Madison 2020

Voice- and chat-based apps are engaging new ways to connect with users, but because they have little or no visual interface they also present some new information architecture challenges. Learn more about the challenges as well as a few strategies for overcoming then.

Thinking about the far-future of a product can seem ineffective, as the predictability of our product & the world around it gets harder the farther away we get in time. Yet there are methods of organizing this mess of possibilities into valuable paths that can help your products plan more effectively.

Using speculative design, we can more thoroughly think through possible paths & plans for our products, identify some of the consequences of our design decisions today, and create visions of far-future that help to guide decision-making now.

This presentation will explain the purpose of speculative design, give some effective examples of this method, and share some common design techniques to help you organize the ambiguous future path of your products.

The Widen Collective is a suite of applications used by marketers and creative teams at 650+ global companies. Director of Research and Design, Leah Ujda, will share the UX team's approach to baselining the cross-collective navigation experience, advocating for improvements, and measuring progress using the PURE method

Kristin Eschenfelder, Information School Professor and Associate Director of the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences, will describe plans for new academic programs and research groups related to information architecture, UX and UI at UW-Madison.

Break for lunch and enjoy one of the many restaurants in the area while networking with others.

Solving big problems and self-servant leadership is the belief we demonstrate every day as UX Designers. Discover how to apply design thinking, innovate with customers, and build a strategy without all the technical jargon. In this interactive workshop, roll your sleeves up and be ready to learn the tools and methodologies that you can apply at your organization.

Gender identity isn’t binary. But until now, the dscout platform gave research participants two options: male or female. It wasn’t working for our users, our customers, our employees, or our company. So we took a hard look at how our platform asked users about gender—then talked to ~70 people across the gender spectrum about how we could build a more inclusive experience for our non-cisgender users.

It surfaced design principles for gender-identity inclusion—and insights for any company looking to move beyond the binary. We'll share:

• How we designed the research—and why we launched it

• What we found from the conversations, research and prototype testing

• How you now can conduct more inclusive research within our platform

• How you can use the insights to make your company more inclusive

Gender identity isn’t binary. But until now, our platform gave research participants two options: male or female. It wasn’t working. We spoke with ~70 people across the gender spectrum to inform changes to the way we talk about gender identity. We'll explore what we learned and changed.

"Live" from Boston we will be streaming Abby Covert's morning keynote as part of the celebration of the IA Element.