SF Design Week 2020
This year SF Design Week was a bit different due to the pandemic — all conferences and studio crawls were online, and available with a one-time purchase of an all-access pass.
This “virtual festival” format had its pros and cons. It was definitely easier to attend more of the talks, fit them into your schedule, attend partially if you had conflicts, and rewatch things you missed (everything is recorded and available until July). The virtual environment also made the questions from the audience better and more relevant, since we could upvote questions we liked and there were a lot to choose from since people were more brave to ask. What was missing was some of the fun and excitement of the event, and for some people it can be harder to stay focused when you’re staring at a screen instead of an interactive environment. In general the virtual talks were less memorable of an experience.
Overall our team is split on whether we prefer the virtual style — it will be interesting to see if in the coming years SFDW becomes some sort of combination of virtual and in-person.
We went to some of the talks and collected our key takeaways, or sometimes just interesting things we heard that stuck with us.
Bringing People Together When They Aren’t
Monday, June 15
- When you find yourself preferring a design solution, ask yourself: Do I like this because it’s progress and it means the project is almost done… Or do i like this because it solves the user problem?
- Remember that people have varying levels of access. An example is doing classes online — some kids don’t have computers with cameras, some kids don’t have a space of their own, some kids might only have mobile devices.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
- Actively listen and be inclusive towards one another. Hire diverse people to bring diverse perspectives to the table. Block names from performance reviews and such to help prevent unconscious bias. Have tough conversations when necessary to ensure a safe environment for all.
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
Can Design Save Cannabis?
Monday, June 15
- Brand is more important in modern times because you can’t experience the product like in the old days. Back then you could touch the flour — now you have to rely on the packaging to tell you about quality.
- What branding needs to do to help cannabis is to help people with education and get them over barriers of entry. It can be very overwhelming and can have a stigma so people are intimidated.
- Cannabis doesn’t need to be saved, but there’s a lot of room for more to come into the party. “Saving is growing.”
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
Designing With Optimism
Tuesday, June 16
I asked a question at the end of this talk: How can I maintain optimism when I find a lot of my good design solutions being skipped over, de-prioritized or stripped down due to lack of resources or conflicting business goals such as revenue?
The answer I got was to redefine your success as a designer around impact. For example, if your designs are less than ideal UX, but they’re solving a problem for more people than they could have if revenue goals aren’t met, then this is a success. Or maybe you are impacting processes by getting departments to work together better or improving the perception of the design team. You can define impact many different ways. Another thing to look at is whether your values as a designer align with the company you work for.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
Answering Earth’s Call — Beyond in conversation with Rainforest Connection
Tuesday, June 16
The rainforest connection was super interesting, they take old smartphones that they attach to rainforest tree to listen to the rainforest constantly. The sounds are recorded and livestream into the clouds. Those sounds allows them to monitor illegal activities like poaching or illegal deforestation and send a local team to prevent them.
The agency Beyond helped them with some interface design and user flow. They were not a lot of specific details but it was great to see how UX can be used a bit differently.
Mélanie Yèche, Product Designer, Healthline
Great Photos Are Not Enough
Wednesday, June 17
- Great photos have three elements: Storytelling, composition, and light.
- For storytelling, next time you’re getting ready to choose/take/direct a photo — stop and ask yourself why. Don’t react to visuals. What is the story? Who cares? What are we trying to accomplish? Who is the audience? What is the message?
- Sometimes a photo might be good visually, or good at highlighting the topic correctly, but it isn’t a great photo if it doesn’t tell the story it needs to tell.
- An example of this was the Kaiser photo above. He was asked to take a photo that highlighted the new entryway and awning. He took a photo that showed the entryway front-and-center and it looked beautiful. But the above photo is actually better because it has the Kaiser logo and shows people walking around, including a man in scrubs, which tells the whole story.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
- It is really important to understand what is the subject of your story, and not being distracted by the fact you took a good picture
- People in pictures can help tell a better story but you have to be careful not to make the story about them
Mélanie Yèche, Product Designer, Healthline
Beyond NPS: Making UX Measurable
Thursday, June 18
An example of a way you can measure design is to measure emotion. One of the presenters used an example that they measured the number of swear words in user feedback to determine the amount of negative emotion.
One of the presenters had a slide that referenced a McKinsey study that said better design = more revenue. I’m excited to dig into this research.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
Key takeaways:
- NPS is just one specific part of the story, it doesn’t tell everything you need to know about how the users feel about their experience or your brand
- One good metric to look for is emotion, satisfaction is one of them but also frustration
To develop your own framework:
- Start by defining what impact means for your discipline within the context of your organization.
