This years program

A Master in Failure:

1) is allowed to make mistakes
2) is able to make mistakes
3) stays relaxed when making mistakes
4) learns from making mistakes
5) embraces the mistakes of others

So, what’s your score? 4 or maybe 5 out of 5? Or do you secretly always have to perform 100% + of yourself? Join Remko during his opening keynote and let him inspire you to use your full potential and to become more relaxed in life.

You’ll learn how to adopt a failure mindset. A mindset aimed at less perfection stress and more on learning and development. It’s going to be a sparkling, active, funny and above all educational session. Are you ready to become a Master?

With UX Research coming into the limelight, more and more organizations are looking to bring in their first UX Research hire. When they look to hire you to build the UX research practice, there are critical things that will help set you up for success or failure.

In this talk, Stephanie will describe how she failed at building a UXR practice as the first UX researcher which eventually resulted in her being relieved of her duties. She will also share what this failure taught her to succeed in her next role as a first UX research hire, where she built a successful research program from the ground up.

“Who wants to be seen to fail, especially when your job’s on the line? We do! The Babylon Health User Research Team are harnessing the power of ‘intelligent failure’ by running ‘Fail Fests’.

We all know that failure is an inevitable part of developing as people and professionals. We know, too, that each failure is an opportunity to learn. But failure still tends to be taboo. Even if we have the time and headspace to reflect and learn from our mistakes in the face of delivery deadlines, it can feel uncomfortable and risky to talk about our failures with others.

This session will cover the rationale for building a team culture in which failure is celebrated, not hidden, and show how we at Babylon are using Fail Fests to do that. It aims to inspire other teams to harness the power of failure to maximise opportunities to learn, and gives some tips and ideas for anyone trying to do that.  

As in accepting and rejecting your hypotheses, you can make Type I and Type II errors in hiring as well: hiring the wrong person and not hiring the right person (false positive and false negative).

This talk will discuss approaches for both hiring managers and candidates to find the right person for your team based on my own failures in assessing hard skills, soft skills, and culture fit.

demos. expo, round tables, games, job market, speed dating, local communities

Be the first to learn about a brand-new method created to recruit B2B participants!  Shaped by user feedback and tons of experiments. Inspired by the unexpected change to work and live online. For the whole creation phase, these steps validate assumptions in a quick way. Staying true to the users’ needs, pains and gains. And finding participants with an on-point job, branch, years of experience in seconds.

When a recruitment agency is too expensive, too time-consuming or couldn’t find them, how can you? At the innovation department, the different teams struggled a lot of finding the right participants to gather feedback during the process. Wanting to know the user is crucial, before developing a new product or service. Getting participants where the job is a bit off from the persona, doesn’t give reliable answers. And when a prototype is ready for a usability test, the participant has to be on point

You will receive hands-on tips and tricks during this workshop. A fast way to find the user, write a personalized message to reach out and even automate the process.

User researchers are familiar with failure and its role in learning. Learning what doesn’t work for a product or a service helps make it better. And yet failure can seem scary when it comes to our own life. Most of us want to glide towards success without hiccups. But beyond the motivational quotes, what does learning from failure actually look like?

The session brings together knowledge from cognitive psychology, art, movies, and science on how to learn from failure.

You will learn concepts and do hands-on exercises to learn:
• How are your failures subjective, and how can you use them?
• Why does Dilbert’s author say ‘Goals are for losers’?
• How are success, perfectionism, and mastery different, and what do they mean for you? and more…

Much tech advice and UX research practice have been documented from the lens of individuals and companies on the cutting-edge of innovation. The reality is, for emerging or not-quite-developed markets, the environment is not as tech-literate, liberal or liquid.

This interactive session shows the trial-and-error behind implementing such advice in a city (and in companies) that are years behind Silicon Valley resources – to teach people (who may find themselves in the same boat) tactics for implementing human-centered design practice in culturally-different, low-budget environments.

Attendees will walk away with principles and potential decision guides (When is it worth pushing for more “UX”? What to do when there’s no budget?) coming from real-life experience.

As a product manager, I evangelize and conduct different kinds of user research in my organization. All the user research sessions we conduct don’t play out as designed and desired.

This interactive session is in the format of a storytelling session that recounts such research projects that we would call failures. Inspired by fables and oral storytelling, this session invites the audience to interact and reflect on what could be the moral(s) of these modern UX fables.

