This is a joint event of GBC/ACM, IEEE/CS and BostonCHI

Most UX professionals feel that they’re at the mercy of their organization’s product roadmaps. They’re on the receiving end of decisions about what the team is building and when they’re building it. These decisions are often not informed by their products’ users’ true needs. Instead, the decisions are driven by the stakeholders’ beliefs that they must match competitive offerings.

The result is that UX teams are constrained to researching and designing in far too short a time period, where the problem isn’t identified and the nature of the solution isn’t well understood. They subsequently struggle to deliver what they believe to be the best possible product or service, feeling like they’ve busted their butts to only achieve mediocre results.

In this presentation, Jared will share the secrets that successful UX leaders have employed to take control of their product roadmap. You’ll see what it takes to escape the misery of reactive UX practices by integrating key user research and design efforts directly into the roadmap planning process. You’ll discover how UX leaders can work closely with their partners in product management to increase their organization’s delivery of innovative products and services.

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about user experience (UX) design, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He started working in the field of usability and user experience in 1978, before the terms “usability” and “UX” were ever associated with computers.

While he led UIE, the industry research firm he started in 1988, the field of UX design emerged and Jared helped define what makes UX designers successful all over the world. UIE’s world-class research organization produces conferences and workshops all over the world and for companies in every industry.

In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new school in Chattanooga, TN to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. They created a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared’s decades of UX experience with Leslie’s mastery of experience-based learning methodologies. UIE joined forces with Center Centre and now delivers the best professional development workshops, masterclasses, and conference in the UX Design industry.

For 23 years, he was the conference chair and keynote speaker at the now retired annual UI Conferences and UX Immersion Conferences, and he manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is a co-author of Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.

You’ll find his writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on the Twitters at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

Schedule – EST (UTC-5)

6:30 – 6:45: Networking (via https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kmFSWLo=/)

6:45 – 7:00: Opening remarks

7:00 – 8:00: Jared speaks

8:00 – 8:30: Q & A

Join us for the following talk by Dominic DiFranzo (rescheduled from September).

ABSTRACT

Modern design goals for social media platforms have focused on growth in terms of increasing user population and engagement, but are starting to show their growing pains with the widespread of hate speech, cyberbullying, and fake news. This design focus on growth at any cost is increasing the amount and reach of antisocial behavior online. In this talk, I will share my research in human-computer interactions that explores practical design interventions that encourage users to better empathize with one another. In my efforts to better implement and test these design interventions, I’ve developed new experimental tools and methods that create ecologically valid social media simulations, allowing researchers to conduct large-scale online social media experiments in a fully curated and controlled social media environment.

BIO

Dominic DiFranzo is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. His research in human-computer interaction translates established social science theories into design interventions that encourage social media users to stand up to cyberbullies, fact check fake news stories, and engage in other prosocial actions. In his effort to better implement and test these design interventions, he has also developed new experimental tools and methods that create ecologically valid social media simulations, giving researchers control of both the technical interface and social situations found on social media platforms. His research has been published in numerous conferences and journals, including the ACM CHI Conference, the ACM CSCW Conference, the International World Wide Web Conference, and the ACM Web Sci Conference.

SCHEDULE

6-6:30pm: Networking via virtual whiteboard and zoom

6:30pm: Presentation

7:30pm: Q&A

HOW THIS WORKS:

We will be using:

• A Zoom meeting for the event
• A Miro virtual whiteboard during the pre-talk networking

Links for both the Zoom meeting and the Miro whiteboard will be sent to registered attendees.

SPONSOR

Thank you to our generous sponsor!