This years program

Willemijn takes you on a journey through the history of creativity research. Why do we think about creativity the way we do? What can we learn from creativity researchers of the past that will help us boost our creativity today? 

We will see that creativity is not only about ideas and solutions. But also about finding the right problem to solve. Creativity is not about thinking outside the box but about thinking in the right box. Creativity is about being imaginative and connecting that to what you know. It is falling down and getting back up, over and over again, without giving up. Creativity is a search after a search. Creativity is research.

She will use the main question: ‘How to do solid UX research in a fast and agile world?’ as the returning example in the talk. And leave the audience with four basic strategies they can use to tap into their creativity.

We are solving the challenges of building and maintaining diverse teams. Slowly. As a result we find people from minority groups being the only ones of their kind in a team, project, or company. For some this is an opportunity to stand out and excel. Yet for others, particularly from under-represented minorities, it is a position of vulnerability. Being “one of a kind” stops them from bringing their whole authentic selves to work.

“I’m the only __ person here, if I say it, they won’t understand.” “If I say the wrong thing will they think it’s because I’m a __ person.” “They only invited me because I’m a __ person.”

In this talk, Farai traces his career journey from contributor to lead, during most of which he was the only one of his kind in the room. He also shares insights from interviews he’s conducted with tech contributors and leaders around the world.

Join Happy Labs on the Festival stage each day to test your UX knowledge and win a UX/UI Flowbook.

Research operations are the people, tools and processes that enable user research to happen and scale. There are users of the operations that we put in place. To be able to build great tools and put smooth processes in place we need to understand the needs of our users.

Lots has been documented about the needs of a researcher. Participants are users of research operations too. They are users of the recruitment process and they use the tools we put in place to collect data. We must centre the recruitment and tools research operations pillars around participant needs.

We conducted a discovery to answer the question “what journey does a user research participant take?” so that we could understand how we could design future research operations that will help us to get deeper insights.

Our discovery research questions were:

• Where does the journey of a user research participant begin and end
• What do user research participants need and when?
• What’s it like to be a participant in a user research interview?
• Are these needs being met today, how and by who?
• How might we better meet these needs, and what would happen if we did?

We spoke with:

• Participants of research
• Lab managers
• Recruitment specialists
• User researchers

We discovered the tasks that potential participants need to complete to be able to volunteer for and take part in research.

We’ll share our findings to enable a conversation on how we can design our research operations to better meet participants needs. Our hypothesis is that by designing our operations around participants we’ll be able to get better research insights because we’ll empower more people to take part in user research.

In his talk, Jan will share the Studio D approach to enabling peak creativity in design, research and strategy projects. Be sure to bring a hanky.

Ready to get creative?

Network and get inspired with our social challenge! With a team made up of your peers, you’ll give your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions to one of the participating non-profit organisations. The winners will be crowned on the final day of the festival, based on the most creative solutions – whether that be the results, research, or even the way of presenting!

Case 1 – Children International

Like the world-changers who support our organization, we are focused on making a long-term impact by helping kids living in poverty. We have a bold vision: graduating healthy, educated, empowered and employed young adults from our programs so they can achieve the goal of breaking the cycle of poverty.

Visit the website for more background information about the organisation.

Case 2 – Art & Tech Society

Art + Tech Society is a new foundation established in Eindhoven in 2019, that envisions a future where natural environments are sustainable and positively impacting the wellbeing of all beings. In this future, people are aware of the intrinsic value of the natural environment and develop a sense of belonging and care for it.

Sponsored by

As a researcher, we need our tools. Take some time to learn how our partners can help improve your research and work more efficient. And they would also love to learn more about your needs. Visit the virtual booths or dedicated demo sessions.

Brainstorming is used to get quick ideas and solutions. But are we asking the right questions? Why not use question storming and shift the focus from instant answers to explorative inquiry? Let’s ask more questions, broader questions, sincere questions, creative questions and challenging questions.

In this interactive session on the first day of UXinsight Festival, you are invited to question storm on a UX-related topic. 

To prep you for the question storm, we will take a quick dive into the topic of asking questions and get you in the question mood. You will then participate in a collective question storm with all other participants. 

After this session you will bring your questions into the UXinsight Festival and hopefully collect some answers or even better: get more questions!

On the last day of the festival you are invited to join a reflection session. Share your experiences and define next steps to bring you, your team or your organization more into question mode.

The greatest innovations address our deepest needs, and empathy is the key to discovering them. And while it can seem mysterious or magical, empathy is more like a muscle: we can train and develop it.

