Digital product equity is at the intersection of futures thinking, inclusive design and product accessibility.
In a recent members’ call, Toronto-based UX researcher Christina Scriven from our design leadership community looked at how the tech industry leaders are approaching the concept, and offered ideas about how you could bring product equity practices into your organisation.
Christina most recently worked as Customer Segments Manager at Scotiabank reporting into the Head of Accessibility and Digital Product Equity.
During the summer of 2023, Christina did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices to both consolidate key themes and to better inform customer experience leaders on industry approaches and in our call she shared her findings.
Read more“The world is in need of better design, and Kozma’s book shows us how to get there.”
Last year Robert Kozma published "Make the World a Better Place: Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values".
The book has been well received and presents an insightful and hands-on discussion of design as a profoundly human activity and challenges us all to use design to transform the world for the better. The book explains how and why the design industry lost its way, and how to re-ignite the idealism that once made it a force for good.
Robert Kozma is a San Francisco-based author, researcher, and consultant with over 40 years of experience in technology, education, and social development. As an emeritus principal scientist at SRI International, he has collaborated with ministries of education, national agencies, multinational organizations, and high tech companies on how to use information and communication technology to transform education and support economic and social development
Make the World a Better Place describes a set of moral principles, based on our shared humanity, that can be used to create “good” designs: designs that reduce harm, increase well-being, advance knowledge, promote equality, address injustice, and build supportive, compassionate relationships and communities.
Read moreHow do online businesses exploit consumers through carefully designed tricks and traps? Regulations are changing rapidly, and we're seeing a big rise in legal enforcement. But is it enough to protect consumers?
Our former Boye Aarhus conference keynote speaker Harry Brignull published his first book back in August titled: “Deceptive patterns - exposing the tricks tech companies use to control you”
Based on over a decade of work on deceptive design (also known as dark patterns), the book takes you into the shadowy world of deceptive design.
Harry holds a PhD in cognitive science and works as Head of Innovation at UK-based pensions firm Smart. We recently did a member’s call with Harry as an informal book launch to our community.
Read moreThe job title “Designer” carries vague promises of creativity and self-expression. It’s not necessarily a job you pick because you want to get rich fast. It’s a job you are drawn to because you find meaning in it. ‘Find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,’ the promise goes.
What does this actually mean for designers? Working as a designer can be immensely fulfilling - you get to create things of beauty and effectiveness, you help people, you reinvent the world. Yet, this idea of design as a life-long passion project rather than a job may also open the door to unrealistic expectations of work as well as unhealthy work-life balances.
The pandemic has led most of us to re-evaluate the workplace and our role in it. In a member’s talk talk, Hertje Brodersen takes this prompt to re-evaluate what it means to love design and to work as a designer, and how to navigate the boundaries.
Read moreIt seems like AI will have a big impact making us more effective, more efficient, helping us generate ideas more quickly and perhaps even making us better understand our audiences and to tailor content and design to meet their needs.
Dennis Oswald is Brand Experience Manager at Netgen in Zurich and like most of us, he is just another curious human being trying to figure out what's going on with AI.
In a recent member call, Dennis looked at how AI will change the creative process and the broader impact for design leaders.
As expected from a field that’s cooking faster than a microwave dish, we covered quite some ground. As Dennis said, doing the slides for the call was a creative wakeup call, but I think, that the call the same impact on most attendees.
Read morePeter Merholz has worked at the intersection of design, technology, and humans for over 25 years. Currently, he’s an independent consultant focused on improving the effectiveness of design organizations. His clients include JP Morgan Chase, Ceridian, The New York Times, Roblox, and Starbucks.
He co-founded Adaptive Path, the premier user experience consultancy, acquired by Capital One in 2014. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has served as a design executive, leading teams at Groupon, OpenTable, Capital One, Snagajob (now Snag), and Kaiser Permanente.
He co-wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, still the premier book on building in-house design teams, and co-hosts Finding Our Way, a podcast exploring design leadership. Oh, and, yeah, he coined the word “blog.”
Peter kindly offered to host a 'Ask me anything' session as one of our regular member calls. The conversation started with his book and took us through current design leadership topics onto his take on the recent tech layoffs, also named by some as a social contagion phenomenon.
