Empathy is a hot topic in business lately. Teams who go outside their organization to develop empathy for their customers are crafting winning products that deliver on the wants, needs, and desires of their audiences. But empathy not only plays a critical role with those we serve; it also has a vital role inside the team–collaboration is enhanced and individuals are empowered when their own needs and goals are understood.
This panel will explore the science of empathy and discuss how empathy fits inside our teams and outside with those our experiences are meant to serve. We’ll share our perspectives on the positive impact of an empathetic mindset, offer tips on how to cultivate empathy within your own organization, and answer questions you may have. Our moderator is a UX Strategist and our panelists include a Psychiatrist, a UX Research Consultant and Published Author, a Design Executive, and a UX Manager.
Persuading, influencing and negotiating skillsMohammed Gamal
These skills are important in many jobs, especially areas such as marketing, sales, advertising and buying, but are also valuable in everyday life. You will often find competency-based questions on these skills on application forms and at interview, where you will be required to give evidence that you have developed these skills.
Whether they take place at work or at home, with your neighbors or co-founder, crucial conversations can have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. You will learn how to: Prepare for high-impact situations, Make it safe to talk about almost anything, Be persuasive, not abrasive, Keep listening when others blow up or clam up, Turn crucial conversations into the action and results you want
Persuading, influencing and negotiating skillsMohammed Gamal
These skills are important in many jobs, especially areas such as marketing, sales, advertising and buying, but are also valuable in everyday life. You will often find competency-based questions on these skills on application forms and at interview, where you will be required to give evidence that you have developed these skills.
Whether they take place at work or at home, with your neighbors or co-founder, crucial conversations can have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. You will learn how to: Prepare for high-impact situations, Make it safe to talk about almost anything, Be persuasive, not abrasive, Keep listening when others blow up or clam up, Turn crucial conversations into the action and results you want
Creating trust in teams is key if you want to get them to a high performance state. This talk revolves around the 5 dysfunctions of a team model by Patrick Lencioni and in particular provide tools for you to help build and develop trust in your team.
A team comprises a group of people linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks. Is a cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.
This session will provide an opportunity to other training professionals to learn more about how to create a culture that will demonstrate intent in regard to developing leaders using the components of emotional intelligence (EQ). This session aims to answer why EQ is important in today’s leaders. Participants will engage in a class activity to better understand how they can use emotional intelligence in their own roles, why to use it in leadership development and how to get started within their own organizations.
Developing the Coaching Skills for Your Managers and LeadersErin Boettge
What are the obligations of managers? The answer to this question varies from organization to organization based upon a number of factors such as industry, culture, department, skill level of the team, etc. Regardless of the organization, at the very heart of this question lies a dilemma.
Managers may have to perform well, depending upon a variety of situations at various places along a continuum, ranging from ensuring employees comply with established processes and procedures at one end, to career development and skill improvement towards the other end. Who’s to say which of the outcomes is more or less important?
In fact, we’d probably agree that the outcomes suggested by such a continuum are all important depending upon the situation. With so many possible outcomes and objectives legitimately competing for our managers’ attention, are there a set of uniform skills or competencies we can use to guide our managers ongoing training and development?
In this webinar you’ll learn:
Why coaching skills are important for your managers, leaders and organization
What is coaching and how to apply key skills to align with specific employees and situations
An overview of traditional coaching models and what you can do to improve them
How we can get managers to make time to coach
A “coaches toolkit” that includes emerging competencies for managers and leaders
The key difference between coaching and mentoring
Empathy: The Science of Feeling. Do You Have Enough Empathy to Reach Your Ful...UXPA International
Ever wondered what makes some practitioners truly great? Is there something in how they are wired that sets them apart and amplifies their contributions on products, projects, and within organizations?
Our presenters will explore how recent advances in brain science and empathic competency may offer practice owners and businesses measurable ways to hire and cultivate individuals who can make a true difference in the success of their products and teams. The two will share findings from their 2015 survey of more than 500 practitioners throughout Europe, Canada and the United States on the importance of empathy in designing informational environments.
Join our presenters and hear how a conversation about hiring for fit, the role of certifications, and predicting team success resulted in a journey to understand what really makes us tick.
(Participant count will be updated after research fields to reflect actual participant numbers and respondent geographies).
Understanding Conflict Styles - using the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Model ktpworks
A recent presentation on Conflict Management given by Eleanor Yearwood of Key Talent Partners. The presentation reflects on the use of the Thoman Kilmann Conflict Model to help people be more aware of their - and others' - style of conflict handling, and how better awareness might help us adapt our style in order to have more influence. Adapting our style may also make us more effective negotiators, enhance interpersonal group dynamics and is applicable at every level of an organisation. The model also promotes the idea that different strategies work better in different situations, and by being more aware of our 'default' approach, we can learn to choose the most appropriate approach to give us the results we want in a particular context.
Storytelling as a contemporary practice was born in USA in the last 20 years
It is the art of telling stories in order to achieve a precise objective (more empathy with our customers, tell a project, explain in a narrative way how an enterprise was born, etc.) and to put ourselves between the ordinary and a special world;
On general basis, a story takes off from a conflict/problematic situation, up to the development of the story and its conclusion.
Tools to Build Rapport and Better RelationshipsGordon Young
Create more fruitful interactions by understanding how to get into rapport with someone; become more conscious of the elements that builds a connection. Like mirroring, eye contact and
matching breathing rhythm.
This program explores how you can leverage EQ competencies to enhance performance and productivity in your organization.
Emotional Intelligence refers to a set of emotional and social skills and competencies that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves; develop and maintain social relationships; cope with challenges; and use the information in emotions in effective and meaningful ways.
CX 101 - A Starter's Guide to Customer Experience @RoyBossRoy Opata Olende
Customer experience (CX) is king.
From Amazon.com to your local corner store, evidence shows that the ROI of customer experience is incredible. For businesses looking to increase revenues and savings, customer experience is the best place to start.
