Workshop Registration Check-In
Morning Workshops
The term ''strategy'' is sorely abused. In business, strategy is invoked to describe everything from the analysis that shapes an entire organization, to a modest plan for a bit of upcoming work. Experience design professionals aren't immune to this disease. We are frequently inconsistent in how we talk about strategy among ourselves, let alone how we talk about it with our business colleagues. The net effect? How our business partners conceive of strategy often fails to sync up with how we actually communicate about it.
This workshop examines the lingua franca of effective strategic communications in business. We'll look at what experience design professionals can do to communicate credibly, clearly, and persuasively about the subtleties that are vital to effective experience design strategy. Attendees will learn common frameworks and elements of effective strategic communication, what's different about communicating experience design strategy, and examples of what works and what doesn't. And it's not all talk. We'll also do hands-on activities to create effective communication tools for you own in-progress strategic design work.
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Leah Buley
Author, Consultant
Leah Buley is the author of the book The User Experience Team of One and the founder of Leah Buley Co., a design consulting and advisory firm. Bridging the roles of practitioner and analyst, Leah conducts research on the user experience field, and uses what she learns to help companies evaluate where they stand competitively with respect to design. Before starting her own business, Leah worked as a research analyst at Forrester, examining the evolving role of design in business. Prior to Forrester, Leah was a design strategist at Intuit and an experience design lead at Adaptive Path. Leah's talks and workshops have a reputation for being informative, high-energy, and just a little bit quirky.
CloseDesign Thinking and Agile - friends or foes? How do they map to each other and work together? Participate in this highly interactive workshop to develop personas and empathy maps, then deliver a playback by acting out these personas. Develop hills (statements of intent) ''as is'' and ''to be scenarios'' user stories and prioritize all this. Play the Candy game to figure out how to in increase your team's velocity. Develop a greater understanding of how to think from a user perspective.
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Vera Rhoads
Senior Managing Consultant, UX, IBM
Vera brings strong expertise in cognitive behavioral research to enhance the user experience. She has extensive experience in IBM's Design Thinking methodology, and has led numerous Design Thinking Workshops in IBM Public Sector. Vera has been working on improving the usability and optimizing web solutions for large-scale Fortune 500 companies, international finance organizations and non-profits (Fannie Mae, AARP, IMF) for 19 years. Her specialties include research, full life cycle user experience (UX), Design Thinking, Customer Experience (CX), content strategy, web strategy and operations, social media, usability, branding, multi-lingual globalization and localization, web content management and search.
She is CUA and CXA certified, PMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-ACP, ITIL and SCRUM master certified. Vera has been teaching UX at the Graduate School of UMD College Park for 12 years.
CloseGreat designers pick their battles strategically. They choose design projects that have the greatest potential to delight their customers and help their organization succeed. Great designers also know how to deflect distractions and say 'no' or 'not now' in a winning way. In this highly practical, full-day workshop Ben Judy will help you:
- - Work on projects that matter most
- - Align design strategy to your organization's goals
- - Benchmark design team performance
- - Develop a set of user-centric design principles that are right for your team
- - Process and evaluate design work requests with consistency
- - Right-size design project commitments for your team
- - Communicate the right 'yes' and the right 'no' with empathy
Ben Judy
Senior Manager, XD, Saxony Partners
Ben Judy is passionate about designing emotionally meaningful digital experiences. Currently he brings veteran XD skills and thought leadership to clients via Saxony Partners, a consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas. Previously, Ben designed and strategized with innovative design teams at Intuit, Novation, CBRE, and Sabre. Ben has presented at such venues as SXSW, Big (D)esign, UX STRAT (2015), and also talks to himself a lot. His not-so-secret superhero identity Captain Clarity (the 'Ambiguity Assassin') helps organizations prioritize design opportunities collaboratively in the midst of complexity and chaos. Ben is a happily converted Texan, but only says ''y'all'' ironically.
