UX Toronto Presentation

Design, Test, Learn, Repeat: Learning as You Go in Agile UX

Agile UX allows teams to test and refine designs to create better user experiences. But if you don’t watch how people use your product as you design and build, you lose one of the biggest advantages of agile, which is to iterate on your design acceptance criteria.

Desirée Sy shares the power of learning as you go, fixing, and making changes to effectively design for real-world use cases.

Desirée will discuss:

• How goals, discipline and trust are vital

• How formative usability testing is useful in agile UX

• How to make tradeoffs in order to get fixes done

UX Toronto Presentation

Designing for Disruptive Innovation

Sometimes we get so focused on winning the small victories of the present—like sign-off on UX or design support—that we fail to plan for a project’s bigger challenges.

Robert Barlow-Busch journeyed with a team who faced the possibility of failure after ignoring something big: the future.

Robert will share how:

• Having higher-ups support design and research can impact a project

• Bringing colleagues along for a design journey will turn them into evangelists

• Destroying a team’s assumptions might be a designer’s most important contribution

UX Toronto Presentation

Keyhole Impact for User Experience and Beyond

All product teams have good intentions, but some products still end up failing users. So what can we do about it?

Ilona will introduce the keyhole metaphor and its war stories. She’ll show us how to communicate to senior management the pitfalls of making assumptions, taking short cuts, and proceeding ‘as planned,’ without applying better insights to maximize the user experience.

Ilona will discuss:

• Why products fail when we forget our users

• What tools will prepare you to deliver exceptional experiences

• How we can explain, predict, and address design challenges

UX Toronto Presentation

The Answers are in the Research

Projects can be unpredictable. And when they don’t follow that decided path—well, that can taste of failure. But letting go of fixed outcomes and trusting what emerges might be what takes a project from disheartening to delightful.

Matt Nish-Lapidus and his team were hired to design and build a website. But during the discovery phase of the project, a very different need emerged. The team let the research lead them to an unexpected outcome that filled a need no one predicted.

Matt will discuss:

• Why research—and trusting what it uncovers—is necessary

• Why strategic principles and goals are important

• How using established principles and goals to guide decisions can help

UX Toronto Presentation

Lessons from Labyrinth: Designing in the World of Enterprise

Designing in an enterprise is like a maze. Getting from idea to execution is often a crooked path full of obstacles. But having the right tools can help designers look past the deliverable and focus on the larger context.

Kimberley Peter shares how to navigate through complex situations and adapt to change.

Kimberley will discuss:

• How visual tools help guide methods within larger cross-functional teams

• How to look for possibilities rather than immediate solutions

• Why taking a step back gives us perspective

UX Toronto Presentation

Designing for the Customer Experience

Design is one small piece of the user experience. Marketing, pricing strategy, customer relations—all have an impact on a user’s journey. Having a working knowledge in those disciplines helps us to see beyond the task at hand and solve for the bigger picture: the customer experience.

Andrea Ong Pietkiewicz challenges us to step out of our comfort zones as UX practitioners and to sign-up for a lifetime of learning new disciplines, like ethnography and industry dynamics.

Andrea will discuss:

• How everyone has an impact on the customer experience

• Why the value of conducting usability testing with real people is so important

• How to walk away from what you can’t influence