CX 101 answers these key questions:
- What is customer experience?
- What is the ROI of customer experience?
- What are the core components of CX?
- How do I measure my current CX?
Developing The Coaching Skills of Your Managers and Leaders BizLibrary
Developing effective coaches in your organization is critical to its success. When armed with effective coaching skills and the inclination to coach workers regularly, managers and supervisors can dramatically uplift business results and the performance and lives of their workers.
According to a study by Bersin by Deloitte, organizations with senior leaders who coach can effectively and frequently improve business results by 21 percent compared to those who never coach.
Join BizLibrary's Libby Mullen, as she uncovers key elements of training you can implement to develop leaders that are able to create measurable differences in performance through coaching.
You will learn:
- The difference between coaching and mentoring
- How to assess, match and apply key coaching skills to align with specific employees and situations
- How to develop the most effective coaching models for your organization
- Skills development exercises to include in your training design
A "coaches’ toolkit" that includes emerging competencies for managers and leaders
Empathy is alive and and well in UX design. Many people apply empathy in their work. The slight problem is that the word “empathy” means different things to different people. And applying empathy doesn’t exactly bring a clear scenario to everyone’s mind. This presentation hopes to remedy this deficiency by providing a practice and vocabulary to dedevelop and apply empathy in your work.
Creating trust in teams is key if you want to get them to a high performance state. This talk revolves around the 5 dysfunctions of a team model by Patrick Lencioni and in particular provide tools for you to help build and develop trust in your team.
A team comprises a group of people linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks. Is a cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.
This session will provide an opportunity to other training professionals to learn more about how to create a culture that will demonstrate intent in regard to developing leaders using the components of emotional intelligence (EQ). This session aims to answer why EQ is important in today’s leaders. Participants will engage in a class activity to better understand how they can use emotional intelligence in their own roles, why to use it in leadership development and how to get started within their own organizations.
Developing the Coaching Skills for Your Managers and LeadersErin Boettge
What are the obligations of managers? The answer to this question varies from organization to organization based upon a number of factors such as industry, culture, department, skill level of the team, etc. Regardless of the organization, at the very heart of this question lies a dilemma.
Managers may have to perform well, depending upon a variety of situations at various places along a continuum, ranging from ensuring employees comply with established processes and procedures at one end, to career development and skill improvement towards the other end. Who’s to say which of the outcomes is more or less important?
In fact, we’d probably agree that the outcomes suggested by such a continuum are all important depending upon the situation. With so many possible outcomes and objectives legitimately competing for our managers’ attention, are there a set of uniform skills or competencies we can use to guide our managers ongoing training and development?
In this webinar you’ll learn:
Why coaching skills are important for your managers, leaders and organization
What is coaching and how to apply key skills to align with specific employees and situations
An overview of traditional coaching models and what you can do to improve them
How we can get managers to make time to coach
A “coaches toolkit” that includes emerging competencies for managers and leaders
The key difference between coaching and mentoring
Empathy: The Science of Feeling. Do You Have Enough Empathy to Reach Your Ful...UXPA International
Ever wondered what makes some practitioners truly great? Is there something in how they are wired that sets them apart and amplifies their contributions on products, projects, and within organizations?
Our presenters will explore how recent advances in brain science and empathic competency may offer practice owners and businesses measurable ways to hire and cultivate individuals who can make a true difference in the success of their products and teams. The two will share findings from their 2015 survey of more than 500 practitioners throughout Europe, Canada and the United States on the importance of empathy in designing informational environments.
Join our presenters and hear how a conversation about hiring for fit, the role of certifications, and predicting team success resulted in a journey to understand what really makes us tick.
(Participant count will be updated after research fields to reflect actual participant numbers and respondent geographies).
Understanding Conflict Styles - using the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Model ktpworks
A recent presentation on Conflict Management given by Eleanor Yearwood of Key Talent Partners. The presentation reflects on the use of the Thoman Kilmann Conflict Model to help people be more aware of their - and others' - style of conflict handling, and how better awareness might help us adapt our style in order to have more influence. Adapting our style may also make us more effective negotiators, enhance interpersonal group dynamics and is applicable at every level of an organisation. The model also promotes the idea that different strategies work better in different situations, and by being more aware of our 'default' approach, we can learn to choose the most appropriate approach to give us the results we want in a particular context.
Storytelling as a contemporary practice was born in USA in the last 20 years
It is the art of telling stories in order to achieve a precise objective (more empathy with our customers, tell a project, explain in a narrative way how an enterprise was born, etc.) and to put ourselves between the ordinary and a special world;
On general basis, a story takes off from a conflict/problematic situation, up to the development of the story and its conclusion.
Tools to Build Rapport and Better RelationshipsGordon Young
Create more fruitful interactions by understanding how to get into rapport with someone; become more conscious of the elements that builds a connection. Like mirroring, eye contact and
matching breathing rhythm.
This program explores how you can leverage EQ competencies to enhance performance and productivity in your organization.
Emotional Intelligence refers to a set of emotional and social skills and competencies that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves; develop and maintain social relationships; cope with challenges; and use the information in emotions in effective and meaningful ways.
CX 101 - A Starter's Guide to Customer Experience @RoyBossRoy Opata Olende
Customer experience (CX) is king.
From Amazon.com to your local corner store, evidence shows that the ROI of customer experience is incredible. For businesses looking to increase revenues and savings, customer experience is the best place to start.
CX 101 answers these key questions:
- What is customer experience?
- What is the ROI of customer experience?
- What are the core components of CX?
- How do I measure my current CX?
Developing The Coaching Skills of Your Managers and Leaders BizLibrary
Developing effective coaches in your organization is critical to its success. When armed with effective coaching skills and the inclination to coach workers regularly, managers and supervisors can dramatically uplift business results and the performance and lives of their workers.
According to a study by Bersin by Deloitte, organizations with senior leaders who coach can effectively and frequently improve business results by 21 percent compared to those who never coach.
