Do you run workshops around alignment, new strategies and concept generation? This workshop will cover how to improve your ability to lead design conversations through clear and productive facilitation skills and how to empower teams to comfortably lead creative initiatives.
Throughout the workshop, we will be sharing practical stories in the form of lightning talks and guiding participants in hands-on exercises. Each section will cover key components of preparing yourself and your audience and allow participants to craft their own tools/methods for running successful exercises with their own teams.
We will also highlight some of the benefits of sharpening these skills and how they will lead to stronger research, more fortified relationships with your team, stakeholders and the potential to grow your career.
Attendees will learn how to:
Facilitators will also share victories, pitfalls and tips/tricks to preparing for the worst, navigating difficult personalities, and the ability to take people on an inspiring journey that lead to successful outcomes.
Prerequisite: This workshop is a good fit for attendees who have had some experience participating in or facilitating a workshop before.
Discovery is the portion of the project that incorporates research, analysis, exploration, and planning to align teams around a foundation. This foundation is the bedrock of subsequent design activities. It gives design teams a way to answer questions and validate their ideas. It reminds project participants what’s in scope and out of scope. It constitutes the collective background knowledge informing your specific product. Great discovery phases make for great projects. This workshop will help participants craft the perfect discovery phase.
Take-aways:
Despite the fact that over 80% of websites collect analytics data, it is almost never systematically used to support user experience. In this workshop, we show how to make your UX practice more effective by combining the quantitative power of behavioral web analytics with the qualitative power of traditional UX methodologies.
The full-day workshop will cover theory of combining web analytics and UX practices, practical training on how to use analytics, and a case study describing how analytics was used for a niche ecommerce site during a significant redesign effort.
Attendees at the end of the day will:
How do we pick ideas and features to build in our Apps? It is a little bit like the game we may have played in Kindergarten, “Duck, Duck, Goose,” where we are waiting for the someone to pick our idea and then we chase them around.
The problem is we need to get an idea in front of our potential users, stake holders, or business owners as soon as possible, and hopefully before we spend loads of time on an minimum viable product(MVP).
Prototyping allows us to test ideas quickly and determine whether they work or not, before even deciding to code. In this workshop, we will explore ways to test our ideas on paper before turning to any software tools. Once our ideas begin to take shape, then we will use Apple’s Keynote software to test basic screens and even UI animations. Last, we will use Apple’s Xcode software to create interactive Storyboards that can be used on an iOS device to allow a user to test our ideas.
Topics Covered:
No prior knowledge is expected of sketching, Keynote, or Xcode. Bring some spare paper and pens to sketch with and a Mac loaded with the latest version of Xcode and Keynote, if you would like to follow along. Lesson files will be provided.
This workshop is based on our experience working with people in many kinds of companies, organizations and communities who are not only trying to improve results, but the culture and conversations from which those results are born.
Most often, attempts to change an organization’s structure or process succeed only to the extent that they take root in the way people relate to one another and to the larger purpose that brings them together. Therefore, if you are working for change at any level, you face the challenges of working with groups of people.
In this one-day workshop, you will experience three methods or tools that can help move a group from debate to dialog, from repeating patterns to creating something new.
You are invited to step away for a day of working and learning with a wonderfully diverse group of people. The workshop will mix Midwest UX attendees – design professionals from all over the region – with people from the Pittsburgh area who work for change in companies, organizations, schools, neighborhoods, schools, and larger systems. We are planning activities so you not only learn from the material we offer, but from the experience of learning as a group.
Through activities and discussion, you will learn a mix of tools for different aspects of facilitated group work. These include:
Prerequisites: Please wear comfortable clothes and bring a notebook!
“There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.” — Benjamin Franklin
Most digital products today exist as a mesh of people, ideas, and connected devices. As technology becomes ever more ubiquitous and shapeless, understanding the purpose, vision, and core activities of our organizations is more important than ever.
A good model can help us articulate and share our understanding by creating an unambiguous snapshot of the “isness” of an organization. These models can serve as a foundational tool to craft better products, brands, and content strategies.
Workshop participants will learn to create such a model in the form of a rigid concept map. Rigid concept maps are a type of diagram made of connected nouns and verbs — little “propositions” of knowledge. These propositions combine to tell a larger story about our organizations and activities by visually describing complex systems with clear language. Concept maps help us represent domain expertise and are a great way to coordinate knowledge between stakeholders, subject matter experts, and designers.
You will learn a five-step process for creating rigid concept maps alone or with a team, as well as important constraints to maximize clarity and discovery. Next, you’ll be guided through a series of activities to develop and refine your maps. Finally, we’ll practice using our maps to tell a story and coordinate understanding with our team.
All workshop activities are done with analog tools including sticky notes, markers, and poster paper. However, the process translates extremely well to digital forms. The beauty of this modeling technique is in its simplicity and adaptability — participants might choose to add a lightweight version of the technique to their own personal process, or bring the process back to serve as the foundation of a new project.
