Workshop type: Online workshop

In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: we can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice design successfully in an era of complexity and rapid change, we must get better at planning. To start, we must let go of “the plan” and embrace a dynamic way of planning that’s social, tangible, agile, and reflective. We must engage our colleagues in business and technology to align use cases, prototypes, and roadmaps with culture, governance, and process. In order to design sustainable products, services, and experiences, we must also design the context. In this workshop, we’ll mix presentation and conversation with “planning together” exercises that invite us all to share stories, solve problems, and invent better tools for information architecture and strategic design. Topics covered in this half-day workshop include: * Why planning is central to information architecture and user experience. * The relationship between strategy, architecture, design, and planning. * How to integrate planning with Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking practices. * Tools and methods for individuals, teams, and cross-functional collaborations. * How to make a business case for planning and strategic design. * Who (which roles and departments) should be involved in planning. * How to get better at estimating cost, time, and risk. * When you should be willing to change goals, objectives, and metrics. * How to plan while implementing, improvising, and learning.

As designers and researchers, we spend much of our time facilitating conversations – articulating design decisions, getting alignment from stakeholders, interviewing customers, and any number of other activities centered around communicating with people and actually hearing them. It comes as no surprise that to become good at this, you must actually practice the art of facilitating and listening. But how do you practice something so ambiguous and unpredictable? Like jazz, facilitation is an act of improvisation supported by an invisible, learnable framework. Using methods from jazz improvisation, this talk breaks down qualities of great facilitation into bite-sized methods. Attendees will take away components of good facilitation and practical exercises for developing skills in each area.

In this workshop, we will introduce our Data Analysis Cookbooks, a set of open-source Jupyter Notebooks that can be used for qualitative and quantitative data analysis without an extensive knowledge of programming. Cookbooks provide low-code, templated building blocks for assessing and addressing data quality issues, performing simple statistical analyses, identifying correlations, and visualizing data. Our focus for the workshop will not be to make everyone a data scientist in a day (obviously) but to empower participants to do more with data in less time, whether from qualitative user interviews, log files, or surveys. Participants will get introduced to Python, Pandas, MathPlotLib, and Jupyter Notebooks through a series of hands-on exercises that emphasize adaption of Cookbooks and recipes instead of custom code creation. Requirements: Laptop Anaconda (free download), Python Version 3.7 Outline * Introduction to Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Data Science * High-level overview and framework to situate the workshop activities * ‘Just Enough to Get By’ Introduction to Python, Pandas, and Jupyter Notebooks * Just enough because the cookbooks will contain much of the needed code snippets and how to use them, so participants only need a few basics to get started * Data Assessment, Cleansing, and Preparation * Best practices for assessing and cleansing data * Know your data * Metadata types * Data quality metrics * Manual data assessment * Hone your data set * Demo and hands-on exercises using Python, Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks * Load data * Combine data sets * View data table and columns * Manage missing data and empty values * Validate data values * Data Analysis * More demos and hands-on * Python techniques for slicing strings * Isolating and counting values * Simple statistical analysis using Pandas and NumPy to calculate: * Mean * Median * Variance * Ranges * Creating correlations Each of the hands-on analysis sections will include simple data visualizations using MathPlotLib and guided discussion on interpreting results

Flexibility within project dynamics is a key to success - be it adapting to project dynamics, client needs, or interpersonal relationships. Improvisational theater offers many constructs to “go with the flow” and build on our teammates ideas, successes, and even where we stumble. This workshop teaches the foundations of improv and provides direct correlations to UX research, design, and collaboration. Practitioners of all skill levels are welcome, and no previous performing experience is required. The goals are to use active listening and body language through improv as a way to improve our collaboration and product design. Different people sense things differently and our perceptions craft our reality. How might improv support this collaboration across information architecture throughout product design. Product design does not happen in a silo with a single individual or skillset making all the decisions. Improvisational theater brings performers from all walks of life together in the creation of something unique, fun, and enjoyable. By adapting these lessons to product design, we can better collaborate across UX, design, content, development, our businesses, and users.