should hire, the role of UX managers and leadership, processes, workflows, tools, and improving collaboration between UX and our cross-functional teammates. We’ll also learn how to measure the positive effects correctly integrating UX practitioners and processes has on DevOps.

“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.

OR: Why You Should Build a Larger Taxonomy Than You Think You Need Most of the time, vocabulary (taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology) development is done for a specific purpose: to index a bunch of documents, structure website navigation, arrange products for e-commerce, and similar project scopes. But the process of building and validating a vocabulary (as an exercise in and of itself) can circumscribe a domain in a structured way useful for modeling information environments – perhaps in a broader context than is necessary for your project as currently instantiated. Having such a structure in place can provide a framework for future projects and connections to relevant external resources – and is a useful jumping-off point for validation to narrow the domain for a particular project scope. This validation step is crucial to this process: the negotiation between taxonomic thinking and the point of view of subject matter experts, users, content owners, and other stakeholders. In this talk, I will discuss how the process of vocabulary construction – and validation! – can help outline and structure a domain, be a paradigm for discovery, and define the scope of your project within the larger domain so delimited.

Many of us are daunted when we first think about inclusive design and the scale of the challenges that face us. We don't need to be afraid. This talk is an introduction to inclusive design, its history, current state, and its future in the context of user experience design. I discuss how accessibility and UX relate to each other, as well as some first steps, examples, and resources to get started and have an immediate impact as soon as you go back to work. Finally, I will discuss some approaches and frameworks, and how to think about inclusive UX design as you begin and progress in your journey. Suitable for anyone who wants to create a more inclusive world.

As organizations become more customer-centric, it’s time for designers to grow. Those who have demonstrated value are ready to become leaders and drive change within their organizations. But does leadership mean you have to stop designing? Absolutely not. As a leader, you’ll apply your skills and processes towards solving a new variety of problems, with amplified complexity. These challenges require insight into the organization and how it operates, so you can bring everyone together and solve user needs while also meeting business objectives.

In this presentation, Andy examines the varying landscapes and challenges of being a design leader. You’ll learn how to lead no matter where you are in your career as well as explore practical takeaways for maturing the design function within your organization and understanding your role in making it happen.