As design gets traction and the spotlight it deserves, practitioners and leaders are taking the opportunity to grow their practice. Yet as many know, there are many hurdles to jump and success isn’t always guaranteed.
Amir will share his experience building and growing design practices across both the corporate and agency world. He’ll share his recipe for what has worked and what hasn’t. Regardless if you’re a practitioner or design leader, you’ll hopefully walk away with some useful tips and pave the way to grow your design practice within your organisation. And during his talk, Amir will pose a controversial question for you to ponder!
This keynote opened the first UX Camp in Melbourne on November 2023. The talk addressed three key themes that have caused concern and anxiety in the practice of UX in recent years: growth of product management, recent redundancies, and the rise of Gen AI. The purpose of the talk was to alleviate these concerns, and inspire the audience in continue to pursue a career in UX.
Amir Ansari - Web Directions Summit 2023 - Design System TalkAmir Ansari
The document describes the journey of a large fintech company to develop an internal design system over several years. It started with an initial HTML/CSS system in 2015-2017 that was difficult to use and maintain. In 2019, they began a new effort with guiding principles like treating the design system like a product and building community. This led to improvements in adoption, onboarding and future-proofing. While challenges remain, moving toward a design system platform could help scale and support tools, engagement and reuse of components across products. The process requires ongoing work and faces many challenges.
Confernece talk as part of the Leading The Product conference in Sydney. The talk covers the main reasons why Product Managers struggle to get time with users, and provides a framework via a user resaerch canvas to aid them and their squads to plan and conduct user research more efficiently.
UX London June 2022 - Design System TalkAmir Ansari
20 years of building software, not to mention many mergers and acquisitions have led to different tech stacks, theming solutions, look & feel and experiences. How do you align 20+ years of different UIs towards a single design system?
In this talk Amir will cover:
- Humble beginnings with pattern libraries
- Current state of the Iress Design System
- Iress’ future vision towards Design System as a platform
- Learnings and failures along the journey towards adoption
This document discusses common pitfalls that can lead to digital product failure and provides recommendations to avoid them. The three most common pitfalls are making assumptions without evidence, lacking customer focus by not understanding user needs, and having a poor business case without a clear product vision or strategy. To address these, the document recommends gathering mixed method research on customers, using a Value Proposition Canvas to define the problem and solution fit, and applying the AWS Working Backwards process to clarify the product vision before development.
Some is better than none product camp - aug 2019Amir Ansari
I had the pleasure of attending the amazing #pcampmelb 2019 un-conference ran by @Product Anonymous Group. My talk on importance of user / customer research via qualitative methods (e.g. interviews) was selected by attendees. Conducting such research (even if very small, quick and sharp) can go a long way in ensuring you make the right product decisions and de-risk building a product based on internal assumptions and anecdotes.
My talk was to help product people and practitioners fight the good fight and arm themselves with rationale when they encountered resistance.
This keynote opened the first UX Camp in Melbourne on November 2023. The talk addressed three key themes that have caused concern and anxiety in the practice of UX in recent years: growth of product management, recent redundancies, and the rise of Gen AI. The purpose of the talk was to alleviate these concerns, and inspire the audience in continue to pursue a career in UX.
Amir Ansari - Web Directions Summit 2023 - Design System TalkAmir Ansari
The document describes the journey of a large fintech company to develop an internal design system over several years. It started with an initial HTML/CSS system in 2015-2017 that was difficult to use and maintain. In 2019, they began a new effort with guiding principles like treating the design system like a product and building community. This led to improvements in adoption, onboarding and future-proofing. While challenges remain, moving toward a design system platform could help scale and support tools, engagement and reuse of components across products. The process requires ongoing work and faces many challenges.
Confernece talk as part of the Leading The Product conference in Sydney. The talk covers the main reasons why Product Managers struggle to get time with users, and provides a framework via a user resaerch canvas to aid them and their squads to plan and conduct user research more efficiently.
UX London June 2022 - Design System TalkAmir Ansari
20 years of building software, not to mention many mergers and acquisitions have led to different tech stacks, theming solutions, look & feel and experiences. How do you align 20+ years of different UIs towards a single design system?
In this talk Amir will cover:
- Humble beginnings with pattern libraries
- Current state of the Iress Design System
- Iress’ future vision towards Design System as a platform
- Learnings and failures along the journey towards adoption
This document discusses common pitfalls that can lead to digital product failure and provides recommendations to avoid them. The three most common pitfalls are making assumptions without evidence, lacking customer focus by not understanding user needs, and having a poor business case without a clear product vision or strategy. To address these, the document recommends gathering mixed method research on customers, using a Value Proposition Canvas to define the problem and solution fit, and applying the AWS Working Backwards process to clarify the product vision before development.
