Adam Connor
Adam’s work focuses on helping teams and organisations strengthen and grow their human-centered design and innovation capabilities. As a design leader, Adam’s work blends systems thinking, HCD, anthropology, and organisational behaviour to foster more collaborative, creative and customer-centric organisations. He has coached and trained teams across the world and from industry leading organisations such as Google, Disney, Fidelity, and Twitter. In 2015 he and co-author Aaron Irizarry released Discussing Design: Improving Communication & Collaboration Through Critique with O’Reilly Publishing. His thoughts on collaboration and design can be found at adamconnor.com and discussingdesign.com
For more, keep up with Adam on Twitter as @adamconnor.
Presentations
UX Camp Spring 2021
Building Character: Creating Unique, Consistent Experiences with Design Principles
Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, apps, our bank, our doctor, our government, anyone—we form expectations of what someone or something will do based on our previous experiences and their past behaviors. When something happens that doesn’t measure up to those expectations–that seems out of character–we’re caught off guard. What do we do next? What should we expect now?
Conversations about consistency in design often focus on topics like content and interface design, ensuring that we use the same labels, controls, patterns throughout our creations. But what if we thought about consistency in the relationship between users and our products or services?
Principles act as rules that guide how we think and act. Formed by our motivations, values and beliefs, we use them as “lenses” through which we examine information in order to make decisions on what to do. And because of their persistent influence on our behavior, they influence other’s views and expectations of us. Using these same kinds of constructs throughout the design process we can design unique content, valuable interactions and consistent behaviors that set and live up to expectations for our audiences.
Leadership By Design 2017: Prototypes, Process & Play
Building Creative, Collaborative Cultures
Organizations are taking a strong interest in design — realizing that understanding the needs, expectations and contexts in which people interact and use products and services leads not only to improvements in their current offerings, but ideas and opportunities for new innovations. With this realization has come immense investment in design talent and training. But having design talent and creativity does not ensure success. Design is not just a new tool to add to a growing collection. As these skills and individuals are added to the mix in many teams, both designers and non-designers alike often struggle to work together and produce great work.
Design is a shift in mindset that influences how we behave and make decisions. In order for organizations to make use of design they must be set up to do so. In this presentation we’ll look at the characteristics and cultures of organizations that are able to effectively create, collaborate on, and produce great design and explore strategies to foster innovation by building better teams, helping them use new tools to work together, identify problems and break down silos that stop progress.
