Schedule

The next time that you out in a public setting, take notice of the number of people that are engaging in discussions and the number of people that are staring at their mobile phones. Today, more than ever, our contributions to apps have tremendous unconscious influence on users and has resulted in a decline of trust, ethics, and integrity. As developers and designers do we have a responsibility to ensure that our work has a positive influence to society? Or do we focus on the new age forms of success such as 'likes' and 'downloads'? The messages that we implant through our designs have tremendous influence over the thoughts and actions of our users. With this, we must ensure that our designs embody trust, high ethics, and integrity.

In this speech, I will share with the audience, statistics and facts about the influence of design in the mindset of users.

• Understanding the impact of unconscious bias in our designs
• Aligning with the responsibility of ethical design
• The changing description of what is and isn't 'appropriate'

In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, and the customer experience to “just ship it” and find out very late in the game if our features had any benefits for users. Business goals don’t seem to overlap with customers’ needs. CX and UX have trouble finding a seat at the table, and “evangelism” can backfire. Agile and Lean claim customer satisfaction is our highest priority, but are we delivering high value to our trial and paying users?

UX is often told that we “don’t speak the business’ language” and we're “not Agile or Lean.” How do we learn Conversational Business while teaching everybody at our company to speak the customers’ language? How can UX utilize Agile and Lean principles in our work and increase efficiency without taking shortcuts or ending up as production designers guessing at screens?

No matter what an Agile coach, Scrum master, or stakeholder declares, the customer decides what is “quality,” “done,” and “good enough.” This session examines has actionable advice and models for how you can start shifting process, teams, and our companies towards true customer-centricity.

Takeaways:

• Advice and actionable takeaways on strategic approaches to refocusing stakeholders, leaders, execs and others on the business side on customer needs, tasks, and priorities.
• Incorporating Agile and Lean principles into UX.
• Improving collaboration and partnerships. Getting that seat at the table while strengthening our autonomy rather than giving it away.

Big data is exploding, but we need the right lenses to tease insight out of the noise. Visualization design requires business and number sense, abstraction ability and many other skills not typically asked of a designer. We’ll discuss strategies for designing visualizations and dashboards that bring the insight users need to make decisions. Starting with understanding users and their needs, we’ll reverse engineer the story that solves their problems. How do we progressively disclose that story? How can we use available data dimensions to show important patterns? What filters and options should we expose? How do we make it work for colorblind people, on phones, and in German? How do we make it perform at scale for data sets big and small? What are the considerations for specific graphing packages? What about pushing it out to other applications and media? This talk will help you tackle all of these considerations and whip your data into insightful information.

Some audience takeaways:

• Strategies for identifying effective visualizations to support decision making
• Best practices for designing dashboards with multiple visualizations
• Methods for tailoring and testing visuals for specific audiences
• Considerations for accessibility

Session description forthcoming!

While web globalization opens your website to the world, it also opens you up to a number of new challenges, namely how to ensure that visitors, no matter what language they speak, can find their local content. This is why the global gateway is so important. Well executed, the global gateway functions like a multilingual tour guide, helping people find exactly where they need to go. A successful global gateway can increase traffic to local websites by 25% or more.

Whether you are targeting users who speak different languages within the US or users around the world, this session will show you how to plan and design a successful global gateway.

Participants will learn:
1. The four visual and technical elements of a successful global gateway strategy
2. Reasons why you should avoid using flags
3. How to best manage Spanish-speaking visitors within the US
4. How to manage traffic to your .com domain. Did you know that for most global brands, more than half of visitors to the .com domain originate from outside their home country?

From mild harm to systemic harm, mismatched experiences are our fault. Here's how we convince people that deeper, slower understanding of people needs to be the foundation of our design efforts.