Some is better than none product camp - aug 2019Amir Ansari
I had the pleasure of attending the amazing #pcampmelb 2019 un-conference ran by @Product Anonymous Group. My talk on importance of user / customer research via qualitative methods (e.g. interviews) was selected by attendees. Conducting such research (even if very small, quick and sharp) can go a long way in ensuring you make the right product decisions and de-risk building a product based on internal assumptions and anecdotes.
My talk was to help product people and practitioners fight the good fight and arm themselves with rationale when they encountered resistance.
Design research 2019 #DR19 - Using Trello to conduct qualitative research mor...Amir Ansari
Academia might give us the standards for rigour in research, but it certainly doesn’t have an edge in innovating on how we do this kind of work. Trello, invented for project management, actually serves quite nicely as a digital space for qualitative data collection, synthesis and analysis. You will learn when and how to leverage this tool in your next qualitative study.
Presented by Transpire Head of UX Amir Ansari, and Senior UX Consultant Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron, at UX Australia Design Research 2019.
A11y camp 2018 - Dos and Don't when building an accessible appAmir Ansari
This document provides dos and don'ts for building accessible apps. It recommends setting a minimum accessibility standard including color contrast and touch target sizes [DON'T]. It stresses testing with a wide range of users, including those with disabilities [DO], and considering accessibility at the screen level rather than as an afterthought [DO]. Regular training for the team on accessibility is important so skills don't lapse [DON'T]. Resources for continuing education are also provided.
Good, better, best: a pragmatic way to approach accessibilityAmir Ansari
This document discusses accessibility and inclusion in design. It provides statistics showing that a significant portion of the Australian population has some form of disability. It advocates building empathy and awareness through education. It offers quick tips for designers, developers, and product owners to make their work more accessible, such as avoiding autoplay, hiding decorative content, setting accessibility attributes, and testing with users. It quotes advocates of taking an incremental approach to accessibility and continuously improving efforts. The document concludes by thanking the audience.
This talk is aimed at people who are about to embark on the next chapter in their design career - taking on a Lead or Head of design role at an organisation or managing a team of designers. I'll share my experiences across my entire career, and what I've learnt to do and not to do when managing and leading teams. Hopefully some of my learnings will arm you to be better prepared when you take on a role to lead and empower our future designers and organisations' design maturity.
Some qualitative research is better than none amir ansari april 2017Amir Ansari
The document discusses the importance of qualitative research in product development. It summarizes that qualitative research is exploratory and aims to understand opinions, reasons and motivations rather than just what, when, where questions. However, some stakeholders argue that they know what users want without research or that small sample sizes are not statistically significant. The document advocates that some research is better than none and provides tips for convincing stakeholders of the importance of qualitative research.
How do you create a User Centred Design culture when the user doesn't even get a mention at the table? Two years ago, I made a bold career move - moving from Australia's largest UX consultancy (Stamford Interactive) where everybody was a UXer to a consultancy where UX was someone else's remit and the UX community hadn't heard or couldn't even pronounce the company's name (DiUS). My goal was to help DiUS not just build products right, but to build the right products.
In this talk I'll share my last two years at DiUS and discuss how I've tried to shift the focus from 'tech stack' conversations to conversations that talks about human centred design, design thinking, end users and customers.
It hasn't been all smooth sailing. So I'll share my approach and strategy, and delve into what has worked and what hasn't.
And as always, I'll engage the audience using some live online polling tools.
http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/conferences/uxaustralia-2016/presentation/building-the-right-products/
Amir Ansari 10min_talk_managing_design_may2016_v2Amir Ansari
Over my career in the consulting space, I've managed teams of UX researchers and designers. I'd like to share my experience and provide 10 tips for taking on a managing role in the UX discipline.
The document appears to be a transcript from a presentation on UX design ownership within agile project teams. It includes results from a survey of 385 participants on their experiences with UX in projects. The majority agreed that having a UX designer adds value and should be involved in planning. However, many projects experience challenges like UX designers not being fully dedicated or research being compromised. The presentation argues that UXers should act as facilitators and leaders of the UX process rather than owners of the design.
Design research 2019 #DR19 - Using Trello to conduct qualitative research mor...Amir Ansari
Academia might give us the standards for rigour in research, but it certainly doesn’t have an edge in innovating on how we do this kind of work. Trello, invented for project management, actually serves quite nicely as a digital space for qualitative data collection, synthesis and analysis. You will learn when and how to leverage this tool in your next qualitative study.
Presented by Transpire Head of UX Amir Ansari, and Senior UX Consultant Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron, at UX Australia Design Research 2019.
