UX Camp Camp Fall 2020

Whether you work for a 5 or 50.000 person organisation, you will need to work together with the right people, to know what the user needs, to find the right balance with what the organisation wants, to document well, and to make sure the guidelines are adopted, to be able to call your content style guide a success.

Content style guides inform the voice, tone, grammar, verbosity and vocabulary of the content. Done well, they are a great tool for collaboration that will help you get your product on point, faster (and with fewer discussions).

This talk will cover learned experiences and common pitfalls (real mistakes I’ve personally made and learned from) you might encounter in content style guide creation, management, and implementation. It will help you avoid them, and to create or improve your own style guide.

15 minute break.

Now that some of the industry has begun to rally around the job title of “Content Strategist,” what does the actual job and career path look like? Why should we keep showing up and do the hard job, at scale? What are the challenges we all face, and when is some of this wicked ambiguity going to get cleared up?

In this talk, I consider the common challenges of a CS, the insecurities we battle, and how to sort out what to do when we’re faced with them. Drawing on my experience at Google, Twitter and Facebook both as a manager and as an individual contributor, I’ll share my worst mistakes, my best wisdom, and maybe some well-intentioned speculation.

30 minute break.

What do Beyoncé, Domino’s Pizza, and Amazon have in common? They have all been sued for non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. And they are not alone. Kevin will share 5 ways to ensure your web site is accessible (and can avoid legal trouble) and will discuss what ADA and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines guidelines are.

UsableNet has found on average, one web site-based lawsuit is filed every hour. This presentation asks and answers: Who is suing and why? What are the consequences? Why is it happening and what can be done about it? Kevin will highlight which groups are served by web accessibility, outline ways to achieve the WCAG guidelines, and provide an understanding of how ADA noncompliance lawsuits originated. You’ll also learn how to broaden your market penetration by ensuring your web apps and sites are accessible to all.

15 minute break

Project constraints often challenge our ability to meet user needs. With a usage maturity matrix, which shows a user’s comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of a product, process or place, as our guide we are better able to focus our design efforts where our users and our business stakeholders need us most.

In this presentation, you’ll learn what a usage maturity matrix is and how to create one. This powerful tool can influence which features and functions we design into our present projects and can serve as a lasting guide impacting our ongoing design roadmap.

83% of Rwanda’s 12,000,000 population lives rurally outside of its main capital of Kigali. The Rwandan universal healthcare system was entirely built from the ground up after the Rwandan genocide as a way to address the health needs of all its citizens equally. This system, which is free to citizens, can successfully deliver quality healthcare at roughly $2 per person per year. It addresses the more immediate needs of the country’s rural citizens via an extensive network of healthcare centers and local community healthcare workers CHWs located in villages. Services offered at these clinics range from antenatal care, administering child nutrition programs, and diagnosing acute illnesses (including COVID-19 and malaria).

E-Heza is a tablet application used by CHWs in some of these health clinics. The ultimate goals of the CHWs are to diagnose, provide routine and simple care, and ultimately refer complex patients to the better equipped regional health centers. E-Heza’s primary role is to document patient care, support decision making, and lastly replace a paper-based system that required significant cognitive load on CHW and health center staff.

In this talk we’ll be addressing several topics:

- How do we adapt the participatory design process when we’re unable to have direct access with the users of our designs?
- How do we build relationships with local healthcare team members when we have to design across geographical and cultural lines?
- How does the local team aid the work and send feedback back up the chain to affect design changes?
- What does designing for a one-to-many healthcare interaction look like in terms of processing large segments of people and enabling non-clinical staff to make accurate medical decisions?
- Are there parallel challenges to designing for American healthcare systems and those of rural Rwanda and how might they be affected by assumptions of class and race?

15 minute break.

A successful intranet increases productivity and collaboration and it also contributes to a sense of belonging and engagement. However, as multiple content authors publish their content, it usually becomes difficult and frustrating to maintain unless we have a well-defined strategy in place.

This talk, I will talk about content strategies that helped me overcome design challenges of working with big organizations. I will talk about how content strategy can help organizations to turn complex ideas into a simple digital experience, how to empower authors with content system and how to keep the intranet experience sustainable.

30 minute break.

Many people hoping to break into the field of user research don’t even know what skills are necessary to do the job and are missing fundamental concepts. They have to invest additional time and sometimes resources into gaining more skills, in addition to what they’ve already put into learning design skills they won’t use, and they have to rely on volunteer-mentors or companies to create apprenticeship training programs that vary wildly.

Some UX training programs for combine user research and UX design capabilities. This contributes to two problems: people aren’t appropriately trained in what they’ll truly need to do the work and to get a job in the field, and UX research isn’t respected as a discipline requiring specialized skills and knowledge. Training programs that focus on user research will give people the confidence to advocate for themselves and their expertise and, hopefully, encourage companies to recognize that not just anyone can whip out a survey or a usability test script and get back accurate, actionable insights that drive a better product.

15 minute break.

The global pandemic has forced many of us to fully rethink how to do our work remotely while managing the increasing anxiety around what the future will look like. It is not an obvious time to add searching for a new job into the mix.

Nonetheless, I decided to leave a company of 9 years in pursuit of something new. As a designer used to collaborating shoulder-to-shoulder at a whiteboard, I had many concerns. How would I get a feel for what it was like to work with new colleagues? Would I be able to grasp the company culture? Would I be able to convey my best self though screens alone? Would I survive the back-to-back Zooms?

Come learn what I’ve learned while tackling the job hunt in an entirely remote environment; from the challenges to the surprising upsides and opportunities that eventually led to landing a new role at Gem.