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Afternoon Workshops
Conducting market research and analysis is a crucial component of the practice of UX strategy. You want to know what's out there, what's worked, and what hasn't. This requires firsthand knowledge of the good and bad user experiences and business models provided by your competitors. If done thoroughly, the research can provide a treasure trove of insight into current trends and outdated manifestations of mental models. Take this workshop to experience a deep dive into the subject matter with both lectures and hands-on exercises. We'll practice with a made-up value proposition of an online product so that you can learn the steps you need to take for informing strategic UX-centric decision-making.
Jaime Levy will give a free copy of her book to the first 20 people who sign up for her workshop.
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Jaime Levy
Author, College Professor, UX Strategist
Jaime Levy is an author, college professor and User Experience strategist based in Los Angeles, California. Her book ''UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want'' was published last year by O'Reilly Media. Jaime heads a consultancy called JLR Interactive that caters to startups and enterprises, helping them transform their business concepts into innovative and scalable online solutions. She conducts workshops worldwide and also teaches a graduate level UX design and strategy course in the Viterbi engineering school at the University of Southern California. To learn more about Jaime Levy, look her up on Wikipedia and LinkedIn.
CloseProducts and services are increasingly interconnected. Ecosystems are the new competitive advantage. The winners will be determined by how well their offerings fit with each other and into people's lives.
The use of systematic, visual representations exposes previously unseen opportunities for improvement and for growth. You've may have encountered some of the various approaches already in use - customer journey maps, service blueprints, experience maps, and more.
This workshop introduces the concept of alignment diagrams, a category of diagram that includes a range of visual tools to inform strategy. In this session, you'll learn fundamental principles of mapping and have the chance to apply them in hands-on exercises.
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Jim Kalbach
Author, Head of Customer Success, MURAL
Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Success at MURAL, an online whiteboard for remote collaboration. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier, LexisNexis, and Citrix. Jim is the author the recent bestselling book Mapping Experiences (O'Reilly, 2016). He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.
CloseNo matter what you call it -- user on-boarding, first-time use, the out-of-box experience -- a user's first experience with your product is critical. Designers need to ensure that people get up and running quickly and understand the benefits the product delivers. But what's the best way to do that? Come join a network of design leaders for a discussion of the fundamentals and best practices of delivering a memorable, engaging first-use experience.
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Kylie Tuosto
Experience Design Manager, Intuit
Kylie Tuosto is a design thinker and creative problem solver. She started her career at the Stanford d.school, where she studied mechanical engineering and product design. Along the way, she fell in love with interface design, and now she's a design lead at Intuit. Early in her career, Kylie focused primarily on mobile app design, but these days she leads a team dedicated to new user acquisition and onboarding. Kylie is passionate about turning digital interactions into magical and meaningful experiences. She's a diehard Fireworks fan, and when she's not sketching or prototyping, she likes bingeing on Netflix with her husband or playing with her labradoodle, Milo.
CloseNo matter what you call it -- user on-boarding, first-time use, the out-of-box experience -- a user's first experience with your product is critical. Designers need to ensure that people get up and running quickly and understand the benefits the product delivers. But what's the best way to do that? Come join a network of design leaders for a discussion of the fundamentals and best practices of delivering a memorable, engaging first-use experience.
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Stephen Gay
Group Design Manager, Intuit
Stephen Gay is a design strategist and innovation catalyst at Intuit where he leads business teams through the early phases of design thinking and identifies new opportunities for mobile and platform products. A consultant with over 15 years experience in user centered design at companies like Motorola, Sapient, and HannaHodge, he believes deep customer empathy and rapid experimentation are critical to sparking delightful products. His current focus is building mobile, social, and global Intuit products.
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Morning Presentations
The boundaries between user experience, customer experience, and service design are quickly disappearing - as customer expectations evolve and digital drives change in every aspect of how people interact with companies. But many organizations have not caught up, still taking piecemeal approaches that thwart their own ambitions for experience design leadership.
In this presentation, Leah will share data from her recent research on the state of user experience, trends in the service design industry, and what she learned about the state of CX as a former analyst. We'll examine where these industries are collectively headed, what meaningful differences between the fields remain, which no longer matter, and what you need to do to be ready.
