Summary
Time is always on our minds in very practical ways—apportioning it for various projects, creating and prioritizing tasks, calendaring, and tracking deadlines and deliverables. Time does, however, have more abstract qualities that require our attention. It drives how we imagine future worlds, set our organizations' visions, track technological trends, manage our enterprises, plan our careers, roadmap our products, and choreograph our people. Each of these activities vary in scale and size, and each has its own cadence. Some focus on years, some on months, some on weeks, some on days. In this talk, Elizabeth Churchill will discuss ways of thinking about time in UX beyond classic, practical notions of "time management". She'll share personal stories from the enterprise and the academy, and invite a conversation about personal journeys of personal life long impact in UX.
Key Insights
-
•
Building social capital and trust inside enterprises increases effective use of formal productivity tools.
-
•
The Yeti collaborative poster allowed cultural co-ownership and broke down language barriers between US and Japanese teams.
-
•
Google Jamboard integrates cloud and G Suite allowing seamless real-time and asynchronous collaboration globally.
-
•
Material Design codifies decades of UX research and principles into a framework used by 90% of Google's product apps.
-
•
UX research on text fields and text legibility directly impacts accessibility standards and influences product designs.
-
•
Ethnographic interviews revealed pain points in designer-to-developer handoff, inspiring new internal collaboration tools.
-
•
Collaboration tools must facilitate trust and meaningful interaction beyond task completion to foster innovation.
-
•
Time boxing aids focus and motivation but must be balanced with reflection on bigger strategic goals.
-
•
Measuring intangible outcomes like rapport, employee happiness, and inter-team trust is critical for justifying internal UX tools.
-
•
Considering time as a material for design encourages long-term thinking about legacy and impact beyond immediate deliverables.
Notable Quotes
"The creation of trust and collaboration environment has a different timescale than communication tools themselves."
"Fuji Xerox would show you how to set up collaborative posters not just as technology but as service for social capital."
"The Jamboard's integration of physical social sharing and distributed digital work artifacts is a new frontier."
"Material Design is both a design philosophy and a framework used by almost all Google apps in some form."
"We tested text fields with Mechanical Turk to find which perform best for most people and fed that into specs."
"Making images and text more legible over complex backgrounds is both a tactical design and accessibility challenge."
"Breaking down silos requires tools that enable cross-team feedback and meaningful collaboration."
"Time boxing reduces anxiety, motivates, but doesn't preclude stepping back to assess bigger goals."
"The CEO wanted rapport, not just productivity, and the collaborative poster created that from scratch."
"When I announced the project shutdown, a flood of employee emails stopped it—it had become part of the fabric."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Most bad panels feel like a bunch of people showing up at the last minute without shared goals or preparation."
Louis Rosenfeld Jemma Ahmed Christian Crumlish Uday Gajendar Chris GeisonCoffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?
May 2, 2024
"We share the inconvenience of meeting times across time zones, alternating so no one team always bears it."
Jilanna WilsonDistributed Design Operations Management
October 23, 2019
"Hallucinations are a kind of AI creativity—dreaming, invention, fiction—all forms of hallucination."
Matt WebbContext Window: Five Futures for AI
June 11, 2025
"Accessibility requires flexible designs, not limited or simplified ones."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
September 8, 2022
"Designers almost always partner with clinicians who are the domain experts in healthcare projects."
Theresa NeilDesigning for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare
May 22, 2024
"The more I work with evals, the more I think UX and product people need to be involved because of the need for diverse perspectives."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
"Design ops and product ops are way more alike than dissimilar; they differ mainly in the orgs they serve."
Rachel Posman John Calhoun"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
September 25, 2024
"Web3 offers a unique chance to get involved early before some of the ethical challenges of Web2 take root."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"Building trust within organizations toward methods and processes is essential to onboarding new ways of working."
Sarah Auslander Betsy Ramaccia Gordon RossInsights Panel
November 18, 2022