Takeaways:
Prerequisite: The presenter would prefer that you bring note-taking devices with a small footprint (notebooks, tablets) over laptops if possible.
Your boss just told you: we absolutely need to be on the Apple Watch. You’ve heard this before. Last year it was ‘responsive.’ Before that, ‘an app.’ What’s next?
Normally you’d start sketching interfaces. Dummy boxes and lorem ipsum. Offer wireframe sacrifices to the gods of development. Your designs are cool but secretly you know: whether on wearable, mobile, desktop, or Vidichron 2000, *content* is still king. If you could only design the content before the interface, users could explore their favorite subject any way they want – a wibby-wobbly journey across time and space and devices.
Ask us how. How to restructure, reuse, and remix content, making it easier to find, explore, and share. How to involve stakeholders early, and avoid that 11th hour dump-truck of PDFs screwing up your beautiful design.
Design and development, meet information architecture and content strategy. This is an introduction to content modeling and planning. Working with your people and your content management system to bring fascinating journeys to every device.
We’re hands-on. You’ll map out a subject domain, atomize content, and draft a plan to take it to the CMS. We’ll show you how they do it at the BBC and non-profit orgs, and give you tools and secrets to take home. (Our biggest secret: start with content, not interfaces)
Whether you’re waterfall, Agile, Lean UX, or some new religion, take our repeatable process for content collaboration, research, and structuring. Your boss will feel smarter, and your content will be ready for the next digital doodad.
This workshop is for anyone working with content. This means you.
Let’s learn!
When brainstorming concepts or asking users for feedback during research sessions, we as UX professionals have one primary goal – to make the best product and user experience possible. So why on Earth should we intentionally try to come up with “bad ideas”?
Bad ideas can allow us to see design problems in new and interesting ways to help us as designers get out of design ruts, foster creativity, and develops rich insights on taboo research topics. By looking at our designs from a new angle we can critically examine current UX standards, dive deeper into understanding user pain points, and step outside our normal design-thinking process.
By attending this workshop you’ll be able to:
Pen to paper, mouse to wireframe, or keyboard to code — when it’s time to render your ideas, how can you be sure you’re designing the right thing?
By setting design goals early and agreeing on them with the people involved, you can be confident you’re solving the right problem. Later, when you present your work, you have a framework for explaining your decisions.
Join a quick goal-setting workshop with fellow attendees and learn how to run one with your team. Work through an example project as you practice writing and refining goals. See how clearer goals lead to better designs.
This hands-on session is focused on taking your research questions and preparing a participatory design session that’s crafted to deliver the insights you seek. By participatory, we mean that users participate not only by talking, but by making. We’ve found that by engaging in activities where they make or assemble physical artifacts during the session, users are able to more easily recall subject matter and present their thoughts. Our participatory sessions consist of a set of activities that are chosen after we have established a clear understanding of what we want to learn. This session is centered on choosing that most effective set of activities.
Attendees will:
Sometimes we get so focused on winning small victories of the present – like sign-off on UX or design support – that we’re blindsided by larger issues from the overall business context. This case study tells the story of a team who experienced this first-hand and learned some lasting lessons as a result.
Like any good tale, the story features heroes, villains, and dramatic twists. Hear how product management and user experience joined forces to tackle a serious business problem. Learn how their field research with potential customers busted some big assumptions and uncovered an incredible opportunity. Then find out what happened when they presented that opportunity to an executive team wrestling with disruptive innovation.
This case study will illustrate:
Amazing design results start with a solid design practice. Over the last hundred or so years designers and design educators have established a foundation of skills, theory, and principles that give us a way of thinking about, talking about, and doing design.
Beginning with an overview of traditional design foundations from graphic design, industrial design, and architecture, this session will explore the evolution of the language of design as it tries to keep up with modern design practice and the types of things that designers are working on in the 21st century.
How can we describe the beauty, aesthetic values, and ethics of something that impacts the quality of our lives but we can’t see, like a social network. Design’s traditional critical language doesn’t adequately account for the aesthetic properties of these new kinds of design outputs and practices. We will explore a possible new framing and critical language that extends tradition and works to evolve how we think about, and do, design in the age of the network.
Attendees will learn:
The need to adapt and be flexible within project schedules and meetings has never been greater, but this is a soft skill not easily taught or quickly learned. It starts with team collaboration and trust while ultimately leading to idea generation and problem solving. Yield to the highest offer. Always say YES. Alway raise the bar. These are three of the core components to improvisation in comedy. They are also three pillars to a good collaborative environment.
This hands on session will explore the fundamentals to improv as a means to strengthen teams across organizations. Participants will walk away with:
We’re looking to get up and shake the cobwebs off our bodies. Through Bodystorming and other improv games participants will engage with the space around them and will learn the basics of improvisational comedy and how it can directly translate back to work in the office and with clients alike.