Join BizLibrary's Libby Mullen, as she uncovers key elements of training you can implement to develop leaders that are able to create measurable differences in performance through coaching.
You will learn:
- The difference between coaching and mentoring
- How to assess, match and apply key coaching skills to align with specific employees and situations
- How to develop the most effective coaching models for your organization
- Skills development exercises to include in your training design
A "coaches’ toolkit" that includes emerging competencies for managers and leaders
Empathy is alive and and well in UX design. Many people apply empathy in their work. The slight problem is that the word “empathy” means different things to different people. And applying empathy doesn’t exactly bring a clear scenario to everyone’s mind. This presentation hopes to remedy this deficiency by providing a practice and vocabulary to dedevelop and apply empathy in your work.
Balancing science with person-focused researchIndi Young
Tips you can use in your organization to help bring person-focused (instead of idea- or solution- or data-focused) research into your process. Balance the numbers with the reasons why, the descriptions, and the patterns of human behavior.
Joe and I have given our talk about innovation in mobile design conference MIX 2015 at Taiwan. The content has been updated with more latest E-commerce app design cases.
Interviews: Stop Thinking and Start ListeningIndi Young
Follow these tips and tricks to get deeper into the interview participant's mind, decision-making, and reactions. Empathy with the people you want to support will guide your design.
We all know that content is an integral part of a product’s user experience. And in the past decade, content strategists have become an important part of many web user experience teams. So why are so many product companies still missing out on content strategy?
That’s what we wanted to know at Shopify. So we started a content strategy team. Find out what worked for us, what failed miserably, and what happened in between.
You’ll learn why your product team needs dedicated content strategists, and how to integrate content strategy into the user experience practice you already have. No (budget for) content strategists? You’ll also learn how your UX team can create better product content right this minute, even if you don’t have the luxury of a dedicated content team (yet).
Unconscious Design: Constructing Interfaces for the Untapped PsycheUXPA International
The most successful products are the ones that people love. But what makes us love these products so much? Legendary designers throughout history have found ways to capture people’s hearts and imaginations by creating products that truly resonate with people. Over the course of decades and even centuries, these designers have gradually built up a catalog of timeless principles that apply universally across many areas design (ranging from architecture, to mechanical engineering, to software). Not until recently have these laws been validated and supported by a new wave research studying the human unconscious. This topic may be the key to understanding the cognitive underpinnings behind great design.
Good design teams prototype – often. This presentation takes a hard look at prototyping and provides a framework for assessing the prototyping needs of a team or project. If you have a “standard approach” to prototyping this session will help you re-think your prototyping strategy. If your prototypes are usually created in a similar way, this session will help expand your knowledge of prototyping and ways you can change what you’re doing to be more effective and efficient.
Have you reached an inflection point in your career? Not sure how to get to the next step – or even what the next step will be? In this hands-on session, you will get an overview of the hiring landscape and salary trends for UX professionals. You’ll hear about the most in-demand positions and skills that employers are willing to pay a premium for – and learn how you can target your own skill set to those opportunities. You’ll also participate in a few exercises to help actively identify new career directions, keep your digital skills relevant to employers, overcome job-hunting obstacles and, ultimately, forge a fulfilling professional path.
Who's Using Our Product? A Story of Enterprise UX ResearchUXPA International
In the world of continuous improvement, there is a concept called ‘gemba’ – or the personal observation of real work happening in its real place. Within the oft-maligned enterprise software design space, accessing actual end-users can be extremely difficult... figuring out who's using our product can be seemingly impossible!
As a user researcher, how do you gain an understanding of the current product and inform future design decisions? How do you navigate your way to meaningful insights?
Within our own user research team at Intralinks, we have been figuring out ways to unlock access to the end-users of our enterprise file-sharing product. It has proved far more challenging than we expected.
Here we aim to go beyond a list of cliché lessons by sharing our practical and tactical steps to: identifying customer ‘ownership,’ gaining access to customer information, gauging customer temperament, accounting for product strategy, accelerating learning, and more.
This presentation will approach the unique challenges that UX professionals face when crafting their career path and finding roles that are both appropriate fits for their existing skillsets and offer opportunities to grow. It will help the attendees understand UX career options and help them craft their work samples and personal interactions to maximize their chances for success, whatever that looks like to them. Participants will learn to use the core concepts they utilize for their project work to how they present themselves and their work.
I’ll cover:
The varying career paths within UX and definitions of success
Information on what employers are looking for in UX professionals
Ways to utilize existing UX skills to illustrate strengths and articulate value within a work environment or to potential employers
Tips to improve work samples to demonstrate expertise
Methods to present and brands oneself
We’ve collaborated on design research for 15 years—now we have 15 lessons learned to make you more awesome.
Whether you’re just starting out or have years of experience, come to find out our lessons learned (with examples, strategies, and resources) to be even more effective as a design researcher.
Where our hard-earned lessons come from: We’ve done research at startups, large corporations, agencies and as independent consultants. We’ve done everything from ethnography to usability to optimization to hybrid experiments. We do research in-person, in groups, online, in labs, coffee shops, living rooms and offices. We do research globally and locally. We do research to support feature and product design, product strategy, communication, content, brand—whatever needs to be informed, we inform it.
We're passionate about design research and want to help you be a great researcher because time is ticking—get out there and be awesome!
Presumptive Design: "It's not research! We're getting stuff done!"UXPA International
Agencies and client UX professionals alike point out a growing trend: companies are becoming allergic to research. Budgets are shrinking and making the case to leaders grows more difficult each month.
Working in small groups, professionals from across the UX spectrum (research, design and communications) will learn Presumptive Design (PrD), a technique for capturing the unmet, and often unspoken, needs of our stakeholders.
PrD *is* a research method, but because it begins with designing an artifact, stakeholders are far more receptive to it as a process. Further, the method is fast, reducing time *and cost* to insights.
Attendees will learn the theoretical frameworks behind PrD as well as gain hands-on experience practicing the method. By the end of the course, attendees will have completed one full cycle of a PrD engagement, including feedback from external users.
