UXLx Talks

One of the best books on user experience design is Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People. No, really. This classic manual on human relations is more relevant than ever as human-computer interaction increasingly mimics human-to-human interaction. (Consider: conversational design, chatbots, voice interfaces, AI assistants, etc.)
In this session, you'll learn how to craft friendlier, more humane experiences by applying Carnegie’s “Nine Golden Principles to Become a Friendlier Person” to the design of digital things. Each principle is illustrated with examples of good and (hilariously) bad practices. If your app or site knows how to smile, your users might smile right back. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Designers are in-demand more than ever and we need to be creative in how we solve our hiring challenges. Learn how Wendy built entry level design programs with Amazon's UX Apprenticeship, Publicis' Early Careers, and at early stage startups – and how you can build the next generation of design talent at your company.

As the second year of the pandemic began, Christian Crumlish started working with the Office of Innovation in the State of California's Government Operations agency as a product manager on the state's Covid response website (COVID19.CA.GOV). Today, more than one year later, Christian is now lead PM for the state's Covid site, along with Cannabis.ca.gov, digital.ca.gov, and upcoming projects.
Meanwhile, he is still trying to figure out how "product mindset" maps to public-sector work, or even whether it should at all. His goal is to start a larger conversation here about how and where product frames are valuable and when they are not.

The stories we tell the world about our products and services are polished and clear. We invest in these stories, hire shiny agencies and experts to craft compelling messages to inspire our audiences to respond as we hope. The results are undeniable—higher sales, greater connection, better success—so why are the stories we tell each other internally so lousy? Why aren’t we investing time and effort into our own stories, so our communications to our colleagues sing, our ideas land, our pitches hit.
In this talk, I will share how to harness the power of storytelling to communicate your ideas, light up hearts and minds, and catalyze people into action. Want to inspire change in your organization? Craft your story and tell it well.

Notes extend our minds. They offload our memories and allow us to think through complex issues.
People have amplified their cognition using notes for a long time. But something is new: the hyperlink. Mindfully linked notes create networks that extend our minds in powerful new ways.
This presentation offers an overview of current note-taking practices and technologies and shows how a bit of information architecture can help you think more effectively.

What exactly does "working in the office" mean in a pandemic reality world? There are lots of opportunities to reframe collaboration, teaming and leadership to yield the best innovation and meaningful work. 
The place to start is by applying Natalie Nixon's 3i Creativity™ framework: inquiry, improvisation and intuition. 
In this talk, Natalie shares examples and tactical methods to boost emerging critical skills in our new working world of blurred boundaries and ubiquitous technology.

Design leaders have evolved from being responsible for executing design concepts to having a crucial role in driving change across organizations. This is welcome progress, but with greater responsibility comes new challenges, especially when it comes to championing change in organizations likely to resist it.
As design-driven changemakers have risen in the ranks of business, they’ve “learned on the job,” experiencing both setbacks and victories. We captured many of these learnings by interviewing over 40 design leaders and incorporating their shared wisdom in our book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Whether these leaders worked at IBM and Google, a US government agency, or a small consulting firm, their insights and observations are applicable to all and well-worth considering.
This presentation will offer an overview of what we learned. It will cover Top 5 mistakes changemakers make as they navigate the messy processes and people issues involved in driving any type of change. You'll learn how to determine the ground conditions needed for success, how to find and align supporters, how to minimize detractors, and how to repurpose design tools, frameworks, and techniques to your advantage.

Design teams and organizations are confronting rarely-seen degrees of turbulence, unpredictability, ambiguity, and complexity today. Generational trends and macro-economic forces are creating a pressure-cooker for business and design leaders where every decision can seemingly save or sink the company. 
But there are techniques and approaches design leaders can deploy consistently with their business, product, and engineering partners, and within their design teams, that can improve your odds for success. This talk will explore those approaches by examining the role of how systems thinking prepares us for designing in complex spaces, and how experimentation gives us a path forward when we’re confronted with uncertainty in front of us and shifting foundations below us.
Walk out of this talk with a renewed focus on looking for moments of interconnected opportunities, ways to gain the insights you need to have conviction to move forward, and how to bring your leaders along with you as you successfully navigate these new environments and ecosystems.

Most people know about AI through movies and TV shows. This one has an unblinking, red eye. That one crushes human skulls under its metal—and humanoid—foot. But how does the AI seen on screen match up with the science of AI? How does what you’ve seen color the way you think about it? How optimistic you are? What you think should be done, and how you would vote on AI policy?
Join Chris Noessel, keeper of scifiinterfaces.com, as he explains what screen AI aligns with the science, what is pure fiction, and what we should be telling ourselves but aren’t.

AI-enabled systems that are responsible and human-centered, will be powerful partners to humans in the very near future. UX research (UXR) is necessary to create systems that people are willing to be responsible for. This talk describes the UXR skills and methods that are needed for proper data identification and preparation, bias identification, prevention of harm, human-machine interaction design and prototyping, and the critical oversight activities needed for dynamic AI systems to continue to be effective.
These UXR skills and methods support creation of AI-enabled systems that responsibly augment human abilities. AI-enabled systems that provide appropriate evidence of system capabilities and integrity will support calibrated trust (an individual’s balanced view of the risks and rewards of collaboration), and UXR informs what is appropriate in each context, how the AI system will augment the experience, and how the dynamic nature of the experience will be managed. This session will introduce each of these complex topics and provide references for further exploration of these exciting issues.