Time(s)
Description
As technologists, one of the hardest things to remember is that we’re not our users and our assumptions can easily extend into our work. If we aren’t careful, we can easily end up designing products based on our assumptions and biases rather than insights from the actual audience. If we want to build better products, we need to include our target audience in the creation process and listen to their feedback every step of the way. In this talk, I’ll share what my team and I learned from a project where we worked directly with teens experiencing various forms of bullying.
Key takeaways from the session:
You’ll learn what types of biases to watch out for, how to challenge your own assumptions, how to engage hard-to-reach audiences, and how the user-driven insights we gained uncovered the struggles unique to their community and informed our design decisions and product iterations. Whether or not you work in UX design, this talk will help you create solutions that will ultimately be valuable for all humans.
About the speakers
Ariba is an innovation, design and UX strategist who builds inclusive and ethical products, empowers teams and facilitates dialogues where curiosity and experimentation can flourish. As a woman of color thriving with hearing loss, advocating for marginalized voices and communities means a great deal to her. She believes in designing for inclusion, prioritizing accessibility, building with an ethical code and being mindful of whose experiences we are excluding.
She is the Director of Innovation at the Ad Council, where she is focused on scaling design thinking and agile practices, keeping an eye on emerging tech trends, creating digital products for social good and nurturing a culture of innovation.
In her spare time, she teaches UX Design to NYC high school students through the NYOT Program. She is a member of Women in Innovation, IXDA, Within, Global CFP day and Shine Bootcamp. She enjoys lifting, knitting and exploring the outdoors.
