Conference presentations

UX & HF: The State of the Union

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Conferencee

The disciplines of HF and UX appear to be drifting further apart, with careers in UX continuing to grow at rates that far surpass those in HF. Does this divergence come at a cost, or is it a natural step that lends clarity and focus to the two disciplines, or both? In this panel we will explore the reasons for this separation and how this divergence has been reflected in our own career from a range of perspectives, ranging from research practices that incorporate both disciplines as critical aspects of the design process, to those where HF processes underlie the approach to UX, to those that trade scientific rigor in favor of democratization of the discipline. We will discuss the implications of this separation, and how (and if) to bridge the gap.

  • Melissa Meingast
  • Christy Harper
  • Michael Bartha
  • Timothy Ballew, M.A.
  • Danae Holmes, PhD

IBM Cloud, Data, and AI Persona Toolkit: A foundation for understanding our users

UX Y'all Conference

Our team had a persona problem. Our gallery of personas was widely used by product managers, researchers, and designers, which should have been an indication of success. However, teams were borrowing personas from other areas as-is, rather than creating their own or enhancing the existing personas. The impact was that teams were making assumptions about their customers. The IBM Cloud, Data, and AI Persona Toolkit addresses these challenges by providing three standardized libraries of roles, context, and actions for the team to assemble their own personas. Libraries provide consistency without the all-or-nothing approach of borrowing an entire persona, and allows us to compare personas across the portfolio. The talk includes an overview of how we drove adoption and ongoing efforts.

  • Tomer Maimoni
  • Yanbin Hao

Dear Design, I love you but I don’t know where you end and I begin

UX Y'all Conference

The discipline of user research seems to be drifting towards becoming a skill set within the UX Design role, with careers in UX continuing to grow at rates that far surpass those in research. Does this trend come at a cost, or is it a natural step where research is treated as a design skill rather than as a separate discipline? In this panel we will explore the reasons for this trend and how it has been reflected in our own careers from a range of perspectives, ranging from research practices that incorporate both disciplines as critical aspects of the design process to those where user research processes underlie the approach to UX, to those that trade scientific rigor in favor of democratization of the discipline. We will discuss the implications of this convergence, and the impact on product development.

  • Melissa Meingast
  • Danae Holmes, PhD
  • Christy Harper
  • Michael Bartha
  • Timothy Ballew, M.A.

Navigating the Crossroads: Career Transitions in Human Factors

2019 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society National Conference

During your human factors (HF) career, you will encounter many challenging decisions to make as your career develops and changes. Whether it is moving into a new domain, deciding whether to stay in a large company or a small one, embracing the corporate world or consulting, becoming a manager or remaining as a practitioner, everyone will experience a crossroad at some point and have to decide whether to and how to transition into a new role. Our goal is to share how different paths have affected the type of work we are doing, briefly discuss the challenges and successes we have encountered, and provide some insight through our shared experiences. Panelists will share their perspectives based on leaving a related discipline to transition into a career in HF, abandoning the corporate world to open a small business partnership, transitioning from a consultant to corporate employee, moving from a government role to become an entrepreneur and shifting from individual contributor to management.

  • Christy Harper
  • Melissa Meingast
  • Jeffrey Graley

Ten lessons learnt to drive and transform open source software user experience, and how to get there.

All Things Open Summit

The greatest strength associated with open source communities is the developer-driven culture that leverages processes and tools optimized for code development and review. One reason this model works is the developers are also the consumers of the software.

But what if community members aren’t the only ones using the software? How do we give them a voice within the open source community?

This discussion includes an overview of our efforts to drive and transform open source software user experience, how we got there, and what needs to be improved.

  • Ju Lim
  • Melissa Meingast

Is the Grass Greener? A look at Roles and Transitions in UX Careers

2019 UXPA International Conference

Ever wondered what your next career move should be? Are you trying to decide between practitioner and manager, debating whether to grow the UX practice at your current company or leave, deciding whether to leave a consultancy for the corporate world or a large company for a small one?

The panelists have encountered these transitions and held diverse UX roles including Manager, Team Lead, Designer, Researcher and Consultant. They’ve made moves from small and large companies, including NASA, HP, IBM, Mile Two, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, End to End User Research, Synaptics and Sophic Synergistics.

We will share our perspectives on transitioning between UX roles, finding the right fit, and the pros and cons of working in various roles and environments. We will facilitate a discussion with the audience, while sharing insights from our varied experiences.

  • Christy Harper
  • Melissa Meingast
  • Cynthia Rando, MS, MBA,
  • CHFP
  • Jeffrey Graley
  • Mohamed Sheik-Nainar

Meet the OpenStack Personas

OpenStack Foundation

In projects with many users, personas clarify user’s, goals and the effects of decisions about the backend, messages, APIs, CLIs, and GUIs on the many different users. The OpenStack UX project and OpenStack product group hosted a workshop at the IBM Design Austin Studio to develop personas that represented wide variety of OpenStack consumer scenarios. Attendees included IBM, HPE, Intel and RackN.

