Donna Spencer is a product designer at MakerX. She has extensive experience in user experience, service design, workshop facilitation and information architecture. She has worked in government, education, with startups and much more.
She is a regular conference and meetup speaker, article author and has written 5 UX-related books. She was the founder of UX Australia and ran it for 9 years. She sews, weaves and knits, and is currently renovating an old house. Her cats are known around the world as they like to ‘contribute’ to all presentations and meetings.
As UX practitioners, we all care about user experience. Yet when teams grow or when there are multiple teams or orgs working on the same product/product suite, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure cohesion across experiences. While individual teams may have the best intentions, without deliberate efforts to ensure cohesion on the cross-team level, teams will easily end up shipping org charts instead of holistic experiences. So what can we do? Join Yutong Xue, staff product designer at Meta and ex-Googler, to hear learnings and techniques from her experience at Meta & Google. In this talk, your will hear about:- Creating end-to-end user journeys to bridge teams; - Building user-centric IA instead of team-centric IA; - Establishing processes to identify gaps between experiences built by different teams.
Mapping Service Ecosystems (4 hrs)Want to take your stakeholder workshop facilitation skills to the next level? Learn the basics of service ecosystem mapping and how it applies to identifying and solving system-level problems. While the increased popularity of service blueprints and customer journey maps is an encouraging sign for the proliferation of service design into the mainstream experience design toolbox, the fact remains that by themselves, they aren't always ideal methods when dealing with senior business stakeholders in the context of overall business discovery and strategy. The theory behind systems thinking and the ability to visualize an organization's service ecosystem should be part of the toolkit of every design strategist.Consequently, learning the basics of facilitating ecosystem mapping exercises goes a long way towards being able to identify the role and influence a company has in its ecosystem, and pinpoint which key parts of that ecosystem should be given strategic priority (and consequently be journey mapped/blueprinted in detail if those journeys are deemed critical). Understanding an organization's ecosystem is not (just) about visualizing and diagramming it. Being able to identify and apply the right lenses to craft a visual representation that tells a compelling story can become a key sense-making tool in your strategic arsenal.Workshop topics:1. Why systemic fluency is a must-have for modern designers dealing with complex problems2. Reductionist vs holistic approaches to design3. Framing a scale of design4. Systems and ecosystems in the context of UX and Service Design5. How to create a service ecosystem map
As designers, we spend a large amount of time talking about our work - probably as much as doing the work itself. Sometimes our clients understand what we're talking about and know how to respond, but not always. Sometimes they seem to comment on things that aren't relevant, aren't in their expertise, and that we just can't do anything about.
In this talk, you'll learn how to present design work in a way that gets great (i.e. critical, not complimentary) feedback every time. It will cover:
- how to prepare the audience to focus where you want them to
- how to present the work so they understand it well
- how to teach them to give great feedback
It's super-practical and you will be able to walk out with tactics for your very next presentation.
