Schedule

09:30 - 10:05

Keynote: You can do better! Improve your design process

In order to do great work you need to influence more parts of the design process than creating wireframes or front-end code. In this interactive presentation (have pen & paper ready!), I will walk you through the expanded sphere of influence on the user experience. I will encourage you to look beyond your deliverables, outside of your department, and past your current way of working. I will help you spot opportunities and draft a plan to improve your design process.

Peter Boersma | Director of Product Design

10:15 - 10:40

Love in the Time of Coronavirus: what the pandemic can teach us about creating a more caring, inclusive, and equitable world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that many things we thought couldn’t be done, in fact can be. Companies that insisted on full-time, inflexible, working hours pivoted overnight to be fully remote. People who thought they didn’t have any creative skills started baking sourdough bread and knitting scarves. Businesses that used to distil alcohol now produce hand sanitiser. And communities have come together to feed and care for their most vulnerable members. This new perspective on what’s possible gives us an extraordinary opportunity to hit the reset button and reimagine a global future that speaks to collaboration, flexibility, and inclusivity. In this talk we’ll explore examples of how key aspects of our lives have changed during the pandemic, and how the lessons we’ve learned from these experiences can help us design systems, services, and products that are accessible, human-centred, and equitable.

Steve Barnett | Senior Front-end Developer

& Nicola du Toit | Senior Product Designer

11:05 - 11:30

The Hero’s Journey

Storytelling is one of the most powerful means of communication and allows us to influence, teach and inspire. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The wizard of Oz, The Alchemist and many more stories, found in books, movies and mythology, follow one of the most recognizable story structures - that of the hero’s journey. In these stories, we see the hero as an ordinary person who is called to adventure, undergoes various challenges and adversity - through which our hero is finally transformed. In this talk we will explore how the hero’s journey can be used as a powerful design tool which can be used to understand and communicate a customer journey - with practical examples at every step.

Atisha Ramdas | User Experience Design Lead

11:40 - 12:05

So you think you’re a hedgehog

TBC

Dean Broadley | Executive Head of Design

13:00 - 13:25

The Art of UX Writing

Text plays a crucial role in guiding users and helping them complete the desired tasks. It can make or break the user experience, so understanding how to create useful content is key to creating a successful design. While UX writing is a growing field, writers and content strategists are frequently understaffed and under-represented on design teams. Sharing training, tools, and resources can help UX and visual designers capably and confidently write copy that follows best practices and brand guidelines. You’ll learn how to: * Ask the right questions to plan content * How to choose actionable, UX-friendly words * How to create un-intimidating resources like 1-pagers and checklists to focus non-writers on the biggest UX writing pain points * Use tools and guides * How to leverage customer feedback, user research, and testing to develop content * How to craft shorter, more effective narratives

Nicole Kim Pillay | UX Writer & Content Strategist

13:35 - 14:00

Public and Participatory engagement through street art and other participatory approaches relative to UX

Nabeel will be presenting his inclusive approaches to inclusive public engagement, research and the decolonization of research in his work which seeks to present data/research and projects that are more responsive, relative and sensitive to the spaces he works in, and the people he works with. He will be speaking about his current projects which are focused on participatory design and approaches, stakeholder involvement, ethnographic or qualitative research and establishing meaningful engagement and investing in relationships. He will be presenting challenges, successes and lessons that could be applied to various contexts, including UIX

Nabeel Petersen | Director / Co-Director

14:30 - 14:55

Technological and technical accessibility: new considerations for accessibility in a remote world

When talking about accessibility and inclusive products, there is often a narrow definition of what it means for a product to be accessible. There are additional considerations to ensure a truly inclusive and accessible web especially as work and school and other aspects of life move online and virtual connections are more important. This talk discusses why accessibility matters and the additional considerations, including what I call ""technological and technical accessibility"" to create more inclusive products in a remote world and digitally connected world.

Lade Tawak | Experience & Service Designer

15:05 - 15:30

The Future of UX Evaluations

Cross functional expertise generating synthetic data for the evaluation of digital systems The evaluation of digital systems involves well established tools and techniques: personas, task flows, heurist evaluations and expert reviews etc. As these systems become more specialised and integrated into how we manage our lives (health, finances, education etc.) so does the need to further enhance the way in which we evaluate them. We’ll be exploring, by way of case study, the challenges involved in evaluating specialist applications and the enhanced evaluation techniques we believe can overcome them. We’ll cover how synthetic data models, in the form of industry wide personas, combined with the expertise of subject matter experts can provide more accurate evaluations. These insights force UX practitioners to question whether too much focus is put on the user, and whether more attention needs to be put on the expertise of the custodians of their well-being (clinicians, financial advisors, educators etc).

Geoffrey Hardy | Head of Digital

& Shaunei Gerber | Head of Digital Marketing

15:40 - 16:05

Behavioural and experimental economics: scientific thinking to drive large-scale change

Designing for irrationality: How can we use experiments to better understand individuals’ true preferences? In this session, we explore the world of experimental and behavioural economics, how we’re bad at knowing what we really want, and how we can reveal peoples’ true preferences to help them make better decisions. Plus, how we can make better designs by factoring in fairness, reciprocity and altruism into the decision-making process.

Natan Sklair | Lead Behavioural Economist

16:15 - 16:40

Abundance by Design

Building upon a rethinking of complexity, a lack of appropriate design skills is identified as the primary limitation to ideating effective solutions under such conditions. In this scenario, scarcity prevails. New theory and practice in information architecture is argued to provide such skills when conducted in design, as a form of design. This is a radical shift in how IA is usually considered in UX, and beyond, and is long overdue. Because of the near pervasive lack of these skills, a variety of assumptions and myths have come to constrain the otherwise natural abundance to be found in acts of designing. Despite the importance and need for these new skills, they require enactment with an awareness of a far more troubling form of scarcity. This is an artificial scarcity born of the commodification of the World Wide Web over the last two decades which has vastly undermined the otherwise inherent abundance and potential of the technology. In both cases, the young field of UX is challenged to question certain fundamental, and fundamentally flawed, beliefs regarding what is and is not possible by design.

