As far as org charts go, researchers tend to not be very high up on them. But, should that really be the case?

Researchers tend to have a strong understanding of the customer and their needs, a critical perspective to have at the leadership level. In this talk, Matt Gallivan shares the case for researchers in leadership roles.

When it comes to the intersection of business decisions and designing experiences for people, we tend to have a few general heuristics we use to guide our decisions. Faster is better. Less is more.

But, what if that's not what our customers need? What if sometimes, more time is better than less time. A more convoluted path is better than a straightforward one. In her talk, Emma Craig helps us rethink our approach to designing and researching customers journeys that work for our users.

With so much focus on better understanding who our research participants are, we often forget to think about how we, as researchers, show up.

With a background in counselling, Vivianne Castillo breaks down some of the important introspection we need to do as researchers, and how we might think about showing up to every participant interaction.

Researchers need to have a wide range of skills to be truly mixed methods. On one end of the spectrum, quantitative methods like A/B testing are powerful tools to measure small differences at scale. On the other hand, ethnographic observations provide for a fully qualitative angle on research.

With such different ways of studying people, there's an inherent tension in how these types of methods work together. In this talk, Sam Ladner explores that very tension.

Julian Park is the co-founder and CEO of Bezi, a 3D design and prototyping tool for product teams building immersive experiences for platforms like Meta's Quest and Apple's Vision Pro. Bezi has raised 13.5 million in its Series A from high-profile VCs, like Benchmark, Uncork Capital, and Designer Fund.

Atikh Bana is the co-founder and CEO of Acctual, and a previous product designer at Stripe, Datadog and Storj. Acctual is the first finance platform that allows businesses to manage accounts payable and accounts receivable in both cash and crypto. Acctual just raised 3.85 million in seed financing. www.acctual.com.

Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, Director of UX, Money at Shopify speaks with Felix Lee, Co-Founder and CEO at ADPList, Paul Jervis, Health Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Modern Human and Sadia Latifi, Director of UX Ecosystem at Shopify. They have a preview conversation of their panel at DesignConf, and chat about support and mentorship programs for new designers. These programs are critical to helping new generations get a feel for real world design work before they jump into it. They also talk about how important it is for junior designers to have time to learn, fail and try new things as they grow to being 'workforce ready'. Lot's of talk about design education in this episode of the Learners Podcast.

Alec speaks with Jess Greco, a Director of Product Experience Design at MasterCard. They chat about how designers should lead their own growth to get to their professional and personal goals. Careers are winding paths, and stepping out of your comfort zone to develop important skills will be beneficial for you to become the leader that you want to be. Join the conversation in this episode and in-person at DesignConf!

Alec speaks with Tom Loosemore and Ben Terret of Public Digital. They chat about how the story of starting and launching the gov.uk design system and how much they learned as they started, grew, and scaled it. One of the key learnings from this story is lost on a lot of people who have tried to copy their success, and they'll be talking about it in detail in their upcoming DesignConf talk.

Alec speaks with Boyuan Gao and Jahan Martin, Founder and Co-Founder at Project Inkblot. They chat about their vision for a future with more equity in design. They emphasize the importance of participatory design focused on tech, and how it’s a highly useful approach to reduce harm in the designs we create.