This interactive session demystifies creative empathy and gives you practical techniques you can deploy for UX research. We’ll look at core concepts, practice a simple creative empathy technique, and you’ll have the opportunity to present your work to the group for discussion.

We’ll Learn

• The process behind Creative Empathy 
• How Creative Empathy works
• Some examples of Creative Empathy techniques

We’ll Do

• Take a fictional research case
• Conduct free-written recall
• Make recommendations
• Discuss

Talking to research participants is the most interesting and fundamental job of UX researchers. We can learn so much from the participants, but first of all, we need to create a comfortable environment for participants to share.

In this session, Hung Chu will share her experience with participants in the Netherlands, China and Canada, how she learned from their different personality, be “friend” with them and encourage them to share their stories.

Farai Madzima discusses some important problems relating to being the only of your kind in the room. He makes a strong point that diversity and inclusion is everyone’s job, not just that of the D&I team.

During this session we will look at some of the D&I challenges we face as UX Researchers. What are they and how can we try to solve them? We will brainstorm in small groups to think of possible solutions.

In 2020 80% of organisations will be using chatbots. It’s predicted that banks can automate 90% of customer interactions. Chatbots are coming! They’re changing the way people interact with digital services. It’s our job to make sure this change is for the better.

Where can we use chatbots to solve customer needs? How do we identify journeys to automate? Where should we start? We’ll discuss research methods to identify the customer journeys that can be solved through chat.

How do you prototype a conversation? Should we wireframe chatbot interactions? How do we phrase questions and build conversations?

We’ll talk through the research methods to test conversations with customers. This session will dive into quick and easy ways to get conversational concepts in front of customers.

Digital and physical product design once existed in isolation, but that’s quickly changing. If you’re a researcher, strategist, designer, or engineer, you’re probably finding yourself working on products that integrate the familiar feel of physical design with the connectedness and flexibility of digital interfaces. Communicating a design vision steeped in user research becomes an even greater challenge when you have so many disciplines added to the mix – interaction design, industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, and more.  

Enter the digital-physical workflow! An early-stage design tool that helps translate research through design while bridging the divides between digital and physical design. Digital-physical workflows allow us to visualize how different aspects of an integrated product will work in parallel. They are the mapping step that comes after your journey map or experience map, but before detailed design begins. They help us clarify pain points, raise important questions that will determine the product’s functional requirements, and help everyone on the project team get on the same page. We’ll talk about why we map, what we map, and walk through a detailed example highlighting key elements.

As the world is increasingly connected, and the promise of personalization is gaining traction, we have to invest in evolving our design practice to deliver in this new reality. Over the last years, Philips Experience Design invested in developing our Data Enabled Design capability.

Our goal is to develop propositions in context and personalize solutions by connecting with users and their background more directly. We are gathering continuous insight into their personal needs.  Especially in the health technology domain, this step towards delivering tailored care to the patient is needed to ensure care is accessible and affordable in the future.

We developed our UX practices hand in hand with advancing our Data Enabled Design way of working. In this presentation, we will show how the skills and added value of the UX researcher becomes an intrinsic part of the systems we design. We developed methods that bring qualitative and quantitative data together, use existing and new tools to translate this data to insights and how these insights inform the design of data and AI-enabled solutions. We will present, through case studies, our approach and the role of UX research in this. The case studies took place in the health technology field and show how we are working towards truly personalized care.

In a space with heightened sensitivity (healthcare), careful considerations around privacy, ethics, and legal are necessary to conduct research. While Google has a UX research infrastructure team that supports the company world-wide across all products, Google Health needed additional, specialized infrastructure to consider specific laws, regulations, and industry standards In a completely new space, we created a Google Health research playbook that covers UX research from end-to-end, including recruitment for healthcare professionals and consumers alike with safety net practices for our users.

In this talk we will discuss how we established the processes that unlocked Google Health researchers to work in symphony with privacy, ethics, and legal considerations to ensure the highest standards that the user always comes first.

This workshop was originally scheduled in person for the UXinsight 2020 conference in April. People with a ticket for that workshop have access to the virtual edition during the Festival. If you have a ticket for this workshop you have received a confirmation on August 14, 2020.

This workshop is not part of the regular Festival program. Tickets are no longer available.

Ever had subjects who did not really care about filling out their surveys? Which ruined your target group research?

Our new solution: gamify the experience – have the tool nudge the subject when behavioural data suggests not enough engagement on his part.

