Steve Fadden

Steve Fadden is Director for Analytics UX Research at Salesforce and an award- winning professional faculty member with the UC Berkeley I School. He has worked in industry, consulting, and academia for many years, with an interest in the use of mixed methods research to study how people understand and make decisions in complex, dynamic environments.

Transforming user needs into design priorities through research and collaboration

6 hrs Workshop | Categeory: UX | Target Audience: Some experience as a designer or researcher is beneficial, but all designers, managers, developers, and researchers are welcome.

Designing products and solutions requires us to empathize with our stakeholders, understand their needs, identify problems associated with accomplishing goals, and prioritize our work to focus on building an effective solution. Throughout this interactive workshop, attendees will learn methods that can be implemented to identify and prioritize user needs that must be addressed through design. Topics will range from survey and interview approaches to more interactive methods such as design studios and participatory design. A significant aspect of the workshop will focus on experiencing multiple approaches to gather feedback in a design studio format, illustrating ways to identify problems, risks, values, and priorities.

Three key takeaways

• A framework to understand the process of going from users to needs to priorities to designs.

• Multiple methods to understand user’s problems, goals, and needs, including design studio approaches to facilitate the transformation from needs/goals to designs.

• Agile research techniques to validate concepts and designs to ensure the design solution is on the right track.

Designing to improve, empower, and fulfill

Keynote

Designers have incredible powers - from understanding diverse stakeholder needs, exploring new ways to solve problems, and implementing solutions to help people accomplish their goals like never before. But with these powers come great responsibilities, and we should go further than solving business problems, improving product usability, and increasing user satisfaction. We need to consider the larger contexts in which we design, and ensure that our work is effective for audiences we can’t immediately discern. By enabling people to achieve success without sacrificing their abilities, designers can better improve, empower, and fulfill.