What can social psychology teach us about (better) UX research?UXPA International
Social psychologists experiment on people, and carefully consider how small changes to situations can elicit huge changes in behaviour. Sound familiar? By drawing upon social psychology research techniques, UX research can go from merely good to methodologically unassailable. I spent six years getting a PhD, but session attendees will learn how to approach UX like social psychologists in just sixty minutes.
The first part of the session will focus on tips for crafting more effective user research experiences. In the second part of the session, you will learn some tricks that can help you make sense of the many contradictions between what you expect users to do, what they actually do, and what they say.
In this session, you also will have the opportunity to participate in on-the-spot psychology experiments (electric shocks optional).
Design Jams! How to run creative sessions with the people who use your product.UXPA International
Getting your users together for a collaborative design sprint can provide a wealth of insight into their needs and goals, help you understand their mental model, and bring fresh ideas to your product. Based on the format of Google Venture’s 5-day design sprint, Melinda conducts 2-hour mini design jams with product users. By the end of this session you’ll have an end-to-end guide for how to plan and facilitate this with your own users.
Understanding your audience; Agile thinking & our content - BrightonSEO Septe...Charlie Williams
My talk from BrightonSEO on 19th September 2015 on creating content that works for both your audience & search engines.
As the search engines seek to reward content that satisfies users, we can learn from what our audience says to influence our work and reach them via search and social channels.
The core of agile thinking is putting user's needs as the primary goal, considering everything from the perspective of the audience. We'll take a look at how this ethos is perfect for modern SEO, and how a range of social media, audience research, keyword topic and content tools can help us build a user-first content development environment.
Understanding your audience; Agile thinking & your content - Kerboo webinar 1...Charlie Williams
In this webinar for Kerboo I took a detailed look at how an agile thinking approach to your content can lead to SEO dividends.
With an agile approach, the audience's needs come first, & by combining this with user-centred keyword research which looks at intent as well as language you create a content development environment where SEO content, UX & content strategy meet.
This environment encourages creating content that is useful, that answers questions, & this matches the moves being made by Google to present the best possible answer to the implied question behind every search.
Know thyself: Understanding and managing biasesKaren Bachmann
Despite best intentions, all of us have biases. It’s more important than ever to understand our biases to achieve the good we want in the world and avoid pitfalls. We explore ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.
UXPA 2016 - Using UX Skills to Shape Your CareerAmanda Stockwell
These are the slides from Amanda Stockwell's 2016 UXPA workshop, "Using UX Skills to Shape Your Career."
This presentation covered the unique challenges that UX professionals face when crafting their career path and finding roles that are both appropriate fits for their existing skillsets and offer opportunities to grow. It helps the attendees understand UX career options and craft their work samples and personal interactions to maximize their chances for success, whatever that looks like to them. Participants will learn to use the core concepts they utilize for their project work to how they present themselves and their work.
We covered:
The varying career paths within UX and definitions of success
Information on what employers are looking for in UX professionals
Ways to utilize existing UX skills to illustrate strengths and articulate value within a work environment or to potential employers
Tips to improve work samples to demonstrate expertise
Newsflash: we all have feelings. We feel them all the time, and those feelings are heightened when using a new product. The “feelings” or emotional experience is an important piece in the overall user experience of a product, but it is also an elusive piece. How to best capture the emotional experience is an important question in the field and UX professionals are tackling it in a number of different ways. In this talk, we will present our journey at UEGroup to understand how to best capture and quantify emotions in a lean way. Listen to seasoned UX researchers discuss how we settled on using a self-reporting tool, and compare it to other methods of emotion capturing.
UX Research within an Agile Design and Development Sprint CycleUXPA International
Want to know how to deliver high-value, strategic research insights within a lean sprint process? Learn a quick, useful, and inexpensive process for incorporating user research & usability into Agile Design & Development sprint cycles. We will share a case study that demonstrates how it works and how we work together (research + UX design + dev).
Some of the topics we'll cover:
User Research on a slim budget & tight timeline
Planning research while still designing (what, when, how)
Rapid prototyping to support usability testing
The Post-Testing debrief (meeting with core team to discuss observations & agree on next steps for design and development)
Design iteration based on testing observations (not based on a lengthy expensive report)
Know thyself and to thine users be true: Understanding and managing biases th...Karen Bachmann
Despite our best intentions, UX practitioners are subject to hidden biases and barriers as any of our fellow humans. It’s more important than ever to understand our own biases to make sure we can be most effective in our communication and our design work. Increasing application of AI and machine learning as well as ever increasing amounts of data on people particularly are areas where hidden and unmitigated biases can create bad and even harmful outcomes. We explore ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.
Know Thyself, and to thine users be true: Understanding and Managing Biases t...UXPA International
Despite our best intentions, UX practitioners are subject to hidden biases and barriers as any of our fellow humans. It’s more important than ever to understand our own biases to make sure we can be most effective in our communication and our design work. Increasing application of AI and machine learning as well as ever increasing amounts of data on people particularly are areas where hidden and unmitigated biases can create bad and even harmful outcomes. We explore ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects
Presented by Karen Bachmann
Building Buy-In: Internally Positioning UX for Executive ImpactJohn Whalen
Why can’t other people in your organization see what you see? That UX insights you uncovered will revolutionize your company and delight your customers like never before! Doesn’t everyone “get” UX nowadays?
The truth is more complicated than just recognizing UX value: Your professional goals and focus are different than those of others in your organization (e.g., C-Suite, Product Managers, Marketers, Developers) by design. What to do? Learn how to position and present your work for maximum uptake to ensure UX has a sizeable and valuable impact on your products and customer experience.
We reveal what we have learned – often the hard way – about linking UX research and design with organizational goals and strategic directives. With a little planning, you can to ensure your creative UX work has an influence and actually sees the light of day when the product is launched.
