UX Connect 23

Let’s explore sustainable design together

The conference featured 2 packed days with a carefully curated mixture of talks, workshops, activities and world class facilitators, thought-provokers, speakers and session leads.

Program

Tuesday, June 13

8:30 - 9:30: Breakfast and registration

9:30 - 9:45: Welcome & Opening

by our host Jens Hofman, Vertica and our moderator Janus Boye, Boye & Co

“We can not meet the sustainability goals without data and smart digital solutions!”

According to Katrine Sundbye, digital is an enabler for sustainability. 

Join this opening talk to learn about the principles of the circular product model. A model where your products can regenerate and be used again. Smart digital solutions are a key enabler for the circular economy, as achieving this requires insights into demand, supplies, location and other details. Details which are available in IT systems, which in turn needs to be designed...

Are there different or better ways to meet user needs by applying circular strategies?

In this workshop, you will redesign an everyday product by reflecting on the functional and emotional needs that it serves and using circular strategy cards to brainstorm new solutions that are better for people and planet.

11:15 - 11:30 Coffee & networking

At Canyon Bicycles, a German company known for offering high performance bikes, we encourage people to pedal along toward a sustainable future. As UX designers, we strive to build a seamless digital e-commerce shop experience. We speak for users, but we also face many challenges and obstacles on the way from selling to servicing. 

In this session, we will share the topics which Canyon Bicycles cares about: accessibility and inclusivity, to bring the positive impact to the cycling community. The sharing will provide two different point of views both from Canyon’s e-commerce team to digital service team:

1. Help customers extend their bike’s lifecycle

2. Inclusive cycling for everyone 

Join to get to know what’s the story behinds cycling industry and Canyon Bicycle digital experience design team.

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

With new learnings and ideas from the morning’s speakers, we will roll up our sleeves and get to work: in this practical workshop we will apply UX tools with a sustainability twist to a case assignment.

Vertica’s UX designer Natalia will set the scene for the task, and give you techniques that help you in thinking sustainability into the design process. We will work in small groups when we try out the tools, and end the session with a joint evaluation of what works, what doesn’t, and how it can be applied in real life UX work.

15:00 - 15:30 Coffee & networking

In Norlys, we have different products we offer our customers as a utility company. This includes electricity, gas, internet, TV and streaming and EV charging. For a long time, electricity and gas had been low-involvement products.

No one was interested in energy products. What electricity supplier you had or what the price was. Energy products were something you saved 500 DKK when you bought a new phone in Elgiganten.

This changed in 2021, when the gas reserves had started to thin out. In September 2022 things went completely crazy and we were in a crisis that we were unprepared to handle.

Join this session to hear about how Norlys have handled the energy crisis and helped our customers as best as possible to:

• Understand which electrical product they had

• Alternative products to offer that might suit their daily life better

• Save money on electricity bill

• See the prices for electricity hour by hour

A story of compromises between usability, esthetics, ease of use and sales.

16:30 - 17:00 Coffee & networking

17:00 - 18:00 Lightning Talks

As the name suggests, lightning talks give speakers a limited amount of time to make their presentation – around 10 - 15 minutes. They may or may not include slides.

Because lightning talks are brief, it requires the speaker to make their point clearly and rid the presentation of non-critical information. This, in turn, helps keep the attention of the audience. It also means many ideas can be presented in a short amount of time.

Talks:
* Inclusive and Accessible UX: Sustainable Solutions for Bias-Free Technology by Antonia Fedder
* Website Sustainability Score by Gavin Colborne
* Let’s sort our trash better by Signe Hollensen
* AI + UX to boost learning, save time, reduce travel and have a more multicultural approach by Dafne Cipriani
* Problem framing by Thorsten Jonas

18:30 - 22:00 Social event at Il Locale, Guldsmedgade

Wednesday, June 14

6:30 Morning Run

We meet in front of Vertica for a relaxed 25 minute run

8:30 - 9:30 Breakfast and networking

9:30 - 9:45: Morning welcome

Reducing and mitigating the impact of climate change is the key challenge of our time. According to the UK Design Council around 80% of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures are determined at the design stage.

The Design Industry therefore has a vital role to play in reducing emissions and mitigating their impact.

In this pragmatic and optimistic session, we will explore how the widely used COM-B model of behaviour can be combined with journey mapping, to encourage design of sustainable user behaviours. We will demonstrate as part of this process how to align consideration of the needs of people, planet and business within digital service design to encourage as many as possible to begin their journey towards planet centred design.

11:00 - 11:30 Coffee & networking

Good design is meant to solve problems, that much we know.

We design for numerous cultures, whether we know it or not. And, when we design without sensitivity and cultural awareness, even the simplest design choice can create experiential dissonance for product users and directly impact trust.

In this session, I’ll introduce cultural theories that support differences in user behaviour, and how I seek to introduce cultural awareness in my research and design practice to understand and create from an uncentered and non-biased standpoint.

Some examples:

• Piloting interviews per regions to gather context on socio-cultural differences.

• Localised language for concept testing.

• Give users of sense of place and cultural relatability.

• Local expert present at interviews and local super users.

• Adapting workshop participation based on culture, etc.

• Adaptive interfaces (e.g. sections vs. Feet) and feature flags

Ensuring high-efficiency levels and coherent collaboration for teams spread across different nations, cultures, languages, and styles of working is difficult to achieve, but all of them working on the same process brings in a higher level of complexity.

Research enables us to make informed decisions, reduce risk, and create products and services that better meet our requirements.

Are you someone who wants to start doing better and more research at your company? Struggling to get a buy-in for constant activities? Finding it difficult to showcase the impact or benefit of research?

Join the talk, where Arun will his journey, strategies, setbacks and successes establishing Kuehne + Nagel establishing user research from the bottom up. Hear how he introduced and established a standard for conducting user research for various products and services and bring your own research questions to get input…and continue the conversation over lunch.

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

Lightning Talk: Chasing a sustainable UX career by Muse Chang

We need to ask ourselves, how sustainable are the products and digital experiences we build and run?

Truth is: They can have a massive negative impact on the world. 

Still we build products focussing on our users, while harming other actors (human or non-human). Still we build products that hang on to existing inequalities or constantly exclude certain people. Still too many websites and apps load tons of unnecessary data and produce tons of unnecessary carbon emissions.

Sustainable UX (SUX) enhances the classical UX tool- and mindset to create more sustainable experiences and products.

Stay for this closing talk to get an overview of the different practices of SUX and see how you can start being more sustainable when you return to your desk.

14:30 - 14:45 A small coffee break

14:45 - 15:30: Wrap-up: What did we learn? Next steps…

15:30: Goodbyes and see you next year!