CloseLeah Buley
Author, Consultant
Leah Buley is the author of the book The User Experience Team of One and the founder of Leah Buley Co., a design consulting and advisory firm. Bridging the roles of practitioner and analyst, Leah conducts research on the user experience field, and uses what she learns to help companies evaluate where they stand competitively with respect to design. Before starting her own business, Leah worked as a research analyst at Forrester, examining the evolving role of design in business. Prior to Forrester, Leah was a design strategist at Intuit and an experience design lead at Adaptive Path. Leah's talks and workshops have a reputation for being informative, high-energy, and just a little bit quirky.
CloseFor a long time, GoPro is known as an action camera company, and when people think of GoPro, they think of athletes wearing camera mounts and the gripping videos that come after. However, GoPro is ultimately a storytelling company. Users want to easily tell their story from the massive amount of footage they captured. The missing link between over-capture and the stories we share, is software.
GoPro's software journey is both a growth story and a saga of finding our North Star. In the landscape of media management, content strategy, what is our point of view?
In this presentation, Ha Phan will present a case study of how one R&D team built and evangelized design experiments to make Storytelling the focus for GoPro Software.
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Ha Phan
Principal UX Designer
GoPro Software and Services
Ha Phan is UX Lead for Storytelling at GoPro. She's led several blue-sky initiatives and manages productizing advanced technology for the Software & Services team. Since 2015, Ha has filed 10+ patents for GoPro. Aside from her Iphone, Ha always carries at least 2 other cameras in her backpack, a GoPro camera and a competitor camera for research. Ha lives in Solana Beach, a beach town north of San Diego county. Online, she tweets at @hpdailyrant where she compares Product Strategy to Game of Thrones.
CloseStrategy is changing in fundamental ways. Competing today requires a new mental model of how businesses work. But we are stuck in obsolete practices that optimize short term gains at the expense of long term value.
All the signs are there: experience design is the new strategic advantage. For one, the notion of customer-centricity and design thinking has reached mainstream business. Also, the notion of ''transient advantage'', as outlined by Rita Gunther McGrath, requires a new, experience-driven perspective on value creation.
But perhaps most striking is the strategic concept of creating ''shared value''. This movement literally shifts focus from maximizing shareholder to creating benefits for society as a whole. And it demands an intense focus on the human experience at the strategic level.
These examples represent huge opportunities for experience design. Never before have our skills been needed, whether businesses realize it or not. Now is the time to act. We must continue making experience design a central topic in strategy.
This talk describes the types of changes we are witnessing in strategy and the overall role of experience design. It highlights ''shared value'' as the next, dominant strategic model. The presentation will also offer practical advice on how experience design can better drive strategic conversations.
CloseJim Kalbach
Author, Head of Customer Success, MURAL
Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Success at MURAL, an online whiteboard for remote collaboration. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier, LexisNexis, and Citrix. Jim is the author the recent bestselling book Mapping Experiences (O'Reilly, 2016). He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.
CloseAfternoon Presentations
While many UX leaders have described what they believe constitutes good UX, there has never been either the available data or consensus of opinion to research and define exceptionality. The UX Awards' proprietary data of hundreds of submissions, thousands of crowdvotes and many dozens of senior judges' perspectives provide revealing, actionable insights into exactly what defines and enables great UX. This talk reveals both insights and concrete guidelines in exactly how to achieve exceptional UX, based on rigorous analysis of five years' of UX Awards ( UXAwards.org ) case study submissions and winners, and illustrated by supporting case study examples.
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Beverly May
Author, Managing Director, UX Awards
Beverly is the Executive Director of the UX Awards, the premier global awards for exceptional UX. Beverly also teaches design thinking, UX and product through OxfordTech.us and GeneralAssemb.ly, and she consults on UX and product strategy.
In 2015, Beverly was CTO & CPO at MIxIt, a social video mixing company in Berlin. Prior to that, she founded and led Oxford Tech, a boutique UX and product strategy consultancy in NYC. Beverly has helped create, optimize and launch hundreds of digital initiatives for Amplify, T-Mobile, Pitney Bowes, Hearst, Rodale, Diageo, Nike, MCI, RealAge, Novartis and others, and has founded several companies.
