Schedule

As UX practitioners, we all care about user experience. Yet when teams grow or when there are multiple teams or orgs working on the same product/product suite, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure cohesion across experiences. While individual teams may have the best intentions, without deliberate efforts to ensure cohesion on the cross-team level, teams will easily end up shipping org charts instead of holistic experiences.

So what can we do? Join Yutong Xue, staff product designer at Meta and ex-Googler, to hear learnings and techniques from her experience at Meta & Google. In this talk, your will hear about:

• Creating end-to-end user journeys to bridge teams;
• Building user-centric IA instead of team-centric IA;
• Establishing processes to identify gaps between experiences built by different teams.

As Usability professionals, our focus is often in the details. We might be focused on the elements of a page, an interaction or a specific user path. As a result the mind-blowing potential and the grandeur that gets us excited and ignites our passions for the project gets foggy in the rear view mirror. Constraints on timelines, product owner personality, and the powerless loop of minor details distracts us from the hint of a higher purpose. That’s when we begin to miss the microaggressions. Those happening in the standup between developers, coming from project leaders and managers, and the assumptions between creative teams that appear to be potholes in the creative visioning process rather than anything we really need to pay attention to. As a result we build something that feels familiar, impersonal and “Blah”. Who is daring to ask, if we’re building something new, as designers, as citizens, how can it be a nurturing, protective, and supportive environment that encourages engagement! How do we evolve from our obsession with base level content engagement and use our raised awareness to help usher culture into the flat, transparent environment we’ve observed a peak in over the last 2 years. Join me for a presentation that uses a working, iterative User Experience research method as a vehicle to ascend the levels of social justice work from reality, to justice. You will discover how you can use this toolkit to empower yourself and impact your projects, making them more conscious, more equitable and evolved.

Innovation is at the core of revenue growth - finding new ways to create and capture value. The reason most innovations fail is not because they don’t work (organisations are very good at building products and services with features and benefits), they fail because they don’t create value on dimensions that drive customer choice. If you don’t understand the causal drivers of customer choice, then you’re largely shooting in the dark and at risk of creating something that customers don’t choose above the alternative market solutions. Jobs To Be Done is the most proven method for uncovering the causal drivers of choice and is a fundamental part of a best practice innovation approach. In this talk, you’ll learn about what JTBD methodology is, how to use it and how it will change the way you think about markets and competition.

We crave connection at every age – including our golden years. Technology has amplified our ability to connect on a global scale, but older users have been largely left behind.

We’ll share what Journey Digital & Ryman learnt designing an App for a diverse group of uses with an average age of 80.

Ryman Healthcare’s purpose is to enhance freedom, connection and well-being for people as they grow older. Leading innovative co-designed projects alongside residents within their villages and communities.

They recognised that the over-70s group hasn’t been well served in the technology design department - so, together Journey Digital and Ryman linked to create digital tools that enabled residents to gain the most of village life.

We did away with key assumptions such as, everyone in that senior age group is the same, because in truth, there are as many differences, as any other age group.

Our data-centric approach captured the real factors at play, allowing us to guide this age group into a new era of digital connection. We undertook over 250 hours of interviews, user-testing, and co-designing sessions involving over 150 residents and informed by 4258 data points, all wrapped up in a cross-discipline agile design process.

This project wasn’t just about gaining data to drive deliverables, it fuelled something much deeper, inspiring us as designers to go beyond what we think design is capable of.

This talk centres around what we learnt through this process, highlighting: - Key takeaway learnings about designing for 70+ year olds.

- What assumptions need to be challenged when designing for seniors.

- Reflections on ageing and technology.

- Empathy for those who ‘feel left behind’.

- Insights into how to adapt research and design processes to older adults, and people less tech-savvy than us.

Within this talk we have some gems, real user stories that will make you laugh and cry, maybe think a little about your own mortality, and ultimately inspire you.