Designing for digital products and other forms of interactions is becoming more about the optimal balance of the science behind the product (technology, connectivity and data computing) and the art of the actual experience (human cognition, logical flow, sensory experience, content and context).
Humanism in this regard is the use of measurable behavioral data, empirical analysis, dynamic mental models, and rational decision-making methodologies to solve problems that alleviate and improve human experiences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – as it involves creating computer models of “brains” based on how human beings consciously solve problems using step-by-step deductive reasoning and our growing knowledge of the world — will be an increasingly large part of the digital products we use every day at home and at work since it delivers the right balance of “art and science”.
In the next decade or sooner, technology and technology-abled products and experiences will be able to detect or predict each person’s mental, emotional and physical conditions, tailoring the interface design to adapt to each user’s specific goals, interests and needs. Interaction design will be triggered by humanistic data as it combines the optimal balance of artistic and scientific inquiries.
We know craft is important, but how does it fit into the ambiguity and complexity (or wickedness) of enterprise UX? What is the role and place for craft in designing enterprise software? There’s massive scales of objects, convoluted processes with buyers (not users), and politically charged organizational matters. Whew! My talk proposes shifting our notion of craft from “precious object” towards “facilitative anchor”, guiding crucial conversations about what matters most: goals, values, criteria. Thus, craft becomes a tool for the designer to achieve alignment and provoke useful dialogues.
To demonstrate, I will share 3 stories from my career at Oracle, Citrix, and CloudPhysics, of how I used craft to clarify issues and build relationships. Each offers slight variations on the “facilitative anchor.” The first is about a “reactive” model of craft. The second is what I call “interpretive” craft. And the final story involves “collaborative” making. Craft becomes a path to teamwork, and a model of design leadership through making.
Key takeaways:
Many stroke survivors lose use of one of their arms, requiring prolonged and costly physical therapy beyond what is covered by most health insurance plans. Through co-design with patients in their homes, our team continues to research and design a personalized system for patients’ homes that will cost under $500 when completed.
In this lightning talk, I will explain our methodology for building patients’ trust to design a customized system for and with them, using their input to design a system they’ll be proud to have in their home. The resulting system is a set of 3D-printed objects that are manipulated with the patient’s impaired arm in guided exercises, which are observed and assessed by a machine learning algorithm using an integrated Kinect camera. As the patient interacts with the system over time, the system’s targeted therapy for the patient will improve based upon the patient’s specific impairment.
It has been documented that a well-designed experience attracts and retains more unique visitors, as well as repeat users.
As a UX Professional, you have discovered the benefits of investing time in research and understanding the needs of your user, now you must marry your findings with a successful visual design to create a complete user experience. In this session you discover fundamental rules behind design, many that were established hundreds of years ago, but are still relevant to visual experiences in our modern world today.
This case study presents design research methodology to understand user experience and explore design in collaboration with users. I will present along with my teammate, Sapna Singh.
Description of issue/topic: Through a design studio at OSU, our team of graduate design, business and occupational therapy students undertook a 14-week class in which we worked with a group of five residents at a senior living facility to co-design a new shoe shopping experience.
How we will address the topic: The presentation will begin with background information into the growing 65+ demographic. Our presentation will provide supporting statistics as well as information about the needs and issues of this growing group.
Then we will discuss why our team selected the topic of clothing, and shoe shopping in particular. We will introduce the co-design process and discuss how we implemented this research method with the elder co-designers, challenges we faced with this new (to them/us) method, and recommendations for future work in this method.
Our presentation will summarize our insight into the elders’ current shoe-shopping experience and our learnings about their ideal experience.
Finally, we will share the process prototype we developed and recommendations for further research.
What attendees will learn:
We’re at the dawn of consumer virtual reality becoming real and mainstream. How do we go about designing for it? While we’re still struggling to master responsive design and the chaos of different sized screens, VR blows the lid off the whole problem by wrapping the screen around you. Now we have screens we’re inside of as well.
This new type of experience presents new problems and opportunities. I’ll discuss common problems including simulator sickness, the screen door effect, and the fragmentation of input devices. I’ll describe some good starting patterns and practices for great VR experiences. Lastly, I’ll cover what are the big exciting problems waiting to be solved.
Participants will leave with an understanding of:
Many innovation initiatives are well-intentioned failures. Not because the ideas aren’t good or the people running the initiatives aren’t capable, but because execution is messy and unpredictable; poor execution can result in failure of even the best ideas.
To solve this problem for ourselves, we developed Practical Innovation. It’s a playbook of activities, tools and processes for generating, evaluating and executing ideas. As importantly, it’s a framework for distilling, visualizing and sharing ideas – helping people inside your organization see what you’re saying.