#UXPA2016
Where's Jarvis? The future of Voice Recognition and Natural Language User Int...UXPA International
Siri, Cortana, Alexa - voice recognition is going mainstream. What does this technology mean for your business? How does speech fit with the internet of things, with virtual agents, or in the enterprise space? Crispin Reedy, a voice interaction designer with over 10 years of experience, and the president of the Association for Voice Interaction Design, will review the current state of speech recognition and natural language technologies, discuss how they fit in the emerging landscape of distributed devices, and discuss techniques and methods to evaluate these interfaces.
Justyna Pindel. Wake up call for product dreamers! BrainRain
In this speech, Justyna Pindel shows how powerful Design Thinking is when combined with Lean Startup. To illustrate the point, she shared a story behind her worst product idea of 2017/2018 - BlockchainFiesta Conference
‘I have a dream (...)! ‘How many startups, projects, changes within organization started like that? What happens when the rush of adrenaline and dose of positive attitude is gone? What to do when you stopped believing that ‘yes, you can do it’?
Justyna is CEO of Wawel Hill and co-creator of ACE! (Agile Central Europe Conference) and BlockchainFiesta Conference. During the last few years, she has worked with various startups as a marketing/business and UX strategist.
Re-use and Recycle: Building sustainable relationships with your usersUXPA International
Usually, the primary goal of user research is to answer specific questions about a design. But what happens when you shift your primary objective from conducting research to “building a lasting relationship”? The presenters will share stories about how this approach has forever changed the breadth and depth of information that they learn about users, and how it’s actually made some of the hardest parts of enterprise research, such as recruiting users, easier.
You'll learn about
circumstances where this approach is (and is not) appropriate
specific tools and techniques to support relationship building
how this approach returns richer data which can more deeply impact products (and even the product team's culture)
Handouts will be provided.
This presentation is best suited for practitioners who work with enterprise or complex multi-use applications, and beginner to intermediate UX practitioners who as part of their job talk to users, regardless of their title.
Levering the digital space to accomplish organizational goals can be difficult.
However, by creating alignment between digital efforts and all other aspects of operations, any organization, individual, or movement can build momentum and generate positive results. It involves these 3 things working in unison:
1. Telling Stories That Connect
2. Prioritizing Real-Time Engagement
3. Growing 1 Community Through Another
UXPA 2023: Start Strong - Lessons learned from associate programs to platform...UXPA International
Imagine creating experiences for your rookie designers’ first couple years that are rewarding, enriching, and full of learning — without taking all your time or energy to manage. We’ll share techniques any team leader can put into practice using real-life examples from associate programs, apprenticeships, and internships.
Topics include onboarding, varied work challenges, developing multiple capabilities, buddy systems, group sharing, guest speakers, time with executives, and mentorship. We’ll also share how to operationalize learning, soft skills like communication and collaboration, setting boundaries, time management, achieving deep work, and more skills we all wish we were explicitly taught early on.
We’ll focus on modern-day associate programs, but even if you can’t create a full-fledged program, you’ll leave this session with ideas to use with your fledgling professionals. The benefits go beyond efficiency; it’s a foundation for culture, camaraderie, autonomy, and mastery.
UXPA 2023: Disrupting Inaccessibility: Applying A11Y-Focused Discovery & Idea...UXPA International
Digital advances are being made at a rapid-fire pace, yet disability inclusivity continues to fall short of the digital revolution. As the number of people living with disabilities rises, the time to take digital accessibility to the next level is now. Let’s disrupt inaccessibility together! Come hear about a multi-part discovery research and ideation project informing foundational UX designs for our customers. You’ll get insights from our unique study, which are widely applicable across industries, and walk away with tips and inspiration to kick off your own accessibility-focused discovery and ideation. Only YOU can prevent inaccessibility – are you in?
User experience can be drastically elevated by combining data science insights with user-based insights from research. Data analytics on its own can make themes and correlations difficult to explain and to provide accurate recommendations. For example, themes identified via large global surveys and usage data can be better understood with UX insights from focused user research, such as user interviews and/or cognitive walkthroughs. This presentation will highlight the complimentary nature of data science and UX and will focus on the benefits of bringing the two disciplines together. This will be buttressed with practical examples of enterprise projects and applications that combined data and skills from the two disciplines, guidance on how the two disciplines can better work together, and the skills needed to improve as a UX professional when working with data science teams.
UXPA 2023: UX Fracking: Using Mixed Methods to Extract Hidden InsightsUXPA International
Users do not always accurately describe what they mean or feel. There are many reasons for this, ranging from politeness to poor introspection, to lack of sufficient technical vocabulary. Fortunately, UX researchers have tools in their trade to deduce what was really meant. We call this UX Fracking, a mixed methods approach that is optimized for extracting hidden user insights. We will illustrate the dangers of inadequate, superficial research, and how this may lead to outcomes incapable of addressing the users’ core issues. We will explore ways to avoid these pitfalls by leveraging mixed research methods to test hypotheses about the users’ intent and needs. This starts with a thorough understanding of who the user is, their goals, and how they work today, to an approach that combines surveys, interviews, and comment analysis with behavioral observation, and finally, validating the newly discovered user insights with the users themselves.
UXPA 2023: Learn how to get over personas by swiping right on user rolesUXPA International
This session walks through the concept of user roles as an alternative to personas as a means to generate and disseminate user insights for product development teams. We will describe the tools and methods used to create a research database organized by user roles, along with examples and short exercises to help attendees think through user roles within their own context.
By the end of the session, attendees should be aware of tools and approaches for:
Organizing user research information in a database
Disseminating user role information to product and design teams
Managing a user roles database as part of a long term UX Research program
If you’re ready to ditch personas but don’t know how, this session is for you!
