For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a business-strategy luxury item. A great product only had to work and ship. A great experience was a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Times have changed. The cost of delivering a product is no longer a barrier to entry. Quality is no longer a differentiator. What’s left? The user’s experience. Every part of the organization must be infused with an understanding of great design. Your organization has to cross the UX Tipping Point. You must increase everyone’s exposure to users, communicate a solid experience vision, and install a culture of continual learning. With that, design will become your organization’s competitive advantage. Jared will show you:

• Which path organizations take to become design-infused
• How a centralized UX team is a stepping stone to a more UX capable organization
• Why the market needs to demand a better experience before it will matter
• What your organization will need to do to cross the UX Tipping Point

New technologies, such as Internet of Things and Machine Learning applications, are collecting and using our personal data in unclear ways with unknown consequences. The traditional approach of treating information security as purely an engineering issue is an inadequate response to the challenges of protecting our personal lives and civil society. User experience design – including interaction design, brand strategy, copywriting, and user research – has an essential part to play in building systems people trust. This presentation highlights emerging challenges and gives practical examples of how user experience design contributes to a more private, secure, transparent, and ethical future.

We are a society under construction, and on the brink of an infrastructure paradigm shift. As designers, we need to be able to quickly deploy into new territories, and address problems that our classical toolbox might not be optimized for. In this talk, Pontus outlines principles for designing the tools we need to create meaningful services in the age of AI and the merge of the virtual and the physical.

To design is to embrace change. Change demands leadership. Therefore, today’s leaders must be designers for change. Ask yourself — are you, your leaders, and your peers ready for the messiness, the hard choices, and the chaos that comes with change? In some cases. it might not be worth the fight. But if it is, you need to prepare yourself for battle. Maria will share her experiences to help drive cultural change at Autodesk, and the lessons she has learned along the way.

“One buzzword people mention almost everyday is “culture”, as in our organization has “strong” or “creative” or even “toxic” culture. But what do people mean when they say this and does it really have to do with free lunches? Now, what if if you wanted to design the culture of your organization, how do you start? And do you need to have a fancy title to be influential? This talk will provide people with a concrete framework to define, conceptualize, and begin to design the culture of your team or organization.

This talk will show how every great designed experience starts with the stories of individual humans. At the Center for Civic Design, Dana Chisnell and her team collected close to 1,000 stories from U.S. voters over 5 years. They used the stories to visualize and map the voting experience. This revealed two massive gaps in the process.
First, people who administer elections and voters have very different mental models on the process of voting. The second gap was between privileged voters and burdened voters. These gaps explained why it’s harder than it should be to vote in the U.S. The stories also showed that several policies that were meant to make things better had unintended consequences that actually make it worse. And just as in the private sector and across lots of different kinds of organizations, design research could have helped solve real problems without causing new ones. It’s time to start designing for democracy.

When Einstein engaged in his thought experiments, he pictured himself riding on a beam of light and traveling through the universe. From this perspective he was able to view the universe through a new lens, enabling him to see things in a different and meaningful way and to develop a theory that others could not. Similarly, when you look at a market through a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, everything looks different: The unit of analysis is no longer the customer or the product, it’s the core functional “job” the customer is trying to get done. Markets aren’t defined around products, they are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done. Customers aren’t buyers, they are job executors. Needs aren’t vague, latent and unknowable, they are the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done. Competitors aren’t companies that make products like yours, they are any solution being used to get the job done. Customer segments aren’t based on demographics or psychographics, they are based on how customers struggle differently to get a job done. Learn how to apply this thinking and help your company make innovation far more predictable and profitable.