Design systems are much more than just components and guidelines. From working and consulting with hundreds of design systems teams, SuperFriendly founder Dan Mall will share stories about how teams can free themselves from intermediate and advanced design systems traps like opaque roadmaps, stakeholder obstructions, communication gaps, balancing convention with originality, and more!

Connections are a part of us, of the world. From the connections between people, between cultures, within language, and more. In these days when more data is collected daily than we could ever hope to explore, the variety in connections being gathered is opening up the possibility to visualize these (often complex) networks.

During this talk, Nadieh will take you through the design process of several of her (interactive) data visualization works, from personal projects to client work. The common thread they all share, is that they all reveal connections, but all differently. From a family tree of 3000 people connected to the European Royal houses, to those existing between our Intangible Cultural Heritage created for UNESCO, to connections we have drawn in the night skies and more. Revealing that all types connections are unique and revealing the intricacies that lie within them requires a creative, iterative and custom approach.

Coming soon!

We create so much stuff before we actually make a digital product. We do research, we sketch screens, we map flows, we do animation studies, we create high-fidelity prototypes. The original spirit of these artifacts—wireframes, journey maps, design mockups, and the rest—was for exploration, to share ideas efficiently. They began as lightweight devices for conversation and experimentation.

Somewhere along the way, these documents all got enshrined as critical deliverables and became projects unto themselves—yet they all get thrown away when we ship the product. Our industry builds generations of carefully crafted yet disposable facsimiles of the product—before even writing a line of code.

It’s a waste of time, effort, and resources, taking much-needed time from the work that matters: building the actual product. Developers are often left with bare scraps of time after designers burn weeks on wireframes and comps that will ultimately get thrown away.

There’s a better way to work: treat design artifacts and developer prototypes as rough sketches, not "deliverables," and shift more effort into working software. This provocative talk will challenge the assumptions we bring to our work as designers and developers and present a better way forward—for faster results, higher quality, and stronger teamwork.

Quantitative metrics are an under-used tool in most user experience efforts. Jared shares the story of one UX leader, as they work to measure the UX of their organization’s products and services.

In this presentation, you’ll see how the UX leader worked with 4 different categories of UX metrics: UX Success metrics, Problem-Value metrics, Progress Reporting metrics, and Value Discovery metrics. These four types of metrics help you understand when your projects have met their intention, help you communicate your value to the organization, help you show how far along you are for complex projects, and help you identify innovative new opportunities for your designs.

You’ll learn how to avoid common mistakes teams make when choosing metrics and see examples for selecting a starter set of metrics. Jared will show you new ways UX design leaders are using metrics to drive a better understanding of how UX design and research delivers lasting value.