- Understand the different levels that impact can happen in your organization, and what is the goal of creating a framework for tracking impact (e.g. prioritization, career development, justification for team’s existence or headcount asks, etc)
- Define all the instances in which impact can occur and ways to track them. This can be done as a team workshop, and it will be a living document/artifacts over time.
- Use the framework and iterate.
- Socialize impact within UX teams, as well as XFN stakeholders. E.g. Before quarterly or yearly planning, as team retrospectives, team newsletters, onboarding docs, headcount discussions, etc.
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
Pleasure, sex, and safe-abortion: Designing around taboo topics
Thursday, June 18
Ylabs is a design and research organization that presented one project they lead in Kenya and Nigeria to talk to young people about safe-sex and safe abortion. They talked about their different insight they got from interviewing and creating product around taboo topics. I think those were really interesting and should also be used for non-taboo topics
For interview
- Always prioritize respect and safety of people over research
- Our responsibilities expand beyond the interview: it’s possible that user will talk about personal issues and trauma during an interview, you have to make sure you have a plan for this and you are not leaving a person in distress at the end of the interview
- Make the interview space feel safe
- Share finding to participant. This one was particularly interesting to me. I think it is pretty rare for designers to share findings with users but it makes sense, specially in Ylabs case since they were designing for a small community.
- Do not force stories, be respectful or the interviewee boundaries
For products and services development
- Cover up for everyone involved
- Design for privacy
- Minimize traceability
- Reassure users that their question are normal
- Use gateway topics
One of the example they show was the big sister club. This club was a safe space for young woman to talk about sex and abortion with older woman. Since it is a taboo subject and some parents might not want their daughters to be part of the discussion, Ylabs used discreet branding and focus their branding around mentoring by calling it the “big sister club”.
Mélanie Yèche, Product Designer, Healthline
Measuring the Impact of Design
Thursday, June 18
Key takeaways:
- Spend as much time with customers. You gain a sense of empathy for their situation.
- Talk with cross functional teams often so you can learn about metrics.
- Understand the impact in design at the product level. How does the impact look over time? Doing is better than telling. And doing together is better than doing alone.
- Start wherever you are. Understand the culture + context. Understand the business. Talk to the customer.
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
- Build shared language within your team
- Do it together
Jay Jung, Product Visual Designer, Healthline
Promoting Inclusion Through Design
Friday, June 19
Diverse set of people on a project just makes the work better. Your eyes are open to serve all those different needs. Imagine what we haven’t seen.
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
Create right set of tools to allow ppl to be creative.
Don’t let them be overwhelmed.
Provide them enough limitation to be creative.
Jay Jung, Product Visual Designer, Healthline
Designing for research vs production
Tuesday, June 23
- Biggest takeaway: Be vocal.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
Key takeaways:
- Make it accessible.
- Be vocal and visible.
- Build on a foundation on diversity and inclusion.
- Don’t assume what you don’t know.
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
Biggest takeaway for me was
“Do not assume what you don’t know.”
Jay Jung, Product Visual Designer, Healthline
Design During a Crisis: How understanding stress and anxiety can help you create better experiences
Tuesday, June 23
This talk started out with a guided meditation for about 15 min which I found wonderful. I was feeling overwhelmed by all the conferences and a stressful two weeks in general, and as I joined this talk I wondered if I could make it through…. then this meditation revitalized me.
Interesting points about stress:
- Fight or flight was meant to be temporary (a tiger is chasing you) — important systems shut down. Blood isn’t going to important areas. Prolonged stress (which turns into anxiety) creates issues because your body wasn’t meant to endure this long term. Issues can arise with digestive system, muscle tension, insomnia, memory, lower back and more.
- Clenching — when the mind clenches, the body clenches, and vice versa.
- Breathe from the belly — breathing from chest is clenched/shallow.
I found this slide interesting:
At One Medical they use images that avoid distinguishing characteristics so you can more easily see yourself in the images.
Sarah Johnson, Product Design Manager, Healthline
What are you eating? It affects your mental health. Because of covid, we’re not getting everything we need right now. Create a routine can really help with your mental health. What are some small things you enjoy that you can build into a daily routine?
Mandi Wolters, Senior Product Designer, Healthline
What is conversation design?
Wednesday, June 24
Vittorio Banfi, the founder of Botsociety, talked about the specificity of conversation design. According to him, it is pretty similar to a standard design flow where colors = personalities, screens = flows and buttons = questions.
A lot of the examples where showing how to fix some standard broken interaction between conversation bots and human. The key takeaway for me was that most of the time the bot don’t express why they are unable to perform and action and that it’s what lead to frustration on the user end. (see example below)
Mélanie Yèche, Product Designer, Healthline