Hosted by Barra O’Leary and Georg Hagemann

Home office put us at a distance from colleagues, clients, and users, which posed quite a challenge for many. Not much changed for Testbirds, as we’ve been working remotely with our community throughout our existence and have picked up a few tricks (and failures) along the way.

In this session, we’ll discuss what considerations to make and how to minimize problems when you’re organizing a UX project far from both clients and users. Aspects that we’ll cover include scheduling, expectation management, communication, and the multitude of tools that are suitable for remote UX work.

Reflections on the day

Designing for Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) implies a lot of tries and errors. We’re still figuring out the foundations of the AR/VR UX. It’s especially challenging to design one of the most important UI elements in software: the menu.

In AR/VR, the user is immersed in the app, this means that the interface is displayed all around them and in 3D. Plus, the user can move anywhere in the virtual scene (VR) or physical environment (AR). With almost an infinity of possibilities, comes an infinity of questions.

Also, there’s no major device yet on the AR/VR market, every one of them has its own capabilities and interaction modes.

You’ll discover our ambitions, our doubts, our failures, and the tough decisions we made in 4 years regarding the menu of Minsar Studio, on several immersive platforms.

Our learning: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes but accept your limits. Like everyone, our successes have always been huge accomplishments and joys, but our failures are those that taught and improved us the most. Thanks to them, we learned how to find simpler solutions for us to develop, and for our users to experience. We don’t try to solve everything at once, we take one step at a time, whether it be forward or backward while always watching ahead. The goal in emerging technologies is to find the right balance between our crazy innovative ideas, the users’ needs, and our real capacities.

How do you convince a whole company of the value of insights from user research? By letting them gain these insights themselves!

This case study showcases how the staff of a media house in Bergen (Norway) committed to doing user interviews, guerrilla testing and hosting group discussions with more than 100 of their readers. During one intensive week, the 45 staff members received a crash course in research and ventured out to gain insights for their coverage of the upcoming local elections.

What could possibly go wrong when you invite everyone in the company to become a researcher for a day? During this talk, you will learn all about the failure as well as the benefits of democratising research.

Customer service tends to be an area of the business often separated from Tech & Product. Yet it has the potential to be the goldmine of data about customer experience. It can be symptomatic of problems created by the products for customers and be an important touchpoint that can shape the long-term relationship with the customer.

My research team was tasked to make sense of the abundance of data tracked in customer service and deliver insights that can help product teams improve customer experience. Yet along the way, we discovered that the existing data structure and metrics represented more the operational, rather than customer perspective. This led our team to reorient our goals – instead of trying to provide insights, to solve the problem at its root: create a new customer-centric data structure that allows measuring the customer service experience in a systematic way.

“My Product Managers just keep asking for mock-ups!,”  is a common complaint from UX teams that are not leveraged properly. Maturing the UX culture of your company and building your UX team is more than adding people to your team. It requires a change in how disciplines work together and mindset.

While it is the mission of the whole UX team to help educate our PM and DEV counterparts (and sometimes our own teammates) on what our specializations are, the role that focuses and leads this work is DesignOps. In this talk, I will cover a case study that outlines how DesignOps began laying the foundation for changing how we work with PM and DEV in a company that is shifting its focus to empathy first.

This session will cover lessons from building a UX team and later an embedded UX research team in two traditionally technology lead companies. We’ll examine the common challenges UXers face with culture change as well as best practices for how to initiate it with company leadership.

demos. expo, round tables, games, job market, speed dating, local communities

Have you ever finished a meeting and felt like you and your colleagues were speaking different languages? Remember how you felt surprised by how people give feedback? Imagine how this might be when you also throw cultural differences into the mix.

In this interactive session, Bindu will share three lessons from her failures on how experiencing cultural differences and understanding the nuances, empowered her. During this session, she will provide two frameworks to reflect on your own cultural experience and how it may be impacting various scenarios at work. This could be communication, leading teams, doing research or even running effective meetings.

During this session, you will apply these frameworks to understand and reflect where you are, relative to your own and other national cultures, in your professional lives. This session is for anyone who’s working with people from different cultures with a desire to understand where cultural differences can manifest and how to navigate in those contexts.

As a product manager, I evangelize and conduct different kinds of user research in my organization. All the user research sessions we conduct don’t play out as designed and desired.

This interactive session is in the format of a storytelling session that recounts such research projects that we would call failures. Inspired by fables and oral storytelling, this session invites the audience to interact and reflect on what could be the moral(s) of these modern UX fables.

