UX Atlanta Presentation

The Cartography of Experience

Project journeys don’t always take the path we anticipate or end up where we expect. Experience teaches us to be nimble and resourceful, to find creative ways to advocate for the user and deliver value to clients and stakeholders.

Last year, Josh Cothran and his team at GTRI began a six-month initiative to develop a customer portal for a state agency. Over the course of the project, the team encountered multiple challenges. There were mistakes and lessons learned, but the team found ways to reorient and deliver value to the sponsor, even as the landscape of the project changed.

Josh will share how:

• Sound user research and design are like the cartography of explorers
• An off-course journey doesn’t mean failure
• Approaching projects with open minds, integrity, determination, and creativity makes us explorer-like

UX Atlanta Presentation

How to Win UX Advocates and Influence Stakeholders

Melinda Baker and her team were hired to redesign the research section of cancer.org. The original goals of the project were met, but not before there was pushback from stakeholders, project stalls, a team huddle to define audience, and much time spent building trust and promoting communication.

What evolved was a team that learned from each other and delivered on goals despite obstacles. The result is one of Melinda’s most successful projects, a pliable framework, and accessible content that tells the right story—the story of cancer research and saving lives.

Melinda will show you how they did it.

You’ll walk away knowing the importance of:

• Understanding the problem you’re trying to solve
• Understanding stakeholders and what they’re trying to achieve
• Listening to stakeholder questions
• Providing information and education on UX Sharing—in an inclusionary way—your expertise

UX Atlanta Presentation

The Power of Empowering Stakeholders

Robert partners with editorial, design and product groups to create design processes for CNN’s digital experiences. With an eye on the possibilities of the evolving digital news landscape, he and his team have been working on a new responsive design and framework for CNN. The team shifted their approach, their thinking, and how they facilitate discussions with partners around core UX values.

Robert will tell you how this shift benefited his team and the project.

Robert will share how:

• Great user experiences take more than interaction and visual chops
• Building a toolkit of techniques can help you educate and empower stakeholders
• Keeping the process of product development transparent and clear to stakeholders can transform projects

UX Atlanta Presentation

Selling the Design

Making a new app work within its ramp-up period when you anticipate millions of users on day one—March Madness is Klemens’ version of healthcare.gov. The app served 120 million streams in its first three days.

Millions of unhappy users is bad for the brand and a lost opportunity. Klemens’ UX team had the tricky but vital charge of balancing business objectives with cash flow.

Klemens will tell you how:

• Understanding what drives a team can help you anticipate when to negotiate and how to manage differing opinions of stakeholders
• A mental framework will provide boundaries to discuss design with your client
• Previous digital experiences can frame a design discussion
• Teams can arrive at design solutions that serve the present and provide a foundation for years ahead

UX Atlanta Presentation

Structural Systems to Survive a Redesign

Modularization is increasingly used by successful shipyards and automotive factories. Architecture missed the trend, and the industry—with its slow, expensive, unpredictable approach— suffers the consequences.

Using a systematic approach with large web applications can make a dramatic impact on how you design, build, and how users perceive your work. Six months after its release, New MailChimp is reaping the benefits of adopting a modular approach.

Learn from MailChimp’s journey. Federico will tell you how:

• Building a web app with patterns gives you consistency in UX, look and feel
• Using patterns helps speed up design and reduces tension between developers and designers
• Reusable code means that time spent improving patterns yields exponential improvements
• The dark corners of your app start to get some love because reusing patterns is cheap

UX Atlanta Presentation

Learn to Call Your Own Baby Ugly and Other Lessons in UX Entrepreneurship

Sometimes it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but taking our own UX medicine is worth the results and the only way to make our products--and their users--thrive.

From her work as a product UX advisor and entrepreneur, Colleen learned it’s one thing to advise and help others with user experience; it’s another to invest your own time, budget, and effort in a user experience process for your own product. Colleen will tell us how this shift in thinking transformed her process and its success.

You’ll leave knowing that:

• Incorporating UX steps into an agile product development process is possible and beneficial
• Microcopy decisions are major decisions
• Planning a useful and usable dashboard requires good content and design thinking
• When you’re both the product owner and the UX expert, sometimes you have to call your own “baby” ugly