In this session, we present an enhanced survey tool that gamifies the process of answering questionnaires, and that intervenes when the behavioural data suggests the respondent’s answers may be less than reliable. The tool combines well-established game mechanics with reliability identification techniques from psychiatric research – where it is paramount to identify respondents who are not faithfully filling out their diagnostic surveys – and with research in the field of online reviews, where they use behavioural data as a means to distinguish between fake and real reviews.

Panel discussion hosted by Brigette Metzler.

Surveys are easy to do – but harder to do well. In this fast-paced interactive workshop, you’ll learn about Total Survey Error: a way of balancing the issues and good practice in survey design so that you get the best results from your survey.

Caroline will take you through her 7-step survey process, starting with Goals and thinking about Sampling, Questions, Questionnaires, Fieldwork, Responses and Reports. Along the way, you’ll find out about practical suggestions for ideas like how to get a good quality sample, getting a good response to your questionnaire, and delivering better reports

Interactive session at Online Department, Rotterdam (Maassilo) – Registration required

Are you mature enough? Sign up now for a very exclusive Escape Room at Online Department in the Maassilo Rotterdam. You’ll have one hour to go through the various maturity levels, trying to solve various puzzles, research questions and doing (of course) research.

After you have successfully escaped, it is time to share experiences while enjoying a drink and also a great way to discuss, inspire and learn more about UX Research.

Very limited places available! Sign up here. Note: a Festival Combi-ticket is required to participate.

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Product teams are increasingly aware of the value in integrating user feedback throughout the product lifecycle. However, despite the increasing demand for ux researchers, the amount of work still far exceeds the bandwidth of most research teams. Additionally, product teams have a genuine desire to build empathy with their users so that they might identify unmet needs and critical pain points that would lead to new product opportunities.

Many organizations have responded to this need by creating formal training programs for non-researchers and supporting the operational aspects of these quasi-research activities. Such a democratization of the role of UX research has led other practitioners to express concern over whether such efforts dilute the unique skillset and value of our profession. Further, the teams who are providing operational support for such expanded efforts run the risk of drowning under their own weight.

Is there a middle ground? In this talk we’ll explore whether it’s possible to develop a user engagement model that allows teams to derive the benefits of both democracy and tyranny. Such a model will consider the necessary skills, expectations, processes, and outputs required to participate at different levels of engagement and provide recommendations for applications within enterprise organizations.

Disbelieving scientific findings is as old as science itself. Be it about the shape of the earth, evolution, or climate change, the information available is irrelevant when the audience does not trust its source. Likewise, no matter how rigorous and important our findings are, if our stakeholders don’t trust us, we can’t change their minds and motivate them to act on critical insights.

So what is ‘trust’? What affects it? How can a researcher gain their audience’s confidence? Combining my own experience with research on the psychology of trust, I will show you the power of viewing your team as users and building strong multidisciplinary relationships. You will learn how to utilize your existing research skills to understand the needs and limitations of your stakeholders, align with their priorities, speak their language, share their struggles, and support their success. By doing so, you will gain their trust and make an impact by shifting their minds and motivating change.

As UX professionals, operating in multidisciplinary, Agile Scrum teams, we feel that working with developers can be challenging. We may find that our user research insights have not been taken into account adequately enough in the end product, or are confronted with an application that does not suitably mirror our designs.

We obviously know our side of the story, but have you ever wondered how developers experience working with us?

We have. We asked them. Through a mixed-method qualitative-quantitative study, we identified pain points in the collaboration between UX professionals and developers. We co-created solutions for these pain points within the context of the Scrum framework, which we will share at UXinsight. This way, you too can improve your collaboration with developers and, ultimately, the digital tools that you jointly build for your users.

Despite the clear value in informing product and advocating for our customers, UX Research (UXR) tends to have a lot to prove within most companies. Whether it’s our value, knowledge, or definition, there are gaps in knowledge about UXR that need to be filled.

Not only that, but we have a lot to share that will make our company smarter. We want to be sure that our insights are heard.

With zero marketing experience, I (alongside our UX Research team) took a stab at rebranding and marketing our UX Research (UXR) team with sincere intention. Collecting lessons and dodging roadblocks along the way, we tested and evolved different methods set out to evangelize UX Research insights, share findings between teams, define and demystify UX Research and prove value for UXR throughout the company. The UX Research team built out the strategies, and Research Operations handled implementation. What does that even look like? I’ll tell you.

This workshop was originally scheduled in person for the UXinsight 2020 conference in April. People with a ticket for that workshop have access to the virtual edition during the Festival. If you have a ticket for this workshop you have received a confirmation on August 14, 2020.

