Between 2018 and 2022, Shir Zalzberg gathered massive amounts of data, running four surveys with thousands of participants in the UX community she manages. The surveys tackled subjects like salaries, gender gaps, age and experience gaps, the job of UX designers vs. managers, design tools, and more.

 

In the workshop, she’ll cover best practices for data visualization. She’ll teach us what visual changes she has implemented over the years to help drive change, and what lessons she has learned about how data visualization can impact the greater community. 

 

Shir is a Senior UX manager at Salesforce. Previously, she led the design team at OverOps, and has also worked with multiple startups and tech companies.

 

Besides her work, Shir is the founder of Startup Designers, a design community with over 20K members and multiple initiatives. For her work with the community, Shir was recognized as Forbes Israel 30 under 30 2021.

 

She completed her MBA at IE business school and recently relocated to Amsterdam from Israel.

 

Connect with Shir here:

 

Uber rolled out SOS functionality only after there were sexual harassment cases
reported on their rides, originally overlooking safety (which often matters more to
women). Yoga apps, even with an overwhelmingly female audience, fail to acknowledge menstruation. Pension funds, failing to acknowledge that women live longer have contributed to gender financial gaps.

 

Our products and services continue to overlook women’s key needs and create unintended consequences for them. Chances are that most of us are not only using products and services that overlook key needs of women, we are also creating them. Research shows that our current design methodologies are biased—that under the guise of being “genderless” or “gender-neutral,” they continue to produce one-size-fits-men outcomes. Businesses have failed to design for and create impact for women–and women continue to remain invisible and overlooked in a world traditionally designed for men.

 

Mansi Gupta says “As a women-centric behavioral design lead for several years, I observed that projects across domain, culture, and geography often run into the similar unique barriers that specifically women face. Safe access, time poverty, non-linearity of their lives continues to go unacknowledged. At the same time, brilliant gender-driven design practitioners have been solving these problems in different contexts for years with, and alongside women. There is room for their learnings, insights, and design principles to be amplified; and cross-learning to be had.”

 

“Design for Women,” a methodology and toolkit, is the culmination of key themes, design principles, and tools from several hours of research interviews with gender experts–so that we can shift the way we approach our projects, and widen our lens in research and ideation to meet women’s needs. This talk will introduce designers to the Design for Women methodology and help incorporate an inclusive, women-centric lens in their thinking, ideation and creative toolkit.

 

Attendees will leave with:
● An increased understanding of how our current gender-neutral design
methodologies overlook women
● Tools to evaluate products, services and experiences with a women-centric design lens and a tactile way to frame design conversations, ideation sessions and
problem definition with women at the front and centre.
● Applicable key themes, insights, and design principles to ensure a women-centric design approach both inside and outside of work.

 

As the founder of Unconform, Mansi partners with organisations to help them incorporate a women-centric design lens across products, programs and processes. She is the creator of Design for Women–a methodology focused on intentionally and actively designing for women; the author of Unconforming, a newsletter advancing dialogue at the intersection of women and design; and the curator of Design for Women Conversations, a monthly event series bringing together gender and design practitioners.

 

Mansi has 10+ years of experience applying behavioural research & design strategy in social impact. Previously, she led projects at Women’s World Banking to increase financial inclusion among lower-income women in developing nations. Prior to that, she designed games to research reproductive healthcare in rural India as a designer for Final Mile Consulting.

 

Mansi holds a BA in Computer Science & Economics from Bryn Mawr
College, and an MFA in Products of Design from the School of Visual Arts. She grew up in India, and is now based in Amsterdam.

 

Connect with Mansi here:

 

Connect with Demi here:

 

In this closing keynote, Angelos Arnis will look at how designers can use their skills and tools to influence a truly green transition and shape a sustainable, equitable, and just future for all. We will talk about how strategic design, sustainable thinking, and systems approaches can help us create solutions that benefit our communities and the world we live in.

 

People love stories. We are told time and time again the value of storytelling when we present our UX work. But this is a workshop about Spontaneous Talks Frameworks (STF for short). These are a bit different from your traditional fairy tale that follows the arc and structure of a story. STF may not have a rising action, a climax, or a resolution. Heck, you might go as far to say that STF are not really stories at all.

 

Spontaneous Talks Frameworks are less about describing a narrative, and more about quickly organizing your thoughts, using a framework. A Spontaneous Talks Framework helps you to organize your thoughts to present UX designs or research findings to your stakeholders. STF can be a fabulous crutch when you need to speak on a topic that you have not prepared for in advance.