  • Jeff Calcaterra
  • Stan (Haozhe) Li
  • Shamail Tahir

Driving Great Experiences within the OpenStack Open Source Community

HP-UXD Summit 2015

This presentation describes techniques that were used to improve the overall user experience of programs being developed within the OpenStack open source community, including the Horizon user portal. This presents a unique set of challenges due to the developer-driven culture that leverages processes and tools intended to support code review rather than impact on users.

  • Travis Tripp

  • Melissa Meingast

Cross Project Workshops: Improving user experience across all OpenStack projects

OpenStack Foundation

Workshop discussed strategies, tools, and processes to improve the overall user experience across all OpenStack projects. Initiated an ongoing professional discussion on how we choose to define user experiences as a community and identify potential areas of focus.

  • Travis Tripp

Cross Project Workshops: Improving user experience across all OpenStack projects

User Experience in the OpenStack Community
OpenStack Foundation

Performed an interactive session to report on the progress of the OpenStack User Experience (UX) group in 2013-2014. Discussed how the UX group helped shape features and improve the overall user experience in OpenStack while verifying that designs are meeting target end users’ needs. Expanded on the efforts to continue Dave Neary’s work on personas. Highlights included: understanding the OpenStack users, requirements gathering, interaction design, design support during development, and usability testing and feeding results back into new requirements.

– Understanding the OpenStack users
– Requirements gathering
– Interaction design
– Design support during development
– Usability testing and feeding results back into new requirements

We will also discuss the recent efforts, which builds on Dave Neary’s previous work, to develop a set of personas to help the development community align with their users’’ needs and tasks. We’ll review the methodology used to develop the personas, insights from the user interviews, and the personas created from the effort. Finally, we will provide recommendations and examples for how the community can effectively use the personas during their own planning, design, development, and testing efforts to improve the overall user experience.

  • Liz Blanchard
  • Ju Lim
  • Jacki Bauer

A task-based process for manikin generation

Human Modeling for Design and Engineering International Conference and Exposition

Human modeling and simulation in the digital environment. Innovations: The Quarterly Journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America.

  • Scott Ziolek

Human modeling and simulation: A primer for practitioners

The Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 44th Annual Meeting

  • Scott Ziolek

Too big, too small or just right? Understanding which company structure will work best for you.

UXPA National Conference 2022

How does the practice of UX differ if you’re working in a large company or a small one, at an agency, or as an independent consultant? How about being a part of a horizontal UX organization vs. being embedded in a product team? What are the advantages and challenges of each? Where you end up can affect the types of projects you may work on, the impact you have and ultimately the trajectory of your career. The panelists represent diverse roles in various sized businesses including consultant, agency, small, medium and large companies with horizontal, embedded or hybrid teams. Panelists from End to End User Research, Peloton, Workiva, YouTube, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HFUX Research will share their perspectives on the pros and cons of working in these different teams and types of businesses. We will facilitate a discussion with the audience via Sli.do, while sharing insights from our varied experiences.

  • Christy Harper
  • Melissa Meingast
  • Angie Avera
  • Danae Holmes, PhD
  • Pieter Kruithof
  • Heidi M. Mehrzad

You do you: a discussion on how our values and beliefs about user experience have guided our careers

New Hampshire UXPA

Your relationship with your employer isn’t all that different from your other relationships including family, partner, or…even your car. In all of those circumstances, the relationship is driven by alignment on a core set of beliefs and values and the expectations we have for ourselves and others around us. It then stands to reason that relationships fail because of a misalignment of those beliefs, values, and expectations. And your relationship with your employer isn’t all that different.

This panel discussion focuses on panelists’ core beliefs about the UX profession and how those beliefs have helped form their careers. In addition, panelists will discuss their personal core values and how they align those values with their beliefs about the user experience. We won’t have all the answers, but hope to share personal experiences and stories to help provide examples of our own struggles and discoveries and where we’ve stood our ground and also adapted for better outcomes.

  • Daniel Schantz
  • Christy Harper
  • Melissa Meingast
  • Gretchen McNeely
  • Ross Teague
  • Pieter Kruithof

Big Wheels Keep on Turnin; A collection of user research methods to drive five-year product strategy

UX Y'all

You’re having a stakeholder interview with an executive in product leadership and they mention something that catches your attention.

“You know,” they say, “my concern isn’t what we’re developing for next quarter but what we need to build in five years to stay relevant to our customers.” You realize that you’ve been so focused on tactical research to evaluate designs that you’ve completely missed the “forest.”

This session provides an overview of research methods that help drive product strategy.

  • Gretchen McNeely
  • Pieter Kruithof