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
"Retraumatization means when someone is reminded of a trauma, they relive it all over again as if it was happening in that exact moment."
Carol Scott Melissa EgglestonAvoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
February 5, 2025
"If you press the exact same button today and tomorrow you get two different results, that’s non-deterministic UX."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Mobile screen readers can confirm basic accessibility but desktop testing is still needed due to differences across tools."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility and You
June 9, 2022
"We organize our work around our life, instead of our life around our work."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"The best way to understand these technologies is to learn them hands-on, especially if your work involves language or taxonomies."
Jorge ArangoScale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies
September 24, 2024
"We’re an older company by tech standards—older than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google by one year."
Chris MosesStretching the Definition of DesignOps with Product Development
November 7, 2018
"It becomes the designer’s responsibility to figure out what aspects of the instructions to the LLM should be configurable and what should be fixed."
Trisha Causley[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features
June 5, 2024
"AI should be a partner to UX professionals, not a replacement for UX expertise."
Clara Kliman-SilverUX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design
June 7, 2023
"Not a single person on this relationship map reported to me. That’s how I affect design at scale at Autodesk."
Michael PolivkaScaling Design through Relationship Maps
November 7, 2017