Read moreAs designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users
When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that require less effort and ideally no training.
In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this great responsibility and place a great burden on their users.
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.
Read moreAs the Head of Design at telecommunications conglomerate Verizon in New York City, Richard Dalton leads a sizable team of 600 designers working at the forefront of Verizon's digital transformation. They aim to create exquisite experiences for their customers, but how do they do it?
In a recent member call, Richard offered a brief and informal Q&A session, where he covered DesignOps, strengthening the design muscle and some of the recent design trends.
Read moreEmergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. In her new book called Life and Death Design, Katie Swindler brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Katie works as is Innovation Design Strategist, Sr. Manager at insurance firm Allstate in Chicago, IL and recently hosted a member call introducing her book. She included some of the many insightful stories featured in the book and told us more about what she learned while researching on the topic. Below you’ll find my notes with some of the highlights from the call.
She opened with a true story on how famous astronaut Neil Armstrong once had a life and death experience and turned to reading the manual.
Read moreHow do you make design accessible for everyone in your organisation? One option is to build an internal design community of practice, drip feed your colleagues with inspiration, cultivate a sharing culture and at some point let it go.
When I first spoke to Grace de Athayde, back in circa mid 2020, I was preparing our first European conference during the pandemic and Grace wanted tell her story about building a UX Community at Danfoss which went from zero to 200 members in less than a year.
In the process, she made it quite clear, including on her opening slides at that time, that she was not an expert, but I think everyone who has met Grace in the past years, would say that she’s very knowledgeable about user experience and design.
These days she is wrapping up at Danfoss and getting ready to start a new job at the LEGO Group as Sr. Manager Digital Product Design as of 1 February.
She’s also our first expert of the month for 2022.
Read more“Nothing today is designed for old people”
For our final member conference call of 2021, we heard the story about how Anja Saabye is building a UX and Design team at Universal Robots. Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and works with industrial automation. They are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterized by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production.
Anja Saabye joined as Head of UX in late 2020 and has since rapidly grown her team. She joined with an agency background, including almost 6 years at Hesehus. She firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company.
Read moreIt’s all about building bridges - in particular between different ways of thinking
Talking to Kristina Larsen who is a UX specialist at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, you might expect to hear about how her design leadership work bridges different departments, but as she shared her story, it became clear that her years studying at Aalborg University and Aarhus University, and now almost 14 years working in higher education, has taken her to the next level.
In her own words, she strives to make others feel welcome, heard, valued and supported, which applies whether you are a colleague, student, a customer at VIA or a close friend.
Kristina is also a leisure doodler, a freelance mini farmer living on a field in the middle of Jutland and dreaming about landing her first board position in the next couple of years. Earlier this month, she was a highly rated track leader at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference and she is our expert of the month.
Read moreThere is nothing better than shared purpose, shared values and value created for all involved. But how does that actually work? You have probably heard of community gardens, co-ops and other community-based initiatives where people come together, put in an effort and everyone gets an output. But how can that work digitally? Does it even work?
When everything we build digitally has some sort of commercial angle or way to create more value for the organisation building it, is it then true commoning? Or is commoning in the digital world quickly on its way to becoming the next greenwashing fad?
Helle Jensen is Experience Director at digital agency Valtech and in a recent member conference call, she shared examples of good, bad and unexpected angles on commoning in a digital context. You might be a part of it already without even knowing it. Helle discussed whether commercial commoning is actually commoning or just a fancy loyalty scheme and if psychological commoning is a trick or a treat.
Read moreHow do you become an inspirational leader of a UX department? In particular, one that needs to gather existing habits, change some of them, and set a new direction. There are many good leadership books you can read and plenty of management theory, but in these strange and surreal times, we need to observe leaders in practice and learn from how they act and behave.
I recently spoke to Mads Norlyk, Head of UX at Jyske Bank in Silkeborg, Denmark about his role, recent lessons learned, and his experiences keeping the team creative and motivated.
Mads has been 3 years with the bank and was previously Digital Experience Manager at LEGO Education. Earlier he was on the agency side as User Experience Designer at Designit. Mads is our expert of the month.
Read moreA few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.
I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:
“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”
This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!
Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.
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