September has us talking about humans. RSVP now.
This session will take a look at the range of experiences we have as individuals, and what we can draw from our own experiences to improve how we design and build for others.
We’ll look at how much we delve into that range, how much we shy away from the extremes, from our intuitions, and how we overlook the nuance in favour of the coarse and the safe.
We’ll go through some frameworks that help apply these conversations at work, how you can format insights that feed into design specifications, and we’ll discuss how these principles apply to facilitation and user research, product, and service design.
Why?
We know people are at the core of what we do, but we rarely explore them with as much rigour or subtlety as we do more technical domains. Our best developers, designers, and product managers are rarely able to talk about humans with as much confidence and nuance as they can talk about ruby, typefaces or commercial strategy.
It’s hard. Partly because the topic is so subjective – it’s so close to all of us, and it’s hard to lay claim to being an expert. It can also be confronting, we can lack the vocabulary, and it’s easy to be wrong. But what do we lose by holding back from fully exploring the human dimension of the problems we’re trying to solve? What tools can we use to make these conversations easier, and focused on product outcomes?
Our Speaker
Gin Atkins is the Head of Product at The Conversation, a global network of independent newsrooms across Africa, Europe, Asia-Pac and North America.
Gin has spent the last 15 years learning about, designing for, and leading people in both product and service environments. She draws on a diverse range of experiences, spanning youth work, community mental health, management consulting, enterprise innovation labs and tech startups.
This includes designing and delivering immersive experiences for hundreds of young people across Australia, working with adults with complex mental health needs, designing a global front-line leadership program for one of the worlds biggest mining companies, a B2B SaaS product focused around data insight into AWS, and go to market strategy for a hardware-software time tracking product.