We will present a case study that details our approach for replacing user personas with user roles for a multi-national SAAS company. We will take the audience on a journey that starts with an executive request for personas, travels through the tribulations of realizing personas suck, and concludes with convincing others to accept a new and innovative way to understand the people who use the product. Our key message is that personas lack real value for organizations that already understand the importance of empathizing with users. Building user-centered products requires easily accessible and well organized user insights. We will discuss defining users through a process of stakeholder consultation and content review, and structuring data around Jobs to Be Done and product interactions. We will also discuss the dissemination of user roles in our organization using relational databases, interactive dashboards and online wikis. Spoiler alert, our stakeholders loved user roles!
UXPA 2023: Experience Maps - A designer's framework for working in Agile team...UXPA International
Agile Methodology refers to software design and development methodologies centered around the idea of iterative design and development, where requirements and concepts evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Thus, Agile enables teams to deliver value faster, with greater quality and predictability, and greater aptitude to respond to change. With evolving product features every design sprint, designers & researchers find it difficult to follow the design process. This sometimes leads to designs delivered in haste or sub-par design artifacts which result in UX debt. UX debt is accumulated when design teams take actions or shortcuts to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. It is the result of prioritizing speedy delivery of design to the development team over a perfect experience journey. Experience Maps is a great tool to practice UX in Agile as well as manage UX Debt.
UXPA 2023: UX Enterprise Story: How to apply a UX process to a company withou...UXPA International
How to build a UX Department from scratch, in an environment they think UX people do social media posters and posts! An agile implementation just started, and people are moving from a waterfall and ad-hoc mindset to agility. In this session, I will talk about my Journey to establish a UX Department for a company that is part of a global brand, but this local branch just started the digital transformation movement. Challenges like: spreading awareness and educating people about UX, hiring the right team, defining the right team structure, establishing workflow and day-to-day operations, and applying localization (non-western culture).
UXPA 2023: High-Fives over Zoom: Creating a Remote-First Creative TeamUXPA International
I started my current job in March of 2020. Many of us remember something clearly about the month that COVID started to shut things down. I remember being surprised to hear that my new on-site-only job would be starting in my living room over zoom. How do you lead a design team when none of the team members live near each other and creativity is highly collaborative? Taking from over a decade of working in HR software, I knew whatever I did needed to put people first. That what employees love about a job is often deeper than the work, it’s the culture, the relationships and people they work with. It’s the feeling that their work has value, and their contribution matters. In this talk I will walk though some of the rituals and best practices I have learned over the last two years building a remote-first creative team.
UXPA 2023: Behind the Bias: Dissecting human shortcuts for better research & ...UXPA International
As humans, we are biased by design. Our intricate and fascinating brains have developed shortcuts through centuries of human evolution. They reduce an unimaginable load of paralyzing decisions, keep us alive, and help us navigate this complex world. Now, these life saving biases affect how we behave with modern technology. Understanding some of the theories and reasons why these biases exist is the key to unlocking their power. In this workshop we will cover some theories around how the brain works. We will review some of our mental shortcuts, take a look at some common biases, and learn how they affect our users, our research, and our designs. Lastly we will review some advantages of biases, and ways to identify and reduce bias. This workshop is targeted for designers who do their own research, and researchers looking to learn more about removing bias from their studies.
UXPA 2023 Poster: Improving the Internal and External User Experience of a Fe...UXPA International
UXPA 2023 Poster: Improving the Internal and External User Experience of a Federal Government Legacy Application Using User Experience and Agile Principles
Are you new to UX management, or thinking of getting into management? Then this talk is for you. After reading countless books, attending countless trainings, mentoring and being menteed, nothing quite prepared me for management like my first year. I’ll share with you what I wish they’d told me. I’ll also share my process for generating team research roadmaps, establishing team values, keeping employees motivated, and not burning out.
UXPA 2023: Redesigning An Automotive Feature from Gasoline to Electric Vehicl...UXPA International
Join us for an interaction design case study from the automotive industry. We created a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) for a vehicle feature that provides household-levels of power in electrical outlets for our customers to use at work and play. This case study will reveal: · Our debate of re-using version 1.0’s HMI vs designing a new user interface for the electric vehicle—when to break with consistency and why? · User research we conducted to guide our early design concept. · Paper prototypes we created to support our usability testing of the concept with vehicle owners. · How we solved internal debate over the interaction design in moving from internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles. * Advice to help you evangelize user-centered design that is also brand-centered for a new product.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered Quality
Empathy at Work: Explaining the Who, What, Why and How
1. EMPATHY
AT WORK
Explaining the Who, What, Why & How
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy
Andrea Gallagher, Bernadette Irizarry, Dawn Nidy, Indi Young and Dr. Joseph Lee
http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187 June 1, 2016
2. Q1 – Everyone is talking
about empathy these
days – Why?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
5. Q2 – How might we
think about empathy
when creating products
or services?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
7. in your work …
emotional empathy
supporting another person through an emotional
process (real-time)
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
8. cognitive empathy
inner voice as a person aims at
an intent or purpose
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
9. in your work …
cognitive empathy
supporting another person in achieving their
purpose (over time)
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
13. Design
THE
SOLUTION
V
VV
ideas have surfaced
design has
taken form
design is
forming
Simmer
PEOPLE
Creative
Inspiration
prior to ideas: develop
empathy about the larger
purpose/intent
validateV
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
14. Post-DESIGN
Why are our customers behaving the way our
quantitative data depicts?
Post-IDEA
Did we look at this from all angles?
Pre-IDEA
Are we leaving brilliant ideas undiscovered?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
18. Q3 – UX and Research teams
have “owned” empathy.
Does it have to be that way?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
19. The biggest single source of innovation is
typically the engineers. They know what’s
possible better than anyone.
The magic happens when developers
get and see customer pain…
–MARTY CAGAN
“
”
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
20. Q4 – How do we get others
to pick up the work of
empathy effectively?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
21. Accountant pain in collecting & sorting data
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
24. I could feel the urgency in getting the activity
completed which reflects the reality of tax deadlines.
Accountants are more flexible than I thought – I had a
stigma that they are stuck in their ways, but I had to
pivot a lot during the exercise depending on the
clients, and it made me realize that Accountants have
to adjust to accommodate their clients.
