UX Camp Spring 2021

UX Camp Spring 2021

UX Camp Spring 2021 is a 1-day mini-conference that delivers great UX content at a price that lets anyone attend, from where you are.

On Saturday, April 3rd, 2021 at 10AM CT, from where ever you are—we’re serving up 2 awesome keynotes that bookend really great presentations!

Interested in getting on a virtual stage? Submit your presentation idea!

We continue to provide a stage with inclusive continuing education that is great for our community. Don’t miss out–join us and expand your User Experience horizons–and don’t worry: we record the sessions so you can revisit them later.

And we’ve got swag! We’ve partnered with Nerditees (again) to bring you some cool UX-themed gear. We’ve got stylish Next Level Human-Centered t-shirts that come in blue with yellow or black with white.

Each swag item purchased adds to our pool of “Need 1, Take 1” passes that are available to anyone who has a need–no questions asked.

Event Details
Speakers
Adam Connor
Adam Connor
VP of Product Design, Skills
Pluralsight
Adam’s work focuses on helping teams and organisations strengthen and grow their human-centered design and innovation capabilities. As a design leader, Adam’s work blends systems thinking, HCD, anthropology, and organisational behaviour to foster more collaborative, creative and customer-centric organisations.
Karen VanHouten
Karen VanHouten
Senior Director of Product Strategy
Infobeans
A curious skeptic and expert snark, Karen has a deep love for beautiful messes fostered over 20 years of work in UX and product.
Betsy Freeman
Betsy Freeman
Senior Visual Product Designer
Intuit
Betsy is a curious creative currently working as a Senior Experience Designer at Intuit.
Cliff Seal
Cliff Seal
Principal Designer
Salesforce
Cliff is a Principal Designer at Salesforce, helping build world-class customer experience tools. For him, experience design is a strategy for creating positive change in the world for others—not in a vague sense, but a literal one.
Colleen Pellissier
Colleen Pellissier
UX Researcher
Groupon
Colleen is passionate about collaboration, human-centered research, and a holistic approach to creating products. She’s currently a UX Researcher at Groupon; bringing a customer-focused lens to teams and initiatives across the organization with a fiery heart and quick wit.
Cristina Simonetto
Cristina Simonetto
Senior Content Designer
RBC
Cris is a content designer in Toronto with about 15 years experience writing for UX. Currently, she’s a content chapter lead at RBC, Canada’s largest bank.
Dean Schuster
Dean Schuster
Partner
truematter
Founder and partner of truematter, a user experience strategy firm, Dean has created user-centered digital products for 25 years. He oversees truematter’s UX practice, leading engagements for regional organizations as well as the Fortune 100.
Kathy Wang
Kathy Wang
Product Designer
Dropbox
Kathy is the US-born daughter of Chinese-born parents. As an Asian-American, she experienced her childhood as a third culture kid.
Loriah Pope
Loriah Pope
Product Designer
Hubspot
A self-described what-iffer, Loriah is passionate about working across disciplines and teams to clarify complex problem spaces. She finds everything endlessly fascinating, asks way too many questions, and writes about those questions sometimes on Medium.
Julia Beauchamp Kraft
Julia Beauchamp Kraft
Founder
Speak To Inspire
Julia Beauchamp Kraft is the founder of the public speaking training company, Speak To Inspire. Founded in 2014, Speak To Inspire has trained 1000’s of entrepreneurs and professionals as well as 100’s of companies like LinkedIn, Salesforce, ZScaler, Twitter, etc.
Low-cost, high-quality events for the User Experience community.
Chicago Camps
Event Producer
Chicago Camps
Chicago Camps, LLC was formed and founded with the intention of bringing high-value, low-cost events to the User Experience community.
Schedule

We'll open the doors a little early and let folks in. Sometimes, we have surprises, sometimes, we play music, sometimes it's a little quiet. Get there a little early to be ready for kick-off!

Building Character: Creating Unique, Consistent Experiences with Design Principles

Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, apps, our bank, our doctor, our government, anyone—we form expectations of what someone or something will do based on our previous experiences and their past behaviors. When something happens that doesn’t measure up to those expectations–that seems out of character–we’re caught off guard. What do we do next? What should we expect now?

Conversations about consistency in design often focus on topics like content and interface design, ensuring that we use the same labels, controls, patterns throughout our creations. But what if we thought about consistency in the relationship between users and our products or services?

Principles act as rules that guide how we think and act. Formed by our motivations, values and beliefs, we use them as “lenses” through which we examine information in order to make decisions on what to do. And because of their persistent influence on our behavior, they influence other’s views and expectations of us. Using these same kinds of constructs throughout the design process we can design unique content, valuable interactions and consistent behaviors that set and live up to expectations for our audiences.

15 minute break.

Siloed organizations aren’t incentivized to improve the space between products, despite the massive opportunity it presents. Seizing that opportunity is as much community organization as it is design.

Enterprise customers increasingly interact with multiple products from the same company. From rapid acquisitions to market opportunities, companies are frequently introducing products and services that are ostensibly interconnected. Users can transfer knowledge of existing product mechanics and flows to new ones, resulting in faster adoption and time-to-value—but that won’t happen by accident.

I’ll show how we’ve managed these efforts at Salesforce: how we built momentum internally, enlisted stakeholders, co-created, made decisions, and set ourselves up for constant improvement.

15 minute break.

