Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Designing for Diverse Users: Bria Alexander, DesignOps Summit Emcee

Lou and Bria Alexander, Brand Experience Program Manager at Adobe, range widely in a conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion—and how they pertain to how a conference program might challenge your beliefs, the ways in which capitalism influences design, co-creation, and more.
Bria will be the emcee at our upcoming conference, the DesignOps Summit, October 21-23. Check out the program and get your ticket: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/program/#tab=day-1
Bria’s recommendations:
• The Curb Cut Effect https://racialequitybuffalo.org/files/winter_17_the_curb_cut_effect.pdf
• How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist-1
• The 1619 Project podcast thttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: https://www.amazon.com/Caste-Origins-Discontents-Isabel-Wilkerson/dp/0593230256
• August 2 John Oliver episode discussing U.S. history: https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/john-oliver-american-history-textbooks-slavery.html
More about Bria: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/speakers/bria-alexander/

The Other L Word—Addressing Workplace Loneliness with Kat Vellos

Kat Vellos, author of Connected From Afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You're Far Away and We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, is our opening speaker on day one of the DesignOps Summit this October 21-23, 2020.
Here, she discusses the issues of loneliness in the workplace, and how managers can support their teams—especially in the time of remote work and added stresses from a global pandemic. In addition to supporting employees’ humanity, a manager who keeps their staff happy enough to stay can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line—at the average national voluntary turnover rate of 25%, a company of 100 people with an average salary of $50,000 will spend between $625,000 and $2.5 million dollars on staff replacement costs in one year.
Kat Recommends: Building Brand Communities https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617261/building-brand-communities-by-carrie-melissa-jones-and-charles-h-vogl/
Learn more about Kat’s session at the DesignOps Summit and get your ticket: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/opener-day-1/
Follow Kat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KatVellos
The Connection Club: https://weshouldgettogether.com/

Maximizing the Impact of Content Design with Jonathon Colman

Jonathon Colman, Senior Design Manager at Intercom and DesignOps Summit 2020 speaker joins Lou to discuss the challenges of developing content operations (and, sure, let’s go there: ContentOps). Should ContentOps stand alone, or be situated as part of a larger DesignOps team? Jonathon also shares how his team sets consistent expectations and defines success metrics across for designers of all stripes, whether they focus on content, product, research, or design roles.
Check out Jonathon’s upcoming DesignOps Summit 2020 presentation and get your ticket to the conference: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/maximize-the-impact-of-content-design/
• Learn more about Intercom’s hiring practices and more: www.Intercom.design
• Follow Jonathon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcolman
Jonathon recommends:
•Blogs by companies doing good work
-https://polaris.shopify.com/
-https://spotify.design/
-https://medium.com/facebook-design
•Current favorite podcast: https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/

Past, Present, and Future: Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams with Vincent Brathwaite

Vincent Brathwaite, one of the featured speakers at this year’s DesignOps Summit, and Lou go meta: they have a conversation about having a conversation about differences. Their discussion ranges from working through our ever-changing vocabulary of identity to establishing a protocol for genuine, authentic conversations.
Vincent also offers suggestions for how to reflect on and own one’s ignorance and accept uncertainty—issues that design leaders continue to wrestle with as they create design teams that are more representative of the world they serve.
• Vincent recommends: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: https://www.amazon.com/Caste-Origins-Discontents-Isabel-Wilkerson/dp/0593230256
• Learn more about Vincent’s upcoming DesignOps Summit talk: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/opener-day-2/
• Register for the DesignOps Summit: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/register/
Vincent Brathwaite is a Caribbean American multi-disciplinary design leader, educator, and speaker. For the past two decades, he has worked to transform communities through disruptive design thinking. Driven by integrity, empathy, kindness, courage, and resilience, his mission is to design experiences that help leaders positively impact the world. Visit his website at https://www.vincentjbrathwaite.com/design

Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences with Cheryl Platz

Cheryl Platz—Rosenfeld Media author, emcee of our Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience conferences, puppeteer, and Principal UX Designer at Gates Foundation—shares the inspiration that drove her new book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences (published December 2020). If you’re an interaction designer, you’ll want to listen as Cheryl dramatically expands our understanding of one of interaction design’s final frontiers.
Cheryl recommends:
Wired for Speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave:https://www.amazon.com/Wired-Speech-Activates-Human-Computer-Relationship/dp/0262640651
Follow Cheryl: https://twitter.com/funnygodmother
Get updates on her new book:https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/design-beyond-devices/

Making Good Trouble: DesignOps Summit co-curator Alana Washington

Alana Washington and Lou embark on a really wide-ranging conversation, touching on:
• The changing nature of work in the time of pandemic,
• How we can handle the intersection of our personal and private lives when working remotely,
• The restorative power of something as simple as putting down the phone and holding a physical book, and
• How DesignOps can help businesses enact more human-based processes.
Alana serves as a Senior Design Program Manager at Uber Freight. She’s also part of the DesignOps Summit 2020 curation team. The team is looking to frame the program against the difficult backdrop of these challenging times, when designers need more support than ever before. That’s why resilience is our theme for DesignOps 2020; we’ll explore design operations’ role in helping individual designers, design teams, and entire organizations adapt, survive, and thrive.
Learn more: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/
Alana’s recommended resources:
• 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week by Tiffany Shlain https://www.amazon.com/24-Power-Unplugging-One-Week/dp/1982116862
• Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html
• Lou recommends: 6 tips for surviving a racism pandemic by Alana herself! https://womentalkdesign.com/talks/6-tips-for-surviving-a-racism-pandemic/

Keeping Up with Rapid Growth—From Startup to Enterprise with Kit Unger

Kit Unger started her UX career as a “team of one,” and now manages a team of over 30 people as Senior Director of Experience Design at Smartsheet. We’re excited to have her as the leader of a group of presentations on “Keeping Up with Rapid Growth – From Startup to Enterprise” at Enterprise Experience 2020 (September 1; details here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2020/enterprise-experience-program/#day-2)
In this episode, she shares the role she wishes she’d hired for 20 employees ago, the elements of scaling a team quickly, and offers a preview of her EX2020 speakers’ presentations:
•Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice with Veevi Rosenstein https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2020/sessions/building-for-scale-creating-the-zendesk-ux-research-practice/
•A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach to User-Centric Maturity at Scale with Vasileios Xanthopoulos https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2020/sessions/a-top-down-and-bottom-up-approach-to-user-centric-maturity-at-scale/
•Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards with Jackie Ho https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2020/sessions/lead-effectively-while-preserving-team-autonomy-with-growth-boards/
Kit’s shoutout: Sarah Hubbard, co-founder of Seattle Women of Design and UX https://www.meetup.com/seaDUXX/
More about Kit https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise2020/speakers/kit-unger/

Crafting Metrics for UX Success with Kate Rutter

After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success." https://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-ux-workshops/crafting-metrics-for-ux-success/
In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!)
Kate’s recommended reading:
• Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Analytics-Better-Startup-Faster/dp/1449335675
• The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Metrics-Jerry-Z-Muller/dp/0691174954
• Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business, Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2019/09/dont-let-metrics-undermine-your-business
Kate’s shoutouts
Julie Zhuo https://medium.com/@joulee
John Cutler https://medium.com/@johnpcutler
Laura Klein https://rosenfeldmedia.com/people/laura-klein/
Follow Kate on Twitter www.twitter.com/katerutter