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Natalie Ferguson

Natalie Ferguson

Founder
,
Sixfold
Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
Bio

Over the last two decades Lulu and Nat have delivered exceptional customer experiences for too many organisations to count. After Nat co-founded Hatch, she begged Lulu to join her on their audacious mission: To supercharge wealth building in NZ. Together, they created a design and product culture that inspired 180,000 Kiwi investors to join in just 4 years.

Upcoming Talks and Workshops

Radical Collaboration: How team work really can make the dream work

If we asked you to hand us a design to ruthlessly critique, would you do it? Designers are experts at pulling information and inspiration from everywhere, but our outputs are often created in isolation.

At Hatch, we turned the traditional design approach on its head and created a culture that embodied the behaviours we were asking of investors. By embracing vulnerability, mistakes and asking for help, we delivered outputs (and outcomes) that had an outsized impact on our customer’s lives. We call it radical collaboration - it’s often confronting, sometimes scary, but also the only way any of us ever want to work again. Join us to learn what it is, why you should get radical, and the simple ways to start now.

Past Talks and Workshops

Radical Collaboration: How team work really can make the dream work

Futurism
Research
2023
 

Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated the software world––from “smart reply” functionality in email to auto-completed code in developer tools––but it’s only recently that AI has been implemented into creative processes. With systems like DALL-E, people can create AI-generated imagery, and in the design world, auto layout in design tools allows designers to iterate more quickly and efficiently than before. But as AI-driven functionality becomes more common in the design tooling space, questions arise––what is cool? Inspirational? Useful? And what is creepy? Unhelpful? Where is the line?This talk will explore the emerging role of AI in the UX world, focusing on its impact on the design process and the nuances around the value it provides. Specifically, we will focus on research our team has conducted on how UX designers want to use AI, when AI could be useful in design, and when it might not. We will share a set of best practices for incorporating AI into the design process, including the importance of establishing trust between designers and their AI-powered tools, as well as how to conduct research on experiences that don’t yet exist. We will finish with a discussion of where the field might be heading, and how designers can think about the role of AI in their work.