How did this
make you feel?
Stressful.
Rushed.
Time Pressed.
Frustrated.
Mary made me mad.
“
”
ACTIVITY REACTIONS
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
27. CUSTOMER OFFICE HOURS
“My team learned a lot today.
Thanks for the opportunity to
connect with other developers.”
“Thanks for setting it up. We move at a million miles an
hour over there so it's rare we get an opportunity to stop
and get an objective viewpoint on anything.”
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
28. Q5 – How do we know
we’re being empathetic?
Is there a wrong
way to do it?
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
29. many applications of empathy:
• persuade (change beliefs, behavior)
• encourage growth, maturity
• support intents & purposes of others
• communicate clearly; tone, vocab
• act like someone else
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
32. A model of people’s behavior, beliefs, & emotions in a
certain scoped situation
Capabilities, competition, business goals, technical foundations,
slotted where appropriate to support that behavior
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
39. cognitive empathy
understand what went through
a person’s mind
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
40. emotional empathy
From Pixar’s characters Sadness and Bing Bong, Inside Out
Sadness: “I’m sorry that they took your rocket.
They took something that you loved.”
Joy: “How did you do that?”
Sadness: “Oh, I don’t know. He was sad, so I
listened.”
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
53. check things I can’t get through security (beer)
check bulky gifts, poster, scuba gear
worry I will lose my checked bag
assume my checked bag will be thrashed again
wonder what the white powder was on my bag
keep my expensive medical device with me
make sure my guitar is not damaged in baggage
carry on computer, camera so it’s not stolen
avoid rolling bag through connecting airport
realize picking up checked bag only adds 5 min.
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
54. Not Again
“There were those two times where my checked
suitcase came back with white powder all over it;
what was that?! And the time my suitcase was
totally thrashed, so much so that I had to buy a
new one. It was a pain to file a claim. Or worse,
there was that time they lost my luggage and I had
to take time out to go shop for replacements during
my trip. Those were awful experiences.”
Won't Go Onboard
“I usually bring my stuff on board with me, but
there will always be an exception. That time I
brought beer back from Belgium to share with my
friends--no way I was getting that through security.
Or when I was presenting a big poster at a
conference, I had to check it. Snorkeling gear and
stuff for vacation didn't all fit in my roll-aboard. So
there are times when I have to check stuff.”
Protect Stuff
“I was bringing a very expensive piece of
equipment to colleagues, and no way was I going
to let the gorillas toss it around. I was sure they
would break it. It would be an annoying setback to
lose my laptop, and have to take time to recover
the data and set up a new one. My guitar has
sentimental value, so it needs to be in its case,
protected in the overhead bin.”
Terminal Experience:
“It only adds five minutes to my transit time to
go down to the carousel to pick up my bag.
Once I realized that, I decided to make it
easier on myself inside the terminal. No
maneuvering bags in the restrooms. No
hefting the roll-aboard up to the bin, or
dragging it up steep jetways. No juggling my
stuff when I pay for and pick up food at the
counter. It's easier on me this way.”
55. unfamiliar with this road & didn’t expect peds
never been here; searching for sign, address
distracted by a commotion, surprising image
I did not see the peds at all
the car in the other lane blocked my view
the sun was in my eyes, so I didn’t see ped
as a driver, I have the right of way on the road
there’s a law that says I have to stop?!?
the law is that peds must wait for an opening
I didn’t want to slow down the cars behind me
I didn’t want to wait, and I’m faster than a ped
I was going somewhere more important than peds
@UXPA2016 #UXPAempathy http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?sessionid=187
Editor's Notes
[Andrea will ask each panelist to respond to this, with Joey talking last to wrap up with the broader concept]
Primary responders: Joey
Minor responders : All
Bern – Historically there is a return to distributed and connected work
Indi – Technology has caught up, it has come out of its awkward teen years
Dawn – We’re comfortable blaming the product
Joey – Culturally we are able to handle it
“This new way of working during the industrial revolution was jarring on a variety of fronts. Work moved from hand to machine; people accustomed to the close relationships formed in small communities felt trapped in chaotic cities; and a capitalistic system began to emerge that leveraged the intense work ethic of the farmer while layering in an obsession with scale.
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1968/
2) In our work as Product Development teams, how might we think about empathy?
Primary responders: Indi
Minor responders: Bern
Indi explains the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy
Core ways it helps in developing products and services
Empathy as listening (a bit about not all research leads there)
Previous notes:
What are the different levels and applications? (Am I already “doing” empathy?)
It’s also how actors and authors convey a character to you. If you don’t feel what the character is feeling, you lose half the story. It’s like a bolt of lightning that zaps you with the person’s feeling.
Which is where you get “sensitivity”
It's more than being sensitive to others' emotions. It's about supporting different people in different ways according to their purpose. Not their needs or goals. Their purpose.
Which is where you get “sensitivity”
When You Have Questions -- Post-design, post-idea, pre-idea
Primary responders: Joey
Minor responders: Bern, then Dawn
Joey nobody needs to uncage empathy it is innate
Bern: teams can put the ownership mantle down
Dawn: Magic happens
DAWN:
And the importance of empathy for engineers was summed up beautifully in this quote from Marty Cagen during an interview at Intuit a few years ago. He said “the magic happens when developers get and see customer pain” because they know what’s possible and when armed both with that knowledge and the understanding of the customer pain, they are often the source of innovation.
Primary Responder: Dawn (Lots to show here)
Secondary Responder: NA
KRISTY:
Sometimes your domain knowledge, or even lack of knowledge, on a subject can get in the way of you fully understanding what your customer goes through, but by utilizing an analogous experience, you can often create a similar emotional state.
So let me set the stage for this next example:
After observing accountants during tax season we learned that:
Collecting documentation from clients is time consuming and painful
Once documentation is collected, the accountant has to sort through mountains of paperwork to find what they need – clients would actually bring boxes like you see in this image, full of paperwork that the accountant has to go through.