This workshop is not part of the regular Festival program. Tickets are no longer available.

If this sounds blasphemous to you, you are partially right.

Human-centered gospel says that we should always start projects with user research. But there are times when you don’t have to spend time with upfront user research. There are times when you can’t do user research at all! Unfortunately, there are cases where the team already knows the right way to move forward, but they waste money on research blindly, just because that popular Medium article says so.

In this session, we will discuss how the nature of the problem calls for different, unique approaches to user research – which may include no research, to begin with. We will use the Cynefin framework to discuss how the complexity of the problem impacts timing, team structure, and the methods you use for research.   

The Research Skills Framework aims to encapsulate the breadth of skills needed to run impactful research projects and includes tools built on the framework reflect on your own growth, in technical skills and human skills.

It was built on a Research Ops Community project launched in 2018 to answer researchers and research managers’ questions about careers and craft: The result is an open set of tools and a report that helps us make sense of all researchers skills, in different stages. You can see more here: https://researchskills.net.

This workshop will include a short introduction to the Research Skills Framework, breakout discussions on skills growth, and an activity for visualizing effective research projects by sequencing skill patterns. We will show you the most important and immediately useful parts of the framework and give you a new way to approach planning how projects will have an impact.

This workshop is for researchers and people with practical experience doing research, and with a desire to invest time and effort in growing research skills.

Interview with Kayla Svoboda

How does a UX research team of 2 create impact in a 160-person organization? For Kayla from Europe’s most popular fitness app Freeletics the key is collaboration. In this interview, Kayla will share the ways she involves stakeholders from design, product management or content creation in the research process and how that creates better outcomes as a result. We will dive deep into the operational details of a collaborative project and discuss how teamwork changed the way research is seen in the company.

We will also learn how the research team at Freeletics approaches the democratization of research and implements this into their daily practices. In the end, there will be time for questions from the audience.

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Almost every good product depends heavily on UX research. But that research is worth nothing if the findings don’t make it into the final design. The way we present our results affects the way stakeholders relate to them — and whether the finished experience “solves for users”.

In this talk, I’ll first cut through some assumptions and biases that may affect the way we communicate research results. Then we’ll flip sides and look at the conversation from the client’s point of view — whether internal or external.

Next, I’ll apply storytelling techniques to presenting research results. After a quick introduction to the neuroscience behind the power of stories, I’ll introduce you to a basic template you can fill out to prepare for meetings and to structure your slide decks. We’ll wrap up with your questions, so you feel prepared for your next presentation meeting.

Come join me as I tackle the myths surrounding research repositories using key findings from our ResearchOps project.  Topics will include: 

• What a repo is as well as repo maturity, 
• The research cycle
• Taxonomy/Folksonomy
• Good governance,
• Insights on how to go about setting up and maintaining a repo.  

Taken from the view of an erstwhile team of research operatives determined to change the world of research repositories… for free.

Tired of the same old key findings deck in your research share outs?

This talk will highlight four creative approaches I’ve used in my research at Spotify to share insights — museums, websites and podcasts — to bring stories to life for stakeholders and spark conversations across the company.”

This workshop was originally scheduled in person for the UXinsight 2020 conference in April. People with a ticket for that workshop have access to the virtual edition during the Festival. If you have a ticket for this workshop you have received a confirmation on August 14, 2020.

This workshop is not part of the regular Festival program. Tickets are no longer available.

This workshop was originally scheduled in person for the UXinsight 2020 conference in April. People with a ticket for that workshop have access to the virtual edition during the Festival. If you have a ticket for this workshop you have received a confirmation on August 14, 2020.

This workshop is not part of the regular Festival program. Tickets are no longer available.

Do you wonder if it is possible to be creative as a user researcher. If yes, join us at this workshop where you will apply fun, hands-on exercises to think out-of-box in your current/past work/life projects ;).

I will also introduce the eight-step creative thinking process and examples of creativity in user research from my own and other user researchers’ experience.

When you’re a researcher of one, research consultant with demanding deadlines, or research lead coaching UX designers to conduct their own usability testing, time is not your friend.

This practical and reflective 60-minute session will cover four principles that you can apply to turn around insights for evaluative research in a much shorter timeframe – without transcripts, yet with rigour – and help you develop a clearer understanding of how you spend your time.

You might already know how to conduct usability tests, do an in-depth-interview or to observe people using your product. But have you ever used art to do research? 