 

In this workshop, Jen Blatz will teach you how to organize your thoughts with these easy frameworks. You will learn how to use this thought organization technique to answer anything — and use it to present your UX work. You will:

Sometimes neither you nor your stakeholders have the time for a full presentation. These hacks allow you to present information on a short timeline. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks help you break up your story into smaller, consumable chunks so it’s easier to organize and remember.

 

As the profession of product design has evolved over the past couple decades, the best practices of product design and process have evolved quite a bit. And they continue to do so. Many large and burgeoning companies usually go one of two routes: hiring a full time person to run their product (often at the C- or VP-level) or they outsource product design to an agency where they become one of many clients, who can easily become yes-people for client requests. But there is a third option that gives you the best of both worlds: the fractional leader. This is happening outside of product as well – with CEOs, CTOs, and in marketing as well. So, why not product? In this talk, Dan Maccarone will explore the success he has seen in factional product leadership, the art of building multiple internal teams at once, and how having a head of product who’s able to keep a peripheral view of what’s going on outside your company can keep you from getting too mired in the weeds and able to leverage experience that you may not otherwise have been aware of.

The problematic intersection of UX design with organizational design: Is your organization ready and willing to change? 

In the field of UX design, we are often asked to do something, but that thing may have more potential effects than we can predict. How might we respond, or create credible recommendations, when the impact of what we are asked to deliver is beyond what was expected – or the reality of our findings are beyond organizational readiness for listening, receptiveness, or action?

UX is often strategic in its essence as a practice, and therefore UX requires organisational maturity around design, strategy and operations to be enabled. Particularly when we as designers identify key pain points, opportunities or moments that matter for our co-workers, partners, users and/or customers. When these identified needs and opportunities indicate that systemic change is required in the way we in these organisations deliver potential solutions or positive outcomes, this can have an effect that can be less domino and more butterfly. 

TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE HERE: https://uxcopenhagen.com/#tickets

Don’t democratize UX Research – and governance for those doing it

Democratization is something few of us would choose if we had alternatives. We would want budget and headcount to grow the UX Research department. A team stretched thin is told not only to let anybody do some or all of their jobs, but that they will need to train and oversee this work.

This actionable session dives into many of the pro-democratization reasons and arguments and offers critical thinking and counter-arguments for all of them. For those who want to democratize – or are being forced to – we’ll work with my governance model, and you’ll learn how to closely monitor having non-specialists do specialized work, and being able to know when it’s successful or failing. 

 

The Content Design of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration

In the current political climate, it seems like we’ve all but given up on productive, respectful discourse. However, there are simple design and content design choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues. In this session we’ll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and the three rules they share.

 

Dave will also be hosting a separate, full-day workshop on March 21, 2023, on “The Inclusive Design: Creating a Bias-Informed Practice”. This one is not to be missed! We had an online version of it in 2022, and are super excited to host it once again, but live. 

The Inclusive Design: Creating a Bias-Informed Practice workshop is intended to help organizations come up with systemic ways to mitigate bias in their design processes. It begins with the acknowledgement that our users have biases and so do we and asks how might we use design and content tools and methods to reduce the harm those biases might cause (or even use some of our mental shortcuts for good). 

The outcomes are practical: 

• Give participants experience using some of the methods (red team/blue team, ethical goal-setting, etc.) that lead to less-biased outcomes

• Give participants a game plan for making changes within their organization to gradually implement increasingly inclusive design

• Ultimately, change not only hearts and minds but budgets, and help participants understand the value of making these practices standard operating procedure in a way that is reflected in project plans and budget allocations. 

Summary agenda:

The first section gives attendees a grounding in how bias works and focuses on the biases our users have and how to use design and content strategy to mitigate or leverage them for good. 

• • Exercises focus on techniques that impact the believability of content and design approaches to reduce the opportunity for biased decision making. 

• The next section focuses on internal, organizational biases and how they impact design. 

  • Exercises focus on mitigating bias in measurement and bias-informed approaches to turn internal conflict into collaboration. 

• The final section focuses on our own biases as practitioners and establishing processes to mitigate those. 

  • Exercises give attendees practice in applying these methods to the design of a hypothetical product.

Testimonial:

“As designers and technologists, it’s our responsibility to recognize bias and be more intentional about the products and services we introduce to the world. Dave’s workshop on understanding cognitive bias has been a tremendous step for our teams on the path toward making better, more enlightened decisions. By equipping us with new information, well-researched examples, and actionable techniques, we are now better prepared than ever to identify cognitive bias and make more effective decisions that benefit our customers, business, and brand.”   
– Brian Beaver, VP of Design at Turo