Beverly has an MBA from Oxford University, an MS from NYU's ITP Program, and a BA from University of Toronto.
CloseOmnichannel is a buzzword, and it's also much more than that. Omnichannel implies a seamless customer experience, and makes understanding, measuring, and optimizing that experience much more complicated. In an omnichannel world:
- personas become rich, nuanced, and complex
- customer journeys become convoluted, crossing online and offline, buying stage, channel, message, and medium back and forth before being completed - often offline
- Technology integration requirements can become overwhelming
Matt (strategy and analytics) and Jon (experience and service design) will share four decision-making frameworks, developed from real-world client experiences with organizations like the American Red Cross, Sephora, Pep Boys, and others.
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Matt Wakeman
Senior Director, Analytics & Strategy
EPAM
Matt has invested two decades in pursuit of business and customer insight. His multi- disciplinary background gives him access to a large toolset when solving business problems - from data science to business strategy, voice of the customer methods to social network analysis, and digital analytics to visualization. Companies including Forrester Research, JP Morgan Chase, Penske, Revolution Health, and Pfizer have relied on his perspective. At EPAM, he leads a global team of analysts that translates data, analytical models and frameworks into tactical and strategic insights that drive enterprise clients' business outcomes.
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Jon Ashley
Managing Director, Experience Design
EPAM
Jon has spent the past 20 years combining his background in Communication, Design and Development into delivering strategic experience design consulting across a broad range of industry verticals. Clients past and present include McGraw-Hill, Thomson Reuters, Pfizer, Merck, Genentech, Hertz, Edmunds, PMI, K'NEX, AVON, MARS, Campbell's Soup, Citibank, UBS, Comcast and Liberty Global. At EPAM, Jon leads Service Design initiatives spanning online and offline touchpoints for key clients, crafting a customer journey that balances audience and business goals.
CloseAt first glance, UX and the Federal Reserve Bank seem polar opposites. We are all familiar with the recent rise of UX in the commercial sector. However, where does UX fit in a complex, quasi-government institution that carries its own share of public perceptions and cultural norms? How can UX come to the aid of our nation's central banking system and all of its customers? We'll discuss how our UX team took on this challenge, what we've learned from industry peers along the way, and how we are succeeding in UX, one user at a time.
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Calvin Robertson
UX Manager
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Calvin has 16+ years of design experience working for a variety of organizations, ranging from global brands to small businesses. He's held roles in marketing, enterprise IT, graphic design, UX and has an MBA. His unique understanding of design, technology and business has helped organizations transform projects into product experiences that are enjoyable for their customers and profitable for business.
In his current role, Calvin serves as the UX Manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, directly managing highly specialized employees delivering user research, user-centered design and user interface development to multiple business lines within the Bank.
CloseIt is not easy to change strategy in the first place. It is harder to do so in a product group that has a legacy of successful products for more than twenty years. The case study highlights how combination of various design thinking methodologies helped Office Leadership to see the opportunities around Mobile first productivity. The process of design workshops and hackathons changed the culture from grassroots level and influenced the experience strategy.
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Shikha Desai
Senior Designer, Microsoft
Shikha Desai is a Senior Designer at Microsoft with 15 years of industry experience in product design and design strategy. She has facilitated many innovation workshops, led several design sprints to create innovative product ideas and influence product strategy. She has participated in various hackathons as product leader of multi-disciplinary teams. She led multi-disciplinary design teams to create concepts that pushed boundaries of mature products as well as to deliver new experiences on multiple devices and platforms. Before Microsoft, she worked at Motorola and JPM Chase, where she used user centered design principles to create mobile and web-based solutions.
CloseLong live Rock and Roll! That crazy, beautiful, noisy, moving and evolving sonic force. Maker of babies, hippies, hairdos and social change. Rock and roll is more than just a genre of music; it entered the music scene to become a globally transformative power, forever changing the cultural landscape. Our UXSTRAT tribe (aka ''Rock Band'') is in the midst of doing the same to business, and in similarly interesting ways. Having already tickled the taboos of Sex (''Big Love'') and Drugs (''Getting High on Journey Mapping'') in previous talks, Ronnie rounds out the revered triumvirate with a rocking talk on rolling with UX Strategy. Get your earplugs out, flick on your BIC lighters on (or your smartphones), and warm up your vocals for a fun pre-Happy Hour Rock n' Roll jam session.
