Summary
You’ve seen it happen repeatedly throughout your career. As a UX researcher you’ve taken the time to develop key insights, as a UX designer you’ve conceptualized and tested several hypotheses. As a design strategist you’ve created a vision for a new or existing product and yet; product roadmaps remain eerily empty of your team’s UX contriubutions. How do you take what you know and have learned at this summit and put it into practice at your companies? How do you get your stakeholders on board to not only listen but implement your recommendations? What strategies do you need to make engineering friends and influence product managers? This talk will showcase various tactics you can use to help turn the passionate UX work you do into real product roadmap influence.
Key Insights
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Human-centered design integration should be viewed as a marathon rather than a sprint.
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Break down grand visions into quarterly milestones to manage expectations and workloads.
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Use storytelling to communicate design concepts effectively, tailoring messages to the audience's mental models.
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Create tangible artifacts to guide discussions and decisions in product design instead of relying solely on abstract ideas.
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Foster collaboration among cross-functional teams to ensure alignment on project goals and visions.
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Adopt the language and terminology of stakeholders to enhance communication and understanding.
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Engage stakeholders in research processes to create shared understanding and ownership of design solutions.
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Treat stakeholders as research participants to build empathy and rapport during collaboration efforts.
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Leverage the power of design ethics to motivate and guide decisions in product development.
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Recognize that successful user experience practices depend on collective efforts, not just individual contributions.
Notable Quotes
"If you don't think you can go to battle day in and day out, UX might not be for you."
"One way or another, it doesn't let up."
"My job is to convince people to create something that doesn't exist or hasn't been discovered yet."
"You can't put your holistic vision into the mental model of people just getting to know what design and research can do."
"The faster you can get something into an artifact, the faster you can steer the conversation toward production rather than debate."
"Our goal is to make them less wrong, right?"
"You have to break up your vision into quarterly milestones because it's hard to convince people of the value of UX all at once."
"Move from thoughts to things to have better influence when conveying your ideas."
"Our assignment is to get human-centered design into products and get that shipped."
"It's better together; think Justice League, not Wolverine."
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