You project just failed. Well congratulations. If you're not stumbling and messing up from time to time you're not learning. Doing things that make us embarrassed and expose our fallibility can be the best lessons for all of us. If you allow them, these moments of failure and vulnerability are a portal to new knowledge. In this talk we'll look at how teams can use failure to increase their personal and collective emotional intelligence and business.

Pokémon Go is still around but it’s lost the luster it once had. Even more, augmented reality has lost steam. What happened to the promise of AR? Let’s look at what we thought AR was going to be, and where it’s gone.

Using a healthcare industry business case, Jaime will walk us through how she applied digital transformation strategy to drive innovative software development and an organizational culture shift to support it.

This talk will share simple but powerful business fluency frameworks to understand business priorities, manage zoom levels between execution and executives, and to translate from business direction to a clear design hypothesis. Designers don’t just need more methods to create solutions or work with users. We need better methods to work with business, and that starts with the power of language. It starts with speaking CEO.

When you think of an organization with a terrible user experience, what comes to mind? Is it their inconsistent styling and awkward onboarding? Or is it their terrible customer support, buggy software, and conflicted revenue model? We claim the grandiose label of “user experience” designers, but most of what makes a user experience good or bad has nothing to do with pixels, content, or CSS. It may not even be about the workflow. In reality, the experience is created by hundreds or thousands of employees who decide where to invest, what to measure, and what the business policies are.

Technology has allowed services to have a more pervasive role in people's lives, influencing their everyday behaviors. And we are swimming in a sea of academic insights on how people make decisions and what levers influence their behavior. But what does it mean to apply these insights practically in the design of our products and services?

So many designers go into UX to make the world better. While making delightful commercial products can fulfill this ambition, there’s also an important role for UX in the work of public institutions. In this inspiring talk, Cyd will discuss how UX practitioners can partner with public servants to shape institutional experiences that honor people’s time and human dignity.

After designing navigation websites and frameworks for digital products for 20 years, I realized that on every project I asked myself the same set of questions about the underlying structural decisions. These questions are the very critique that helps me move the design process forward. Each question is a lens, through which I examine the structure.
In this session, I’ll share some of the lenses, how they’re used, and how you might apply them to different IA challenges. As a consequence of articulating these lenses, I’ve also come to some realizations about the practice of information architecture itself.

Design research — techniques and methods developed by designers for use in developing new products and services — can offer new perspectives on exploring these imaginaries and their consequences for human behavior, complementing social and cognitive sciences with an experiential layer. Design can also help us go beyond characterising what we have already, and actively develop and propose new ways to understand, and new ways to live, supporting people’s imagining and helping them conceive of new perspectives. In this talk, I'll explore these areas through practical examples drawing on my work, with colleagues, in Europe and the US tackling topics including energy, local government, design for behavior change, and creating new metaphors.

In our jobs and our design projects we work with ideas all day long - but what do we really know about how ideas work? This entertaining and provocative talk will teach you timeless patterns and useful insights pulled from the history of great projects from the past, ones that can help you be more productive and raise the quality of the ideas you work with. From the surprising origins of the Eiffel tower, to insights from Amazon’s predecessor by more than 100 years, when this talk is over you’ll improve your creative and decision making confidence, and rethink how you think about thinking itself.