Highlights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2024

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?

Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way?

Presentation

Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need. In this presentation we share best practices for designing menus.

Presentation

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

MuseumNext (virtual)

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Design for Context have developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library, historic home collections and exhibitions. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.

Our insights

Article

Business as (Un)Usual: How a UX Audit Can Help

May 22, 2020

Michael Owens

It may be the understatement of the century to say that 2020 is not going the way any of us had planned. In the best of times, it can be difficult to justify the allocation of resources to assess and redesign your UX. And in tough times, like now, it can be especially hard to make needed progress, which is where a UX audit can really make a difference.

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Article

Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

February 11, 2020

Michael Owens

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.

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Article

The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

Published January 9, 2020

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.

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Presentation

Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

DCUX Conference, Washington, DC – November 9, 2019

Michael Owens

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.

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Presentation

The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Content Strategy DC -- August 29, 2019

Duane Degler

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.

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Workshop

The Delicate Art of Facilitation

IAC 2019 in Orlando, FL -- March 14, 2019

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

Good facilitation skills are essential for many IA tasks and projects. The ability to successfully guide internal colleagues as well as external groups to shared, valuable outcomes serves a wide range of project needs – achieving stakeholder and team consensus, creating a clear vision for IA strategy, refining a taxonomy, to name just a few. This IAC2019 workshop builds activities around real-world scenarios from the presenters' own experiences that participants can use to plan for and guide their own work.

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Presentation

Split Focus: Designing Applications for Multiple Monitor Setups

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 8, 2017

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers, Michael Owens

In this UXPA 2017 session, Lisa Battle, Michael Owens, and Rachel Sengers discuss new UX design patterns and challenges that arise in software and web-based application design for multiple monitors, illustrating them with real project examples.

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Presentation

Ethics: A Human-Centered Design Goal

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 6, 2017

Karen Bachmann

In this UXPA 2017 session, Karen Bachmann addresses about how to talk carrots (value) and not sticks (legality) to make ethics a core human-centered design constraint.

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Presentation

Delicious Design: UXers and Visual Designers Collaborating Together

UXPA Boston’s 2015 Conference – May 15, 2015

Rachel Sengers, Jennifer Chaffee

Led by a UX designer and a visual designer, this session provides practical ideas and recommendations for ensuring a smooth and effective collaboration between specialists in these disciplines.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle

Interaction15, the IxDA conference, San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2015

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: UX Leadership in Long-Term Projects

User Focus, the UXPA DC Chapter conference in Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.

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Presentation

Design Guidelines: Real-Life Stories

Information Architecture Summit, Baltimore, MD – April 5, 2013

Rachel Sengers, Lesley Humphreys, Rob Fay

As an organization grows and its products proliferate, how can it maintain a coherent sense of identity and usability across them, while allowing room for flexibility and growth? For a family of online communications channels or applications, design guidelines can document and disseminate the organization’s UX principles and patterns. This presentation offers resources and insights from both practitioners and professionals outside the field who have undertaken these types of projects together.

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Presentation

Applying User-Centered Methods to Inform New Product Selection and Strategic Planning

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 15th Annual Conference, Broomfield, CO – 2006

Lisa Battle, Tim Herbst, Bill Dixon, Sean Wheeler

Usability professionals always say the best time to start user-centered design is at the beginning of a project. But what about starting even earlier, when the vision or concept is first considered? This presentation discusses integrating UCD with marketing methods to inform/support executive decision-making and strategic prioritization of projects.
Presentation

The Usability Professional as Visionary/Strategist

User Focus, UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, D.C. – October 2006

Duane Degler

Have you had insights and observations that go beyond the scope of a particular system or site? Are you talking with business leaders, sharing how things could be better for users overall? A quality user experience is important for organizations and their customers, citizens, and staff. User advocates can take on a “thought leadership” role within organizations and projects. This talk addresses how we can do that.

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Presentation

Integrating UCD with Requirements Engineering: Improving Processes, Formats, and Communication

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 15th Annual Conference, Bloomfield, CO – June 2006

Lisa Battle, Rebecca Ray, Karen Bachmann

User-centered design practitioners are skilled in eliciting user needs and translating them into design. However, our methods are sometimes poorly integrated with requirements engineering. This panel discussion presents practical approaches to coordinating UCD with other types of activities involved in the creation of requirements.

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Workshop

Requirements in User-Centered Design and Software Engineering: Tools for Bridging Design Cultures

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) UPA 14th Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada – 2005

Lisa Battle, Ahmed Seffah, Daniel Engelberg

This workshop explored various formats for documenting user needs, and discussed approaches to better integrating UCD and traditional requirements engineering approaches for interactive systems.
Publication

Patterns of Integration: Bringing User Centered Design into the Software Development Lifecycle

User-Centered Systems Design and Software Engineering Integration: Institutionalizing Usability in the Development Process, eds. Ahmed Seffah, Michel Desmarais, and Jan Gulliksen – 2005

Lisa Battle

Faced with a need to integrate user-centered methods into existing software development lifecycles, many practitioners lack clear direction and continue to negotiate the scope of their involvement on a project-by-project basis. There are best practices that can be adopted, however. This book chapter distills the experiences of many practitioners into a collection of process patterns that describe an evolutionary path towards full integration.

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Presentation

When Your Group Can’t Do It All: Investing UCD Resources Wisely

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 13th Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN – 2004

Lisa Battle

When an organization’s internal UCD group is too small to support all projects that request its services, management is faced with a need to prioritize and invest its limited resources wisely. This is how one UCD group defined different levels of service and implemented criteria for evaluating project requests.

Matt Oliphant’s blog on this presentation
Workshop

How to Design User Interfaces to Support Users and Their Tasks

GSA Workshop on Usability and the Federal Enterprise Architecture – October 28, 2003

Lisa Battle, Sean Wheeler

An analysis of users and their tasks typically generates a lot of rich information… but the process of translating that information into design solutions may seem like “magic.” The truth is that user-centered design is iterative, and requires a mixture of art and science — it takes a series of small steps that both transform and refine the collected information into design solutions. This presentation uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the process from high-level visioning all the way through detailed design.

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