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Ronnie Battista
Practice Lead, Experience Design, Slalom Consulting
Ronnie is the Practice Lead for Experience Design at Slalom Consulting, and has worked with over 150 clients from C-suite strategic to the team tactical level. Ronnie served on the Board of UXPA as Director of Certification from 2010 - 2012 and was past-President of NJ UXPA. Ronnie co-created and is Program Director and Lead Adjunct Professor for the Rutgers Mini-Masters in User Experience Design, and teaches both core course and bespoke corporate CX training with the Rutgers School of Business Executive Education and Rutgers Executive MBA program. In his past life, Ronnie was the lead singer of Lucy Fur, a British punk band in the early 90s. His vocal talents have been described as sounding like a 'violent lounge singer'.
CloseMorning Presentations
Businesses are undergoing a transformation right now. Established industries are being disrupted by new business models, technological advances, and customer expectations. To thrive in this new reality, organizations need a culture of innovation that leverages the power of customer experience design to drive business strategy and uncover new opportunities. However, change is not easy, especially when organizations are fine tuned for efficiency and scale rather than innovation by design.
How can organizations create a culture of design-led innovation and how can passionate design-minded entrepreneurs win executive support for their initiatives? In this talk, Janaki Kumar will share three tips to be an effective change agent at work. She will outline a framework to foster an innovation culture, based on her experience working with the world's leading companies at SAP's Design and Co-Innovation Center.
Janaki will also share her personal experience as a leader who values and fosters diversity in her teams. She will make the case that diversity leads to innovation, and that working in a diverse team is delightful. She will leave you with practical tips to build and nurture innovation and diversity by design.
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Janaki Kumar
VP, Head of Design and Co-Innovation Center, SAP
Janaki Kumar is the VP and Head of Design and Co-Innovation Center at SAP Labs Palo Alto. She leads a team of design thinkers and design doers who co-innovate with customers on their strategic user experience and design projects. She is a thought leader in nurturing creative cultures in organizations, and building, coaching and inspiring award winning design teams.
Janaki was named one of Silicon Valley's 2016 Women of Influence by Silicon Valley Business Journal.
She is the co-author of the book, Gamification at Work - Designing Engaging Business Software. She was a speaker at a TEDx conference in 2014. She is a co-instructor at Stanford's Graduate Business School LEAD course on Customer Experience Design: A Neuroscience Perspective. She has authored 20 intellectual property patent applications of innovative user experiences. Janaki has a Masters in Information Systems from Boston University, and was in the Executive Leadership Program at Stanford University.
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Ben Babcock
Director of Design Research
Jet.com
Ben has over 15 years of experience in product design and research. His experience ranges from Ecommerce sites, video games, to mobile devices. He has focused his career on blending big data with little data to understand the story behind customer experiences. Ben has had the opportunity to hone his craft at Xbox, Microsoft, Amazon, and Jet.com.
CloseBen Judy shared a case study at the 2015 UX STRAT USA conference wherein he described the formation of a ''Mission-Based UX Strategy'' at Intuit. It was a story about building a strategic capability with a newly formed XD team.
One year later Ben brings us some follow-up. He'll introduce a new framework for analyzing UX strategy to take a retrospective look at what worked, what didn't, why, and why not. Along the way, Ben will share insights about product design strategy; organizational change management; internal corporate politics; and the importance of having a clear purpose as part of your UX strategy.
CloseBen Judy
Senior Manager, XD, Saxony Partners
Ben Judy is passionate about designing emotionally meaningful digital experiences. Currently he brings veteran XD skills and thought leadership to clients via Saxony Partners, a consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas. Previously, Ben designed and strategized with innovative design teams at Intuit, Novation, CBRE, and Sabre. Ben has presented at such venues as SXSW, Big (D)esign, UX STRAT (2015), and also talks to himself a lot. His not-so-secret superhero identity Captain Clarity (the 'Ambiguity Assassin') helps organizations prioritize design opportunities collaboratively in the midst of complexity and chaos. Ben is a happily converted Texan, but only says ''y'all'' ironically.