Jason Hobbs | Director

17:00 - 18:30

Special Keynote Session: A Q&A discussion

Don Norman | Design Lab Director

09:30 - 10:05

The power of putting research into everyone’s hands: Lessons learnt from scaling and restructuring ux research processes at Booking.com

Around ten years ago I was the one and only ux researcher working with three product managers and one designer at Kalahari.com. Fast forward five years, I had moved to Amsterdam to join a team of researchers in a global organization that had too many product owners and designers to count. We were on a mission to scale our business fast and with that growth came new challenges and continuously shifting goals. This is the story of my adventure. This talk will cover: How democratization of research helped Booking scale. How democratization of research also shot us in the foot. Being bold like Brené Brown. How our contextual model was born. Why emotions excite me more than conversion rate optimization. Why work at Shopify if you can make more money running your own online store through Shopify. Why work for Facebook if you can make more money managing Facebook ads.

Kari Peters | Senior User Experience Researcher

10:15 - 10:40

Design Ethicquette – A Case for Ethics in Design

"In 2019, tech giants Facebook, Google and Amazon found their way into the courtroom under the receiving end of intense scrutiny from lawmakers and the public. A brutal whipping techlash is perhaps an indicator that the tech and design industry is failing to self-regulate itself and are doing something terribly wrong in all these years of going unchecked. While invasion of privacy and swinging electoral votes may seem intangible and distant to some, technology and design has done a dire disservice when it leads to innocent lives being taken. The rising cases of these alleged crimes committed in the tech and design industry are alarming. The industry is facing an ethics crisis and The Cambridge Analytica saga is one of many that proves it. As Cennydd Bowles puts it “An ethical awakening is long overdue.” Bowles also was quick to point out that paying attention to deeper questions of impact and justice is a sign of the industry maturing which was echoed by sociologist Richard Sennett, “It is at the level of mastery that ethical problems of craft appear.” As an industry, we ought to take action. A complete overhaul, to rectify our ways before we cause a design pandemic. The question remains, how did we end up in the courtroom in the first place and how do we get out of it?"

Ziqq Rafit | Founder

11:05 - 11:30

Wireframing 101: Back to Basics

I will provide some tips and advice on how to design low fidelity wireframes that not only solve design problems but also make the designs easy to understand for everyone who interacts with them. As a UX Designer, your first responsibility is to make sure you are solving the right problems, coming up with usable solutions that not only meet the user needs while achieving the business objectives but also delighting users throughout the experience. Applying the techniques described in this presentation should help you achieve those lofty ambitions on a more consistent basis, leaving you with happier stakeholders and more satisfied users.

Ignatius Ferreira | User Experience Designer

11:40 - 12:05

Creating data driven personas using UX research methods and machine learning

We are not our users; we probably think that we know what they want, but we rarely do. The field of UX aims to understand and represent users's needs, and often builds "user personas" to do so. These user persona's provide detailed descriptions about the types of users - but these too are problematic as they capture the biases, and assumptions of the designer and fall susceptible to their blindspots. By running customer surveys, user interviews and employing unsupervised machine learning, we gained insight into the clusters of our users, we were empowered to create more intelligent, data-driven personas. This session will explain what User Persona's are, what Unsupervised Learning is, and how the two were brought together to create a fuller view of our users. We'll also delve into the many mistakes and learnings along the way - there are many things we'd do differently next time.

Chantelle Withfield | UX/UI Consultant

& Jade Abbott | Lead Machine Learning Engineer

13:00 - 13:25

One scary thing a day keeps imposter syndrome away

I'd like to lead through my UX growth journey in health and fitness industry, how it inspired me to create my own side business to prepare people for future healthcare challenges, and how it helped me pulling through the pandemic. I may also introduce my theory of why there is no unicorn to date in health care.

Jessica Reps | UX / UI European Design Lead

13:35 - 14:00

Introducing The Experience Oriented Enterprise™ Blueprint

This powerful model will help you evaluate and craft strategies to orient your business towards creating remarkable experiences for every stakeholder in your eco-system from the employee and customers to suppliers and shareholders. The blueprint snaps together like lego pieces and it will help you grow your business in a differentiated way so that you can stand out from the crowd. Join this empowering presentation that will enlighten, inspire and align your teams on the jobs to be done!

Chantel Botha | Managing Director

14:30 - 14:55

Adventures in UX Dogfooding

"UX" and "dogfooding"--two words you rarely hear together. While I love user testing and recommend testing every design, my recent experience has shown that to deliver a great UX in a hurry, effective dogfooding can be far more insightful and cost effective. In case you aren't familiar, dogfooding is the practice of having a team test its own product as a user would. Doing so helps you find "obvious" design problems, and develop real user empathy along the way. In this talk, I will explain how to dogfood your UX, plus share my recent experience. I will also summarize the results of UX dogfooding found by others.

Everett McKay | Principal of UX Design Edge

15:05 - 15:30

Build better products by engaging hard-to-reach users

As technologists, one of the hardest things to remember is that we’re not our users and our assumptions can easily extend into our work. If we aren’t careful, we can easily end up designing products based on our assumptions and biases rather than insights from the actual audience. If we want to build better products, we need to include our target audience in the creation process and listen to their feedback every step of the way. In this talk, I’ll share what my team and I learned from a project where we worked directly with teens experiencing various forms of bullying that directly informed the product’s goals, UX, and content.

Ariba Jahan | Director of Innovation