Missing or incomplete data is a problem that interrupts the workflow of the accountant and results in them having to continue to ask/nag their client
So first we have collecting and sorting data – we know that getting data from clients is painful, and then once they have it, they have to sort through it to find what they need and discover anything that might be missing – and that causes disruption to the workflow.
As a side note, these are pictures taken from a real accountants office – they get so much paperwork it fills every corner of every space in the office.
So we wanted our employees to understand the pain an accountant goes through during the rush of tax season,
but trying to recreate exactly what they go through would require significant tax domain knowledge, which our team did not have. Instead we needed to create an experience that would elicit the same emotions without needing the domain expertise.
KRISTY:
To do this, we used an online survey, simple word documents and dropbox to create the experience. Participants were asked to imagine they were an accountant during tax season: they had to communicate with fake clients throughout the process using open ended questions in the survey,
(CLICK) They downloaded the client’s documents from dropbox, sorted through those documents to find and tally the ones with the name of a color on them.
(CLICK) and then finished by entering the totals for each document type to determine the amount of taxes their client owed.
They did all of this with a 15 minute time limit to simulate the rush of tax season.
This short video shows about 50 of our developers going through the activity– just to give you a visual of how it worked…
KRISTY:
I’m not sure if you can tell from the video, but the experience itself is completely standalone – everything was monitored and paced through the survey tool, but we usually ran it as a group and then spent time debriefing afterwards.
When we introduced the activity it was met with a fair amount of skepticism from the participants –
mostly because it seemed simple and a little silly, but afterwards they were genuinely surprised by how much they learned and how much they could empathize with what accountants go through.
They also shared that the exercise made them feel stressed, rushed and frustrated – all emotions that accountants can relate to during the very busy tax season.
DAWN:
One of the first things we focused on in stage two was getting people in our organization to interact with customers directly – mostly through customer interviews.
The first time we created research and interview guides to help them get started, and often recruited the customers for them, but we had them go through the process of actually interviewing the customer
For our program, we specifically started with our leadership team.
We knew they were steeped in the perspective of their stakeholders, but not as grounded in the day to day usage of the products and services they owned.
We hypothesized that by better understanding their end users, they’d get more empathy and become greater champions of the program and role-models for the rest of the organization to follow.
But then we asked them to do it again, the second time with less guidance.
We found that some leaders were ready: they found their own customers, asked really good questions, and came back with interesting insights.
Other’s, however, needed more help and guidance, which is where the coaching aspect of this phase comes in.
KRISTY:
As we expanded our interview initiative beyond the senior leadership team, we started to notice significant gaps in the people’s skill levels when it came to how they interacted with customers.
We knew that part of our second phase we wanted to work on developing the skills and capabilities of our organization and decided that our first skill building workshop should be focused on interviewing!
In this hour long workshop, we focused on fundamentals –
first encouraging the participants to stop thinking of their customer interactions as interviews, and focus instead on listening and letting the customer drive the conversation.
We also challenged them to let go of their solution and just be present in the moment with the customer.
(CLICK) – After we went through some of the mindsets, we then had them practice these listening skills with one another using specific scenarios and taking turns being the interviewer, the customer or just an observer.
(CLICK) We created little takeaway cards that outlined common pitfalls to avoid – such as talking more than the customer, or teaching instead of listening
(CLICK) And best practices to focus on – like being present and asking open ended questions.
The cards were guidelines we established that made sense for our team, but you could think about what would be appropriate for your own organization and create your own.
I still see people with these cards tucked into their badge holders so that they are with them at all times.
KRISTY:
And on the topic of customer interactions - another method we have used to help our organization directly interact with their customers is office hours.
We noticed that although teams were starting to really understand and embrace the power of customer empathy, there was still a perceived barrier to getting access to their customers.
The time and effort it takes to decide who, what and when was often enough to stop a team from connecting on their own – and we wanted to address that.
So we created an office hours environment where we’d bring in customers and allow employees to drop in and connect with them.
Our research team recruited a sampling of customers that we thought would be relevant to the majority of employees and then just sent out an email indicating when they’d be available and asking interested employees to sign up for time.
With internal customers, we designated 20 minute time blocks and allowed 3-4 teams to talk to any one customer, but with external customers we usually go for 30 minute segments and limit each customer to two teams – so as not to overwhelm them.
But you could do whatever works for your group!
Teams were really excited to have a chance to talk to customers and share their ideas- especially because they wouldn’t have made the time to do it on their own.
And they loved the fact that it took almost no effort for them.
If we are going to put more effort into empathy, hHow do weyou know weyou’re being empathetic or not? What is the wrong way to do it?
Primary: Indi
Secondary: Joey
If we are going to put more effort into empathy, hHow do weyou know weyou’re being empathetic or not? What is the wrong way to do it?
Primary: Indi
Secondary: Joey
If we are going to put more effort into empathy, hHow do weyou know weyou’re being empathetic or not? What is the wrong way to do it?
May or may not be *better* ideas; certainly broader range
It’s also how actors and authors convey a character to you. If you don’t feel what the character is feeling, you lose half the story. It’s like a bolt of lightning that zaps you with the person’s feeling.
Sadness “fixes” Bing Bong with emotional empathy, where Joy failed with her tickling and energy to fix things
That don’t have to do with the services or things a person has, but the human things that your great-grandparents thought about and planned for.
Developing empathy requires listening to many different people’s stories to understand how their thinking goes. There is a practical way to do this, and to draw reliable patterns from the words which can guide you
Back up a step
Now that I found out the cost, I want to book two seats. And add a third for a friend who is not going to be there for the same length of time. No way to do this.
Why report numbers by gender? Why not age? Destination? Vacation vs. business trip?
As much as this sweet little picture is something we we’d like to be true.
Usually the two things we correlate at work are more related. Insidious.
Our minds like to simplify things.
Age, gender, economic means—these do not matter here.
Why report numbers by gender? Why not age? Destination? Vacation vs. business trip?