Josephine Massey - To Run Successful User Interviews, Be Prepared to Throw Out the Script
Session SurveyIf you’re a UX designer or researcher running user interviews, you will spend a large part of your time writing interview scripts. You’ll craft the perfect introduction, make sure to match your questions with your-research goals, and try to think of the best open-ended ways to get at what you’re trying to learn—without leading your user on. But sometimes putting so much time into the perfect script doesn’t allow you to actually react to what your user is trying to tell you.
Especially if you’re early on in your UX research journey, it can feel like you need to stick to a plan. However, interviews often don’t go as planned. I’ll share some insights into how departing from your script and learning how to be adaptive in your interview can produce far more useful and rich research findings.
Nouran Shehata - Storytime: How 4 Peers from non-UX Disciplines Created a UX Practice at a Large Enterprise
Session SurveyCompanies now more than ever are realizing the importance and value of more intentionally integrating UX into their software development practices. While this realization is a great first step in achieving your true potential as a company and delighting your users, a series of questions typically ensue: Where do I start? Should I hire the folks for this function externally? Should I recruit in-house? What processes do I need? How do I hold my organization accountable to UX practices? Will these UX practices play nice with AGILE software development? What does success look like and how do I measure it?
And so with that being said, I’m going to tell you a story. A story of a Product Manager, a Program Manager, a Content Designer and a Data Engineer who were tasked with answering these questions and more. Four people with no background in user experience were tasked with spinning up a UX function at their organization and spoiler alert: they figured it out and learned a considerable amount along the way.
As the individual tasked with leading this initiative and maturing this practice, I’ll be presenting the 8-month journey that led to many, many actionable lessons learned on creating a team structure, understanding the product development landscape of your organization, acknowledging/recognizing your stakeholders, proving “your worth” as a new function to the enterprise, creating the UX processes that will help you design/identify/measure user experience improvements for your organization’s products and last, but certainly not least, how to realistically define/measure success to tell a profound value story for your UX practice (especially if you have no prior UX experience or budget for formal UX practitioners).
Scaling UX for the first time at a company is never an easy feat or one size fits all, but if we can do it, we’re confident you can take some of these lessons, tailor them to your organization and create your success story.
Georgiy Chernyavsky - Passing Contrast Check does not Always Ensure Pleasant Reading Experience
Session SurveyWeb elements that meet accessibility requirements for contrast are not always easy to read. This may sound like absolute nonsense. We have WCAG for a reason, they are scientific, they help us design the better web for all the people, right? Well, it is not as simple as that. People’s judgements are quite subjective, even when they are rooted in simple human biology. By formalizing the way users perceive web pages with standards such as contrast ratios we are simply taking an educated guess. And this guess may not work for everyone, there will always be extremes. Such as people with a certain type of colour blindness, who still prefer a colour combination that does not pass the contrast check, but instead “feels right” for them. Surprisingly, there exist certain “accessible” colour combinations that are WCAG compatible, but difficult and unpleasant to read. Well, what do we do then? Join me in this short talk on colour palettes and accessibility, where we will review an example of accessible-inaccessible design element and learn our options of dealing with the problem.
