1-Hour Talks

Learn how rapid UX research cycles can help teams already moving in a lean or agile format get the information they need to learn and pivot quickly while maintaining sound research practices. Output can take the form of mental models, jobs-to-be-done output, journey maps and behavioral personas — based on the need. Critical business decisions are addressed in weeks rather than months. 

Learn about tools and techniques for collecting and analyzing qualitative data in video format. In this session, we will discuss what to look for in a video recording device, how to record field observations, interviews, focus groups, and usability tests, how to prepare video footage for analysis, and how to analyze video footage using qualitative data coding.

UI/UX designers and developers need to work collaboratively on projects, but they often have friction and even outright conflict that can have a negative impact on project outcomes. Although both groups are invested in project success, designers and developers have fundamentally different priorities. Designers advocate for user needs – easy to understand, frictionless user experiences - while developers advocate for the technology - robust, updateable, maintainable code. Commonsense strategies for working together can make a world of difference, but it’s complicated.

User research can be a challenge when working in the public sector, dealing with regulations, red tape and long approval times. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to research or test your work with your users. Explore ways to recruit and options for testing when no one has money to spend, with real-world examples and clever workarounds that allow public sector researchers to get private sector results.

Working with users when doing usability testing or other user research involves some real skill. Experienced facilitators will tell you, though, that users are nothing compared to the people behind the glass or on the phone – your observers.

This presentation looks at tips and tricks you can use to make your relationship with your observers as productive, efficient, and positive as possible. These apply whether your observers are in the room with you, in an observation room next door, or on the phone.

Often companies are faced with a dilemma between redesigning something from scratch or continuing to iterate on their existing product. Although redesigns are a minefield of potential customer outrage, sometimes they are the right action to move the needle and modernize your product. By planning carefully, ensuring you’re solving for user needs, and involving real users throughout the process, you can mitigate the risk of a redesign and maximize its potential. Learn the principles and tools and see how TodayTix pulled it off successfully. 

A design system as a repository of user interface conventions, styles, and components is critical to designing and developing high quality products at speed and scale. This seminar addresses the opportunities and challenges of establishing a design system to be used by multiple product teams including: multi-disciplinary participation, integrating with legacy designs and technology platforms, UI framework choices, staffing, and selling the value to the organization.

Chatbots.  They’re all the rage.  Come learn what chat bots actually are, why they really will be the next big thing, and how to design ones that genuinely work. Chatbots combine Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to allow users to interact with your company much as they would with actual customer support personnel. They’re also very easy to design, which means they will also soon be ubiquitous. This presentation looks at some emerging best practices and also offers a model with which to understand how chatbots work and how to design effective and usable ones.

Creating user interfaces around complex data? In this online seminar, we’ll take a hands-on, step-by-step approach to designing a great user experience around big data, using a sample data set and visualization tools. We will walk through steps to create interfaces that support end users who need to choose what data to look at, how to interpret what they’re seeing, and what to do about it. 

Flat design has a common, nasty side effect: It can make users feel uncertain and powerless. If you’re considering adopting a minimalist or flat design aesthetic, learn how to keep the clean visual appeal but ditch the negative interaction consequences.