1 in 4 people in New Zealand is limited by a physical, sensory, learning, mental health or other impairment. Accessibility design for systems based in the online learning space requires a unique consideration for our ākonga. In this talk by Will Soward, Lead User Experience & Media Designer for Open Polytechnic/ Te Pūkenga, Enterprise Service Hub, the fundamental principles of designing for neurodiversity will be explored. Common components and elements such as buttons, animations, typography and colour are examined to support the neurological conditions of users in combination with user experience laws and principles. With over 12 years of working in the education sector (both UK and NZ) as a lecturer and learning media designer, Will presents his insight into value-added design for neurodiversity that can be applied to Web components and systems to support the success of learners with Dyslexia, ADHD, Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, Vestibular Disorders and other learning differences. In the last 6 years of working as the UX design lead, Will illustrates his observations and evaluations supporting online learners in vocational and higher online education. The principles discussed can be applied widely to industries that deeply consider accessibility as an essential factor in their design systems and greatly support users with neurodiversity.

Join us for a panel discussion that will dive into a holistic discussion about how we can better balance career advancement, mental health and internal/external pressure.

The current landscape of the tech industry is filled with the expectation of learning at speed. Even at the very start of our careers, we all have to walk the line between hard and soft skills. When considering the speed in which the field is evolving and how quickly new tools, technologies and methodologies are adapted, it can be difficult to keep up. This constant grind can cause anxiety.

As an employee, you may not have direct control over your organisation’s culture and ways of working, but there are things within your control that you can do to stay on top of wellbeing in your career. In this discussion, our panelist with share experiences, practical tips, and insights to help you improve professional wellbeing. Including:

• identifying and managing long-term anxiety in your career
• overcoming feelings of imposter syndrome – at any level of experience – by using skills that you already have in your UX toolbox
• encouraging psychological safety and a culture of experimentation within your team and organization
• how companies can support their employees with holistically with career advancement, mental health, and family support

They say a picture says a thousand words. So what does it say when that picture is forced to live in a predefined category? Join me in an in-depth exploration of emoji IA, and you'll never look at your emoji keyboard the same way again.

Want a seat at the table? Learn how to use the principles of product strategy to become a more strategic designer and deliver work that really ‘moves the needle’.

Designers are all too often just seen as ‘pixel-pushers’ - when the business of design is all about solving problems. Often, designers are not included in product strategy, or worse - there IS no product strategy!

Using real-life examples from highly successful products, learn how thinking like a product manager can give you more influence in the direction of a product or service - and drive results that stand out.

It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand you need to submit a business case and as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way.

Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?

In this talk Meera will share a case study on how to approach service traceability and alignment, and some of the challenges faced to deliver the following:

• Alignment between different layers of government, such as the minister’s office and departmental teams,
• trace decisions to a hierarchy of artefacts commonly produced, such as a blueprint, business case, and products and features delivery roadmap,
• produce a delivery readiness framework to determine if further research and design is needed before products and features go into build,
• establish research and design operations practice to provide a strategic and holistic approach to the service design and delivery process.

Attendees will gain an understanding of how to use service traceability techniques in their work and apply them to any environment to ensure they design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model they have been required to work within.

From the depths of a complex business to business environment in a world with cloud products and network engineers talking in acronyms was born a simple three step tool for improving clarity, removing egos, and creating an inclusive problem-solving environment.

Simplicity advocate Ella Stoner has applied this three-step tool to many spaces that needs solving or designing for – regardless of the level of complexity. It bulldozes that looming assumption that everyone knows what they are talking about and upon completing the tool together, everyone will feel more relaxed and on the same page before even beginning to think about the approach to the work.

It’s something that’s small, compact and keeps a rather delicate thing safe – a nutshell. She’s here to talk to you about how to use a nutshell in your working life to break down the barriers of complexities.

We all want to be experts in what we do right? We train, we practice, we keep learning. We even do 10,000 hours of something believing it will make us an expert.

But what if our ‘expertise’ actually comes with some pretty big downfalls. What if experts can be less creative and innovative than their less experienced counterparts? What if they lack flexibility and can be more prone to error?

In this talk, we talk about the paradox of expertise, how it shows up in design (and especially design research), and most importantly what we can do about it.