Past Events

WIAD is a one-day, global festival of all things Information Architecture, UX, Interaction Design, Design Strategy, User Research and related disciplines. Host cities around the world all have events on the same day. Events are open to and welcoming of anyone interested in learning how design can change the world

This year's theme is: Design for Difference.

"As designers, we are responsible for creating worlds of experiences, environments, services, and systems that impact millions of people – with lasting impacts. While we don’t have a Hippocratic Oath, it’s important for us to follow a similar goal to “do good” and “do not harm.” It is our responsibility as IA's to consider the consequences and impact our design decisions have on humanity and society as a whole.

Research is a foundational step in the design process. It ensures that we understand and account for diverse user needs within communities, both in our own domains and globally."

Here are this month’s speakers:

Terry Peters, Experience Director, ICF Olson

Talk:

Communicating Design

Design is a complex process composed of many smaller activities: listening, analyzing, evaluating, brainstorming, synthesizing, experimenting, composing, describing, discussing, exploring, reacting, and countless others. Documenting is not one of these activities, but engaging in any of these activities yields artifacts—diagrams, notes, sketches, lists, inventories, annotations, and larger documents—that result from the act of performing the task. At the same time, each task requires inputs, and these artifacts that come from doing design are the same things that can help feed the design process. The success of the task directly relates to the quality of the inputs and may be measured on the quality of its outputs. So how does one effectively make use of these to communicate the fruits of their labors?

Bio:

Terry is a talented user experience leader with 12 years of proven experience in the development and implementation of enterprise digital strategies, user-centered research and systems design with clients such as AARP, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Chik-fil-A, Johnson Controls, Scripps Networks, and The Nature Conservancy. Experienced team leader capable of mentoring cross-functional teams and fostering relationships to transform business and design needs into valuable and usable working products.

Katie Moriarty, UX Researcher, Snag

Talk:

You Don’t Have to Be a Researcher to Do User Research

We’ll discuss the value of observational research, how to do this type of research yourself, and how to apply your learnings to your day-to-day practice. Katie will use her own experiences to illustrate how accessible observational research can be.

Bio:

Katie is a User Experience Researcher at Snag. Her work focuses on helping Snag’s product development teams gain a greater understanding of hourly workers and employers so they can design and build products that solve their users true pain points. Katie has experience in conducting a wide range of qualitative research methods to uncover key insights that are both meaningful and actionable to stakeholders.

Connect:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiemoriarty/

Adarsh Ramakrishnan, Freelance Product Consultant

Talk:

A Figma(nt) of Your Imagination -- Streamlining your design flow using Figma

Explore how Figma can help you consolidate your entire design flow, letting you design, prototype, and spec in one platform.

Bio:

Adarsh is a product consultant who specializes in strategy and design. As part of his consulting services, he has designed and built visual systems for digital products across multiple platforms. He is also teaches engineering design to students from non-technical majors through the VCU Da Vinci Center.

Matt McGhan, Experience Designer, SingleStone

Talk:

Healthy Design Systems Make Better Products

Bio:

Midwest farm boy turned East Coast experience designer. Went from drawing animals, sports cards, and airplanes to designing visual experiences via VCU to non-profit to SingleStone. Lover of people and their day-to-day interactions with designed & digital things.

4 Richmond designers will drop their know-how, lessons learned, and best practices on a variety of topics in just 15 minutes apiece. Not only will you walk away inspired—you’ll be armed with new tools and techniques you can put into practice ASAP.

Presenters:

Ashley Cook - Making UX Better

"User Research" Coming Together: Big R Meets Little R

Adarsh Ramakrishnan - Capital One

Project Management as Process

Larry Thacker - CarMax

SPRINT Types and Planning

Amanda Serfozo - Capital One

Kicking Off a Project the Right Way

About Raj

"I’m an AI content designer and strategist at Capital One. I design content primarily for our company’s conversational UIs, which include Eno, our SMS chatbot, and our Alexa skill on the Amazon Echo. In my free time, I like to watch a lot of sports, television, and movies, and generally be as unhealthy as humanly possible."