ClosePersonalization should be more than tracking transactions and queries to speculate the best next offering. Working in education we learned that the mistakes are more telling than the successes. They help unveil one's mental model and drive predictive adaptations in content and intensity to students, so they can learn and progress in an individualized way. Traditional personalization, by discounting the mistakes, has been throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What if we start to pay real attention to the wrong decisions, to the failed attempts, to unexpected reactions? What if personalization shifts from pushing products to actually caring about outcomes for individuals?
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Belmer Negrillo
Sr. Design Lead, IDEO
Belmer loves the challenge of creating digital products in an ever-changing world. At IDEO, he helps to translate the learnings from people's real stories and emotional expressions to scalable products and experiences in the digital world.
Belmer's career as an explorer and innovator began growing up with his aspirations to be a mad scientist. That curiosity and will to explore is still a passion today, and he loves to embrace the unknown, but not before evaluating the risks.
Having worked in design consulting (IDEO), in advertising agencies (Ogilvy and DM9DDB), in rapid and iterative development (startup), and in a multibillion-dollar ecosystem with multiple stakeholder management and interdependencies (eBay), Belmer has built a holistic understanding of product strategy and life-cycle management.
CloseAfternoon Presentations
Years of growing UX has resulted in our companies' managers, directors, VPs, and CEOs claiming to understand and value UX. So why are we still seeing many projects without the UX practitioners they need? Or why do some UX practitioners feel overworked - or even misapplied? How can people excitedly talk about UX, yet fail to prioritize it? We assume that UX adoption is a linear stairway, like Kotter's 8-step process or AA's 12-step program. We expect that taking one step leads to the next. But it's not linear, and there are barriers. So I studied, with real people who I'm trying to convince, and I created an experience map that helps you decide where individuals are and what they need to hear from you next.
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Dr Jeffrey Onken
UX Strategist, Northrop Grumman
Jeff leads UX Design in the Washington, D.C., area at Northrop Grumman, known for the stealth bomber and the Army's computers that show where friendly units are. Jeff has worked in cognitive human factors, UCD, usability testing, and for the company's CTO. He is now building a team especially for UX designers where they are free to be creative on their hard problems in the information-inundated government business. This requires strategies for change management and UX adoption across senior and middle management. Jeff received his Ph.D. in human factors, M.S. in aerospace, and B.S. in physics and computer science. He is married to Lauren, loves playing guitar with their three-year- old son, and can't wait to take him to Disney World.
CloseWithout a clear picture of the context of a future product or service, user research efforts might not be worth the effort. Creating successful products and services requires that stakeholders are aligned on and confident in the context that these experiences will reside. In today's rapidly changing and competitive business environments gaining alignment has become increasingly challenging. Low confidence in the underlying assumptions of today's customer behaviors, technology and business models necessitates new approaches to collaboratively define the context at the inception point. Learn new methods to define the future competitive terrains and evolving customer behaviors to guide focus and alignment in product and service creation.
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Sean Rhodes
Executive Creative Director
frog
Sean Rhodes, Executive Creative Director at frog, leads multi-disciplinary teams with a focus on mobility, retail and entertainment. In this role, Sean partners with firms to leverage digital, product, service, brand and experience design for competitive advantage in dynamic business environments.
With over 20 years of experience, Sean has helped bring new products to market, execute strategies and re-boot brands for clients including American Express, Bloomberg, BNY Mellon, Chrysler, Comcast, Estée Lauder, GE, Goldman Sachs, IMAX, Logitech, McKinsey, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Qualcomm, SanDisk, Staples, TD Bank, Theorem and TouchTunes.
Prior to frog, Sean held creative leadership positions at technology consulting, advertising and architecture firms where his contributions have won Cannes Lions and defined the urban plan of post-Big Dig Boston.
Sean earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BFA from Purchase College and Rhode Island School of Design.
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