A11y camp 2018 - Dos and Don't when building an accessible appAmir Ansari
This document provides dos and don'ts for building accessible apps. It recommends setting a minimum accessibility standard including color contrast and touch target sizes [DON'T]. It stresses testing with a wide range of users, including those with disabilities [DO], and considering accessibility at the screen level rather than as an afterthought [DO]. Regular training for the team on accessibility is important so skills don't lapse [DON'T]. Resources for continuing education are also provided.
Good, better, best: a pragmatic way to approach accessibilityAmir Ansari
This document discusses accessibility and inclusion in design. It provides statistics showing that a significant portion of the Australian population has some form of disability. It advocates building empathy and awareness through education. It offers quick tips for designers, developers, and product owners to make their work more accessible, such as avoiding autoplay, hiding decorative content, setting accessibility attributes, and testing with users. It quotes advocates of taking an incremental approach to accessibility and continuously improving efforts. The document concludes by thanking the audience.
This talk is aimed at people who are about to embark on the next chapter in their design career - taking on a Lead or Head of design role at an organisation or managing a team of designers. I'll share my experiences across my entire career, and what I've learnt to do and not to do when managing and leading teams. Hopefully some of my learnings will arm you to be better prepared when you take on a role to lead and empower our future designers and organisations' design maturity.
Some qualitative research is better than none amir ansari april 2017Amir Ansari
The document discusses the importance of qualitative research in product development. It summarizes that qualitative research is exploratory and aims to understand opinions, reasons and motivations rather than just what, when, where questions. However, some stakeholders argue that they know what users want without research or that small sample sizes are not statistically significant. The document advocates that some research is better than none and provides tips for convincing stakeholders of the importance of qualitative research.
How do you create a User Centred Design culture when the user doesn't even get a mention at the table? Two years ago, I made a bold career move - moving from Australia's largest UX consultancy (Stamford Interactive) where everybody was a UXer to a consultancy where UX was someone else's remit and the UX community hadn't heard or couldn't even pronounce the company's name (DiUS). My goal was to help DiUS not just build products right, but to build the right products.
In this talk I'll share my last two years at DiUS and discuss how I've tried to shift the focus from 'tech stack' conversations to conversations that talks about human centred design, design thinking, end users and customers.
It hasn't been all smooth sailing. So I'll share my approach and strategy, and delve into what has worked and what hasn't.
And as always, I'll engage the audience using some live online polling tools.
http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/conferences/uxaustralia-2016/presentation/building-the-right-products/
Amir Ansari 10min_talk_managing_design_may2016_v2Amir Ansari
Over my career in the consulting space, I've managed teams of UX researchers and designers. I'd like to share my experience and provide 10 tips for taking on a managing role in the UX discipline.
The document appears to be a transcript from a presentation on UX design ownership within agile project teams. It includes results from a survey of 385 participants on their experiences with UX in projects. The majority agreed that having a UX designer adds value and should be involved in planning. However, many projects experience challenges like UX designers not being fully dedicated or research being compromised. The presentation argues that UXers should act as facilitators and leaders of the UX process rather than owners of the design.
14. 14
14
@amir_ansari @iress
Guiding principles Strategies Traps
Principles that have
helped guide my
approach to scaling
design.
Strategies I’ve employed
to effectively scale
design.
Challenges I’ve faced
and things I’ve learnt
(bumps on the road) that
have impacted my ability
to scale design.
16. 16
16
@amir_ansari @iress
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a
day. Teach him how to fish and you feed
him for his life time.
Origin: highly contested
17. 17
17
@amir_ansari @iress
Guiding principles
● Teach people to fish practice design (It’s not rocket science)
● Design scale ≠ headcount
● Pragmatism - Good, better, best
● Demand first, not supply
● The squeaky wheel gets the grease
● Top down / bottom up
● The long game
● Measure the right stuff (not maturity, ratios, but outcomes)
23. 23
23
@amir_ansari @iress
Traps
● Novices feeling they are experts
● Assuming what worked in one company works in another
● Assuming if you’re in-house, you don’t have to sell!
● Big bang approach (to head count)
● Out of sight, out of mind (do once ≠ job done)
● Hiring juniors too early to build capability
● Perception of value = billable utilisation (agency world)
24. 24
24
@amir_ansari @iress
Guiding principle
Democratise the
practice. Not about head
count!
Strategy
Teach any and all. This
will lead to advocacy for
practice, better coverage
and overtime, increase
demand for the craft.
Trap
Set and forget, without
any oversight and
governance to ensure
what has been learnt is
being applied correctly.
Dunning-Kruger effect
will happen.
Main takeaway