High-performing design teams are structured around the customer value they deliver. In this workshop, we'll explore how these exceptional teams align themselves with vision, values, and practices to ensure they can create the ideal cross-functional working environments and delivery paths.

You spent months building your design system. Your audits were thorough. The style guide is up to date, and your library of reusable UI components is a thing of beauty. And then, when you finally share your design system across your organization, nobody bothers to use it. Frustrating, right? Don’t fret—there’s hope yet. Over the course of this workshop, you’ll learn how to rally your team around your design system by streamlining communication, boosting silo-busting collaboration, and cultivating a culture defined by unified purpose. You’ll explore empathetic research techniques that create a better understanding of stakeholder needs, hear how to make processes more inclusive, and learn governance structures rooted in shared ownership.

Designers understand the power of design in shaping great products, but it can be challenging to get other teams and stakeholders to buy into the design process if they haven’t experienced the benefits first-hand. Design thinking offers a toolkit that can help democratize design, and get teams aligned early in the process of creating a new product or feature.
In this workshop, we’ll take a look at how design thinking has helped shape innovative products in a multitude of industries, and then have a hands-on, team based design challenge where we use the methods in the design thinking toolkit to attack a creative problem. By the end of our workshop, you should be able to bring these methods back to your team, and share the power of the design process to help create more innovative, impactful products.

Design is a medium for communication, and to do it well, we must cultivate our own communication skills. Within design teams, we do our best work when we create a culture of feedback shaped by our creative space and our design review process. Beyond the design tribe, our work thrives when it’s communicated in language that aligns to the goals of the business and invites participation early and often. In this presentation, Aarron will share the experiences of real design teams at Apple, Spotify, and other organizations to show how to improve the communication of design both inside your team and with key outside stakeholders. You’ll see how to run effective design reviews and retrospectives which will help you create a culture of feedback that produces better work, helps designers sharpen their skills, and communicates the value of design by making it more transparent and inviting.

When you read the words scattered over an app or website, you experience them as if spoken. This voice is every bit as real as color or motion on a digital screen—it’s an illusion, and it’s there for you to design. Words are often the most important design element in a product, but designers rarely handle them with the same care or conviction that we have for visual patterns. We can do better. Ben will share simple guiding principles to help you design better with words through lessons and inspiration in neuroscience, fairy tales, and examples from across the web.

If you're working on building a digital product, you've probably heard the term "unicorn" thrown around in reference to someone who can both design and code, and you've likely been dragged into at least one "designers should code" argument. If this kind of talk rubs you the wrong way, trust me—you're not alone.Yet, it's also very likely that you or somebody on your team has skills that don't fall cleanly into a neat and tidy box as either a designer or engineer. In an industry that tends to form silos around Design and Engineering, where do hybrids fit in? What should we call them? How can we embrace and grow cross-functional collaboration in our organisations? In this talk, Jack shares his experience navigating a career as a design/dev hybrid, some thoughts on what makes a healthy team, and how we should think about the role of engineering in the design process.

Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs, and aspirations. At Uber, the Global Scalable Research program is intended to influence product teams at HQ and around the world, to design and test in global regions—currently Mexico, India, Brazil. I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Our Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today.

The best brands in the world—organisations like Amazon, Starbucks, IBM, and McKinsey—have embraced design as a critical component of corporate strategy. They apply design methodologies not just to develop products, but also to boost engineering efficiency, to decrease time to market, and to capture greater market share. But business leaders and design leaders struggle to measure the multi-dimensional impact of design on business growth. Using the results from InVision's groundbreaking The New Design Frontier report, a study of more than 2,200 design organisations around the world, we'll explore the nexus of design practice, team connectivity, and business growth.