About Scott

"I’m an AI content and systems designer at Capital One. Prior to joining the Cap, I worked in the games industry -- primarily in design with some producing and project managing thrown in for good measure. I’ve worked across a wide swath of genres, from kids games like SpongeBob SquarePants and Nancy Drew to slightly-older-kids games like Agatha Christie and the Elder Scrolls series. In my free time I enjoy playing guitar and tinkering with photography. I took a picture of the Washington Monument with my iPhone last weekend that is going to fundamentally change the world, or at least get somewhere near a dozen likes. Could go either way."

At each event, four designers will spend the evening sharing their know-how, lessons learned, and best tips and tricks on a variety of topics. You’ll be armed with new tools and techniques that you can immediately put into practice.

Here’s what’s on deck for our inaugural round of lightning talks!

Presenters:

Kevin Tuskey

Experience Design Lead - SingleStone 

Design Thinking Crash Course

Shannon Leahy

UX Content Designer - Capital One

Topic: 4 Ways to Get Started with Content Testing Today

Jenn Atkins

Product Designer - Snag

Topic: Opportunity Trees: How to grow and care for them

Margaret Karles

Experience Designer - Freelance

Topic: What is a Concept?

Ladies that UX Richmond (LTUX) and Think of Us are sharing the story of their rewarding partnership. Why? Because we want others to replicate and improve upon our model. Our hope is that you walk away feeling empowered to use your professional skills to do good in the community.

You'll hear about the LTUX and Think of Us partnership from both sides, and then we want to hear from you. What are you passionate about? How can you prioritize giving back? Who can you think of that would benefit from a partnership like this? Let's not leave this at hypotheticals - we'll share what we've learned along the way so that you can get involved!

Whether you work in the nonprofit space, or you're just trying to find ways to use UX to build a stronger partnership with your community, this workshop is for you

Together we’ll:

• Look at simple, short, shareable formats to capture the content strategy, audience needs, business needs, and content requirements
• Practice documenting the content strategy for real-world scenarios
• Discuss how to use what you capture to keep everyone aligned — and not let that work go to waste

On top of hands-on practice, you’ll leave with a sample format to use when you get back to work.

About Sara

Sara Zailskas Walsh started out in journalism and ended up doing content strategy and UX design for home building, airline, smartphone, and financial industries. She’s currently doing experience strategy work at CapitalOne.com in San Francisco, where she’s learned to tolerate kale if it’s prepared certain ways.

Come learn how we incorporate users directly into our strategy and design process by using personas, in-person and remote interviews, and usability tests. We will end with a tour of our own usability lab and also discuss ways that YOU can (cost-effectively) incorporate user research into your process.

A good content management system helps you provide epic customer experiences. A great CMS goes one step further—it helps you deliver enjoyable user experiences to the editorial and marketing teams that use it every day.

Understandably, the CMS user experience is often sidelined in favor of the front-end, customer-facing experience. After all, there’s only a select few content creators that will be exposed to the back-end, right?

But at the end of the day, these two aspects can't, and shouldn't be separated. A thoughtfully-designed CMS user interface is paramount to delivering great customer experiences. And, a great experience for content creators will reduce staff costs, training costs, and technology customization costs over time, too. 

Taylor Horak of Authentic will show us how to face the UX of the CMS head on. From tips for the discovery phase to employing content modeling, Taylor will reveal how to craft a simple-to-use, efficient platform that supports infinite website redesigns and scales well.

About Taylor

Taylor is a consultant at Authentic, working as a client advocate throughout the design and implementation process to deliver sustainable content management solutions. A typical week for Taylor includes leading a client discovery workshop, developing end-user training, and designing flexible content models.

80% of us own a smartphone. And when we’re on our phones—which we are, constantly—85% of the time, we’re using apps. But we’re picky: most of us only use 5 apps regularly.

How do you make a great app—one that makes it into your users’ top 5? It starts with content. A web content strategist who successfully made the switch to mobile will show you the ropes: how to make your app findable in stores, how to engage your users with push notifications that don’t annoy, and even how “traditional” web SEO impacts your app (it does!).

This talk's for you if you have questions like:

• How is app content different from website content?
• How can I make my app findable, both in stores and on the web?
• How can I make my app usable?
• How can content strategy help me keep users engaged with my app?
• What do I need to know to successfully include apps in my overall content strategy?

About Melanie

Melanie works as Senior Content Strategist at WillowTree in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has taught content strategy at General Assembly, and helped create websites at Razorfish, Rackspace, cPanel, and other interesting companies.