UX research is still a relatively immature field. However, part of maturing requires honest assessment of our struggles & failure, which is not always the norm for researchers trying to defend the value of our work. Our emotional states also impact what we do, yet we often jump from one project to the next without time for deep self-reflection or rest. As a result, our core needs are often unacknowledged or overlooked by ourselves and others. This occurs partly because as a field we are lacking a symbolic “home” to call our own that creates a sense of belonging, shelter, protection, ownership & stability within our field. 

This workshop aims to explore and help us acknowledge and define our core needs as researchers by using the symbolic structure of a house to build “our own home” with. To build each floor, wall, roof, etc during this exercise, we will have to ask ourselves: What do we hide from others? What are we struggling at? What behaviours do we want to change? What emotions do we want to feel more often? Who protects us? Who supports us? Who makes us feel unsafe? How do we blow off steam? What are we proud of? What are the values that govern our UX research practices?

Want to improve your Global Research skills? Learn from our (many) failures!

The partners of the UXalliance have over 400 years of experience in global research. That means we have made a lot of mistakes as well. Failures that you can learn from in our interactive session!

Be ready to share your global research failures, as we would love to learn from all attendees. If you do, you might even win the ‘Most Valuable Failure Award’!

About the UXalliance

Portraits and Exploring On-Site Behaviour

How do you define customers and understand how they behave? This information is absolutely vital in improving customer’s experiences and helping to support teams make more informed and data-driven decisions. The Voice of Customer team at Zalando will walk you through how they created customer portraits, a way to define their specific customers within the online shopping space, and how they use this data day-to-day. The team will also be talking through what on-site data means to them, and how they use this data to enhance Zalando’s customers portraits or help teams make better decisions.  

How We Work with Stakeholders

Working with stakeholders is a key responsibility for user researchers, especially at large organizations. The Voice of Customer team at Zalando will talk through how they work with a large and diverse group of stakeholders, from intake documents, prioritizing requests, helping these teams understand research and everything in between. With many teams to support and limited capacity, the team will walk through how they run projects and keep stakeholders engaged throughout the process.  During this panel, the team will also cover how they empower stakeholders through their democratization practice, as well as what the benefits and drawbacks are that come with democratizing user research at a large scale. 

Reflections on the day

As researchers, we typically don’t have one bad project with the rest being flawless and simple. Instead, we fail in little ways along different lifecycles of projects and, sometimes, we fail multiple times. How do we grapple with all the ways a research project can do wrong? We start by taking a clear look at how we fail over the journey of a research project and how to overcome these mistakes.

In this talk, Nikki walks through the various failures she’s encountered across different projects and actionable steps to avoid, or better juggle, these challenges the next time around. Together, we will learn how to celebrate failures, understand how we can support each other and ourselves, and gain new perspectives and tools to improve our processes.

Collecting and interpreting data to inform product decision making, requires you to do so objectively, without being influenced by your own emotions and biases. Researches have to be aware of their internal drivers in order to neutralize them.

During this talk, I will share a use case where our research and product team were so overconfident and opinionated in a specific area, we were not open to interpret and appropriately consider the vital information collected from internal users.

The result – the commencement of a project which succeeded in achieving the defined success metrics, but completely missed the mark in solving the challenges the internal team originally reported.

During this session, I will focus on specific biases to look out for and will share practical strategies to avoid them.

We live in the era of “move fast and break things” — where learning through iteration and delivering quick outcomes is prioritized, even if it comes at a cost. But at what point is that cost too high? What kinds of unintended consequences could we be unleashing on our users by shipping things without careful deliberation?

And how can we as researchers leverage our unique skill sets — not to mention our privilege — to help proactively prevent harm in the products and services we help build?

We have learned from the past that we need safeguards in place to maintain ethical standards for research conducted with humans. UX researchers and those who play a role in UX research have a wide range of backgrounds and qualifications when it comes to conducting research. We need to ensure our UX research is compliant with ethical standards of research conducted with humans. To do this, we need to have an awareness of potential ethical issues in research, training on how to conduct ethical research, and a systematic review of our research protocols to avoid potential ethical pitfalls.

In this talk, Victor explores some lessons learned from the past, reflects on some areas of ethical consideration for UX practitioners when conducting UX research, and explores potential solutions to preventing research from venturing into unethical territory.