By envisioning what could be and focusing on what will be, you can create the most valuable, viable and sustainable product possible. And along the way build both consensus and momentum.
Our session will focus on:
During our session, participants will learn the fundamentals of:
The user is more than what’s in front of the screen. In this talk, I’ll show how tools can become natural extensions of the user and explain the neuroscience behind the process. But I’ll also show that tools change us, and in fact even change how we see the world. Some philosophers say that this is the most natural thing ever, and hence call us “natural-born cyborgs” (Andy Clark).
Attendees will learn:
Want to make a cool product? Think that “cool” is subjective and elusive? Not so. Karen studies cool — how cool is that? — and will share her framework for creating engagement through cool experiences.
Keynote
Jesse wrote the book on game design, but there’s so much value in it for designers of all kinds. You won’t want to miss Jesse reveal his secrets of game design… and discover how these secrets can inform your work.
We all know that testing your product with real people is critical for success — that’s not new information. But, regardless of whether you’re a researcher, designer, product manager, or executive, it can be challenging to make sense of user feedback once you have it. Is all feedback good feedback? What happens next? In terms of the product, how do you decide what stays and what goes?
In this hands-on session, I’ll recount lessons learned from design research in the automotive, DOD, and video game industries. I’ll share insights for making sense of the complex but invaluable resource that is User Feedback, with methods for recording, weighing and prioritizing feedback data.
The process behind making a blockbuster film is similar to creating a meaningful website or app. Through the lens of cinema, we’ll walk through practical ways that UX design teams can work together to deliver an award-winning final product. Whether you’re making a low-budget indie for a non-profit or the next summer smash for a Fortune 500, we can learn a thing or two from film.
We’ll take two approaches: (1) a deep look at the filmmaking process and the lessons learned from over a century of refining roles and (2) the challenged wrought by the independent and digital film revolution and its similarities to the commoditization of modern web and application design.
What we’ll cover:
You’ll come away with:
The world of startups and the speed of technology change creates new challenges for practitioners of interaction design. The shift of value creation “from atoms to bits” in our networked economy seems to make it more difficult to predict success; so many startups fail. Developing genuinely new ideas requires peer-to-peer collaboration across disparate domains of expertise. Teams morph quickly across the phases of development as well as the phases of maturity of an enterprise, as it evolves from startup to market entrant to major player. The rapid evolution of technology pressures designers as well as makers to constantly update their tactical skills. As a result, interaction designers must gain these pragmatic skills, which are the focus of this talk:
Whether you're looking to boost your skills or tackle your next challenge at work, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other designers at the mid-point in their careers.
This session will be facilitated by Geoff Barnes, Lead Designer at MAYA Design.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to UX or looking to change directions in your career, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with others who are just entering the field.
This session will be facilitated by Ian DeJesus, Interaction Designer & Researcher at Bessemer Alliance.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to managing a UX team or a seasoned UX leader, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other UX team managers.
This session will be facilitated by Carol Smith, Watson Design Team Manager at IBM.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you’re a freelance designer or a team of one at your company, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other independent designers.
This session will be facilitated by Chris Roberts, Lead Designer at Rivers Agile Solutions.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Mingle with a select group of premier design companies. Explore new career opportunities and learn more about these UX-driven companies:
These companies are interested in meeting you and many will have job opportunities to talk to you about!
Whether you're looking to boost your skills or tackle your next challenge at work, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other designers at the mid-point in their careers.
This session will be facilitated by Geoff Barnes, Lead Designer at MAYA Design.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to UX or looking to change directions in your career, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with others who are just entering the field.
This session will be facilitated by Ian DeJesus, Interaction Designer & Researcher at Bessemer Alliance.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to managing a UX team or a seasoned UX leader, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other UX team managers.
This session will be facilitated by Carol Smith, Watson Design Team Manager at IBM.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you’re a freelance designer or a team of one at your company, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other independent designers.
This session will be facilitated by Chris Roberts, Lead Designer at Rivers Agile Solutions.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're looking to boost your skills or tackle your next challenge at work, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other designers at the mid-point in their careers.
This session will be facilitated by Geoff Barnes, Lead Designer at MAYA Design.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to UX or looking to change directions in your career, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with others who are just entering the field.
This session will be facilitated by Ian DeJesus, Interaction Designer & Researcher at Bessemer Alliance.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you're new to managing a UX team or a seasoned UX leader, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other UX team managers.
This session will be facilitated by Carol Smith, Watson Design Team Manager at IBM.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
Whether you’re a freelance designer or a team of one at your company, this discussion group will give you the opportunity to exchange ideas, ask tough questions, and provide suggestions to familiar dilemmas as you engage with other independent designers.
This session will be facilitated by Chris Roberts, Lead Designer at Rivers Agile Solutions.
NOTE: Advanced sign up is required to attend this session. Spaces will be limited.
