Corporate Training

Let’s get past the idea that checklists and compliance all there is to accessibility. The results are predictable: technical compliance instead of delightful experiences.  Even worse, barriers to accessibility are often baked into the design and difficult to fix at the end of a project.

What you’ll learn UX researchers and designers have powerful tools for understanding people, but their training often lacks key skills needed to navigate and influence the business environments in which they work. This workshop will give you the business acumen you need to amplify your impact within your own organization or your clients’ organizations. Covering the fundamentals of finance, organizational structure, and strategy, you’ll learn the tools and frameworks that drive business thinking and decision making, and learn to be a better interlocutor between traditional business functions and your own function or department. You’ll leave the workshop with:

Historically, design practices have focused on process, methods, and craft. But this limits design’s potential—design leaders can provide more value to their organizations by implementing robust DesignOps. In Design Operations Essentials, Dave Malouf will introduce participants to the three lenses of DesignOps, and how each one helps an organization increase the value it gets from its design practice. Participants will learn frameworks from strategic thinking and service design so they can start developing their own operational models for their design practices.

You might already be familiar with the “components” part of design systems, but what comes next? How are design systems best used by team members other than designers and engineers like product managers and content creators? What’s the best way to get them used by as many people as is appropriate? Who shouldn’t use a design system? What should success metrics look like? SuperFriendly founder and CEO Dan Mall will walk you through common design system pitfalls, how to avoid and escape them, and all the other intermediate-level stuff that everyone’s asking to help you see how they apply to your specific organization.

As a design organization grows and becomes more complex, designers are spread too thin and don’t feel good about the quality of their work. How best to work within cross-functional teams is unclear. Retention suffers as designers feel ineffective and their career growth isn’t being given sufficient attention. Recruiting and hiring practices aren’t filling roles quickly enough, leaving gaps throughout the organization. Design leaders can’t devote their energy to creative leadership as operational challenges take precedence. The user experience has lost cohesion as more and more isolated teams contribute to it.

What you’ll learn Many UX designers, product owners, and the people responsible for the digital world are facing incredible complexity. As they try to design simple front-end solutions for their users, the back-end reality of multiple databases, multi-level permissions, APIs, and content governance often seems impossible to tame. In this workshop, participants learn Object-Oriented UX, a methodology that helps wrangle that complexity into a tidy array of color-coded sticky notes. Participants will return to their organizations with a repeatable, scaleable, and collaborative tool for detangling—and visualizing—even the most convoluted IAs.

More of our transactions and social interactions are moving online every day. People access these digital products and services using a growing variety of devices: notebook computers, mobile phones, wearables, voice-driven smart assistants, and more. Good experience requires that these systems be coherent and understandable. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important today than ever before.

Many designers jump to sketching and prototyping before they understand and define the application at a conceptual level (known as the grammar layer in Semantic IxD). The result is incoherent, overly complex applications with an order of magnitude more screens than necessary. The goal of UX Magic is to teach the Semantic IxD Method to enable UX practitioners achieve their objective with the minimum number of screens and the shortest task flows  before the first UX sketches are even produced.

Few organizations deliberately want to create a bad user experience for the people they serve, yet we see even the best-intentioned organizations doing it all the time. The fundamental problem is one of alignment: organizations are out of sync with what the people they serve actually experience. Misalignment impacts the entire enterprise: teams lack a common purpose, solutions are built that are detached from reality, there is a focus on technology rather than experience, and strategy is shortsighted.

What you’ll learn Learn core concepts of JTBD from a recognized leader through hands-on exercises so you can put techniques to work right away.

Stories in UX are data shaped into a useful, compelling format to explore insights about the real people who use our products and services, and connect the dots from user research to the final product – weaving through early sketches, personas, and journey maps. In this workshop, you’ll spend the day working with stories, trying out techniques from word sketches to cartoons and storyboards and learn how to shape and share insights from UX research that keep design solutions connected to user needs.