Workhorse, data-dense digital products pose serious challenges, requiring compact UI focused on productivity and efficiency. To make better complex apps and software, we must deeply understand the domain expert power user, whose behavior and preferences confound the best digital product designers.

Because mission-critical app users demand compact, crowded interfaces that only a master Excel ninja could love (or use), it can be brutally difficult to make user-friendly products for them. Our UX instincts often lead us to design products hese users rebel against.

But you CAN do it. The best place to start is understanding the user of complex interfaces. In this session, you’ll learn the tips, tricks, and indispensable secrets to help you come to terms with their needs. These principles will change the way you think about constrained interface design. And your power users will love you for it.

30 minute break.

So many of the things we used to rely on to fuel our creativity before the pandemic—meeting new people, traveling, visiting museums—have been off-limits for many of us over the past year. Staying creative can feel nearly impossible—and fear not: there’s hope.

I’ve developed a framework for boosting your creativity no matter the circumstances. I’ll share how to harness your curiosity as a focal point, and how to break that down and to help identify ways to reignite your creativity. The process infused my life with renewed energy that sparked my creativity—from my sketchbook to my day job and even on to receiving a promotion!

15 minuted break.

You did your research, you found the problem. You came up with great concepts and design. But you get to user testing, and all your users can talk about is the content: they don’t get it.

In these days of tight budgets and lean teams, you’re expected to wear many hats. So, in the absence of a content professional, how can you tighten up that content so clients can absorb it?

We’ll go over what content design is, how to incorporate it into every stage of the double diamond process, and mainly some concrete tips to make your UX writing a little better.

15 minute break.

Did you ever wonder why so much of our work seems harder than it should be? Does it feel like you are constantly working at altitude, trying to do more work with less oxygen? Well, Karen’s first job in tech was in 1993. You read that right. 1993. That’s almost 30 years across different roles and companies, all in technology and digital products. And no matter how much more skilled we all get, things just seem to be getting harder. How do we move from barely surviving to practically thriving?

In this new talk, we’ll discuss how we get wicked good: moving through competency and mastery to sustainability, even in environments that seem to be set up for failure, disappointment, and eventual burnout. We’ll explore how to make our work spaces kinder, more inclusive, and more supportive of long term engagement and growth while at the same time encouraging us to be more thoughtful and intentional about the design decisions and career choices we make.

15 minute break

Have you ever found yourself at a loss for what to say in response to “I don’t understand why we need to point out race… we’re all humans here?” Have you ever stood in line at the coffee shop, and overheard a heated argument, but went back and forth between wanting to stand up for the person being yelled at and thinking it was none of your business? Have you ever caught yourself in a situation where you just couldn’t tell if someone was being racist or not?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’ll understand why Allied Voices was formed. We’re a platform that enables you to navigate your racial landscape by reading other people’s stories of similar incidents, and how they handled them.

Join us as we dive into how an Uber ride initially inspired the project, how we addressed the issue of coming off as tone-deaf in initially only addressing Asian-American struggles, how we took user trust into consideration (as we made design decisions on the way we displayed different types of content), and what surprising takeaways we found through rigorous user testing.

You’ll walk away with a new understanding of how to use your design skills for social impact, and how to approach, and even embrace, uncomfortable conversations as a designer.

15 minute break.

The design industry doesn’t make it easy for any of us to be designers—and it can seem even more challenging to be a great designer. We all want to do great work; however, great design is subjective! We all want to grow our skills, and our industry is riddled with tool debates, in-fighting about who is a designer, who should code, and any number of other competing viewpoints that make it difficult to know if you’re on the right path.

Design, the noun, verb, and industry, can leave even the strongest of us doubting ourselves and wondering what we need to do next. I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome, and through the reflection of my own experiences transitioning from development to design, I’ll share the framework that is helping me find my growth path so you can tailor it to meet your needs, and target the future that makes the most sense for you.

30 minute break

Have you ever screwed up at work? This can be a big or small thing; it’s a terrible feeling. This happens to everyone at every level in our career. We make mistakes, we’re trying our best but work hard, people are harder, and sometimes it all just goes to shit. I think that’s ok, that’s human and being human is the best we can do.

I’ve spent the last couple of years learning, cultivating, and honing a superpower: mindful self-compassion. These are small things I do every day to be kinder to myself, forgive myself, and reminding myself of common humanity. This practice has made me a better teammate and employee. I’ve gained better focus and balance at work.

By sharing some of my own "failure"/mess-up stories I’d like to illustrate how I used self-compassion tools to navigate the situation. These tools and methods are super accessible and informal that anyone can try, and I’d love to give the audience some things to try out.

15 minute break.

On-camera anxiety and Zoom fatigue can make it challenging to be and present your best self. Being a confident communicator is not just the way you act, talk, and look. It’s a habitual way of thinking and reacting to various life situations. There are steps you can take to transform your mindset and nervous system so that you can be fully expressed on camera and in your whole life (and hopefully in-person again someday).

You can learn how to become an engaging and influential leader and cultivate the communication tools needed to effectively share your ideas. In this talk we’ll explore how to break down the barriers, misconceptions, and fears that prevent people from being fully heard.

And, you’ll become aware of small changes to your words, tone, and non-verbal communication to improve how you interact in high-stakes personal and professional communications.

And, you’ll learn some virtual speaking basics to shine in our new virtual communication world.

15 minute break.

Event Details
Sponsors
December 2024
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