In this workshop you will learn how to turn your personal art form into a research method that you can use at work. Maike will give examples of design researchers having done just that, and she will show her own artistic research where she used photography to research the role of empathy within digital government. At the end of this workshop you will be able to carry out your first artistic research iteration with participants. 

To join this workshop make sure to have a research question or design challenge on hand and, of course, your art form. It can be anything and it doesn’t have to be logical. 

To learn more about Maikes artistic design research project, visit www.debegripvolleambtenaar.nl. Or read about her ongoing research on her blog: www.klipklaar.nl.

When evaluating the user experience, you end up with massive amounts of data and hours of video footage. How does one get from this point to an actionable outcome? We’ll give you the answers!

In our session, you’ll be learning about organizing your research data, in the smartest ways possible. With limited time at hand transcribing, every user interview is a luxury. Get insights on how to be smart about organizing your research findings and leveraging it into the next step.

Additionally, the session will be about focusing on patterns. Learn about how working with patterns helps you save time, and how drawing insights from findings can be a challenging task.

Last but not least, you’ll also get insights on how to build a story you can share. We all know sharing your research as a couple of bullet points or long pages of details is not enough. It has to be a story which readers can relate to. Join our session and make your research data insightful.

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* Due to an increasing number of COVID-19 contaminations in the area, Online Department decided to postpone the Escape Room to a safer time. Visit the Online Department booth at the online conference to win an Escape Room.

Interactive session at Online Department, Rotterdam (Maassilo) – Registration required

Are you mature enough? Sign up now for a very exclusive Escape Room at Online Department in the Maassilo Rotterdam. You’ll have one hour to go through the various maturity levels, trying to solve various puzzles, research questions and doing (of course) research.

After you have successfully escaped, it is time to share experiences while enjoying a drink and also a great way to discuss, inspire and learn more about UX Research.

Very limited places available! Sign up here. Note: a Festival Combi-ticket is required to participate.

Sponsored by

In this talk, Brigette will introduce you to the ResearchOps Community, the nearly 4000 people working hard to advance ResearchOps. She’ll introduce you to the Eight Pillars – the broad areas that researchers care about and explain how these connect to the emergent field of ResearchOps. Drawing on her experience as a Research Ops specialist and as chair of the community, Brigette will outline how ReOps starts and where it can take you- from organised to operationalised.

Whatever the scale, Ops’ mission is to help researchers do their best work.

Stephanie compares running a distributed, community-based approach to Research Ops at the UK government with being part of a dedicated team as UX Research Ops Manager at Springer Nature.

What can we learn from both approaches? What are the challenges of researchers working together, building on and improving research operations? Stephanie also shares what she learnt from the first six months as a Research Operations Manager and some of the work that Springer Nature has been doing in this area.

What do your customers actually feel when they interact with your products, beyond what they tell you? Bill will present a case study that measures customer emotions using biometrics focused on virtual dressing rooms.

Find out how you can start to measure customer emotions to design better products.

“This research ops thingy sounds smart – we should do that!”

Easier said than done, right? How do you start? Where do you focus on? – We do not have a universal answer for that. But we will share our own story that will inspire you to find your own way.

As a digital agency USEEDS° has focused on customer-centricity for more than 10 years. As the awareness for greater product success through user-centered development grew, so did the demand for experienced researcher and thus our research department. We had to face the challenges of standardization and knowledge management.

This was the moment when the concept of research ops management seemed like the right solution for us.

We would like to take you on our research ops journey that will show you how we at USEEDS° started with a practice lead role, later were joined by a technical lab responsible and now even have a dedicated research ops manager. With our talk you will learn what main requirements for these research ops roles are and how their tasks and responsibilities were defined. Find out what low hanging fruits can be implemented quickly and how the research ops roles had an impact on our research team and our daily work.

So do not hesitate – join us on our journey!

This workshop was originally scheduled in person for the UXinsight 2020 conference in April. People with a ticket for that workshop have access to the virtual edition during the Festival. If you have a ticket for this workshop you have received a confirmation on August 14, 2020.

This workshop is not part of the regular Festival program. Tickets are no longer available.

The winners of our social challenge will be crowned on the final day of the festival, based on the most creative solutions – whether that be the results, research, or even the way of presenting!

Sponsored by

• 16.30-16.40 Introduction UX Academy (film) and trainers Anne & Brian Pagan
• 16.40-16.50 Anne introduces UXQB and the method: how to pass the exam at the UX Academy
• 16.50-17.15 Anne shows 5 example exam questions, participants and Brian will give the answers
• 17.10-17.30 Q&A
  
  

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