Highlights from Day 2 at Savvy UX Summit 2022

Last month on August 26-28, UXTesting.io hosted its fifth annual global summit. During the summit, keynote speakers talked about User Experience (UX) in their respective industries. Invited speakers worked for world-renowned companies such as Google, Youtube, Adobe, Netflix, LVMH, and LEGO. The event attracted attendees from over the world to learn, connect and inspire each other. 

With this year’s theme “UX Debugs the World”, various topics were discussed related to UX Strategy, UX Operation, UX Research, UX Leadership, UX Design, Luxury UX Design, Gaming UX, and more. This article series recaps the highlights of Savvy UX Summit 2022 day by day.

1. Coupang UX: How simplicity helps us scale

To open up the second day at Savvy UX Summit, Tessa Kim and Rannie Teodoro from Coupang hosted a session on “Coupang UX: How simplicity helps us scale”. Tessa Kim works as Product Design Director, leading the overall design direction and strategy for Coupang App. Drawing on her past experience with multinational companies and the financial tech industry, she applies her learnings from past experiences in UX, product design, and agile practice using data and research to drive design direction. Rannie Teodoro is the Director, Emerging Businesses & Design Foundations. She has over 10 years of experience in UX. Currently, she leads the UX team for Coupang Emerging Businesses and Design Foundations.

Achieving consistent, sustainable growth is a challenge faced by many companies looking to expand.

In this session, attendees learned how Coupang scaled its global presence as an e-commerce and food delivery company. Tessa and Rannie talked about the customer problems driving Coupang’s decision-making, how experimentation is critical to growth, and the tradeoffs in simplifying UX.

2. UX Research Operations – Centralizing, Streamlining and Innovating Global Research Processes

The second speaker taking the virtual stage was Iva Randelshofer. She is the UX Research Operation Manager at Ubisoft Düsseldorf. With 15 years of UX experience in the games industry, she is focused on Research- and DesignOps, cognitive ergonomics, and accessibility. Iva is a tireless advocate for user needs and believes it is the players’ right to enjoy seamless and memorable gaming experiences without any frustration. She also currently works on her Ph.D. in UX and Human-Computer Interaction and teaches interaction design at various international universities.

While UX maturity is gradually increasing across industries, we encounter new challenges on how to approach user research in order to keep up with the growing demand of design teams or business stakeholders. Especially bigger companies that operate on an international level are recognizing the growing need of streamlining and centralizing research for a bigger and effective impact. This is when Research Operations come into play. By offloading researchers and designers with taking ownership of streamlining research processes and coordinating testing resources, such operations ensure that every party can focus on high-quality user centric deliverables. This way actionable research insights can be efficiently shared and properly utilized for impactful business decisions.

Iva’s keynote was about “UX Research Operations – Centralizing, Streamlining and Innovating Global Research Processes”. She discussed the global UX Research Operations of Ubisoft, their mission of democratizing research and bringing it to the next level, by centralizing research processes, adapting research pipelines to new agile design cycles, and ad-hoc testing requests. She also discussed how to set up a shared research repository to create full transparency of research findings and make them accessible and usable by everyone.

The key learning to remember for her session include:

1. Say “yes” first and prioritize
2. Have a plan B, and C — but also be clear and realistic about the required resources
3. Forge strong alliances — Invest in strong partnerships, built support and mutual trust
4. Pick your battles — Be very selective and mindful of your own and your team’s resources
5. Chase of the “Northstar” together

3. Impact of Design Management

Next up, Sunit Sharma shared a session about “Impact of Design Management”. Sunit is a product design enthusiast with 15 years of experience solving business and user problems for various products across multiple sectors. Currently, he works in Singapore as Sr. Design Manager at Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) to promote digital transformation via design.

In his session, Sunit shared a roadmap for UX managers talking about top qualities and how to be a successful design leader. Sun described a successful leader as someone who:

• Built relationships
• Demonstrate value and repeat it
• Built allies
• Over communicate
• Promote your team and their wins
• Opportunities to shine your team
• Spend time in hiring and training your HR to find good candidates

Further, he shared his framework, highlighting the four key steps of becoming a better leader or manager.  

1. Understand — Do you like complexity, chaos, and difficult situations 
2. Evaluate — Are you prepared for this challenge? Do you enjoy tackling organization, team, and individual problems?
3. Test — Explore internal roles in which you can inspire or lead other team members
4. Step up — Once you are confident, it’s time to embark on your journey

4. Design is Intent: my design leadership journey [No recording]

After Sunit’s keynote, the day continued with a session hosted by Grace de Athayde. Grace is the Senior Manager - Digital Product Design at LEGO Group. She is a lifelong learner and has a deep interest in Service Design, Lean, and Agility. 

In this keynote, Grace shared about learning from her career as an entrepreneur, working with transformation through service design, cultivating communities, and building diverse digital design teams in the most playful company. Unfortunately, we are not able to release any video recording or provide a summary as it contains confidential information.

5. Influencing Product Strategy: Building UX Research Programs That Make a Difference

The fifth speaker, Reggie Murphy, talked about “Influencing Product Strategy: Building UX Research Programs That Make a Difference”. Reggie is a 20-year veteran in the user experience research industry and is passionate about creating a human-centered world. He works as a Senior Director and Head of UX Research at Zendesk. Prior to his current role, Reggie built and led research teams at USA TODAY, Facebook, Vanguard, and Twitter. He frequently speaks at conferences and shares his knowledge about UX research on podcasts and social audio programs.

The value UX Research brings to the product design and development process is stronger today because UX Research teams are more effective at sharing relevant and actionable customer insights. How can companies build UX Research programs that make a difference on what products and services they build and ship to their customers?

In his talk, Reggie talked about the keys to building a UX research team that influences product strategy

• Design a strategic research mission — UX research is sometimes misunderstood as usability testing. A journey to design a strategic research mission may look like this: (1) Educate the organization, (2) Built operations, (3) Drive strategy.
• Built relationship — Relationships help you establish trust with your XFFNs, clarify misunderstandings and resolve conflicts faster, stay visible and engaged with XFNs and help you work smarter and faster. 
• Write strong POVs — POVs help you clarify your perspective, serve as your consumer insights elevator pitch, and own a position on what to do next.

6. User Experience Research in the B2B Space: How to overcome B2B challenges and use it to leverage research

Priscilla Ferronato is the UX Research Manager at Mastercard. With her research team, she supports the creation of leading and disruptive B2B financial technologies. Before joining Mastercard, Priscilla led UX research at Synchrony Financial, Nubank, and The RealReal. She also holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, focused on users’ trust in autonomous systems.

While the most well-known role for a UXR practitioner is to be embedded and work closely with a design t team, the capability these professionals bring to an enterprise extends far beyond the proximate level of product design. UXR adds value to business strategy because of the broad knowledge base, varied experiences, and can-do mindset of these experts. Incorporating UXR into strategic decision-making enables companies to form a complete picture of the current state of affairs, discern how well a current initiative does or meets user needs, or spot emergent opportunities. For instance, discovery research is a highly effective way to map out what sort of initiative to embark upon or what product to build. However, research and design B2B experience, in general, tends to be a difficult and complex environment. Some of the issues include recruitment and internal stakeholders' engagement.

During this session, Priscilla talked about “User Experience Research in the B2B Space: How to overcome B2B challenges and use it to leverage research”. Some of the main challenges of B2B research include:

• Partner recruitment is time-consuming — Multiple user profiles and segmentation based on individual and enterprise levels. 
• Incentives in research studies — We cannot financially incentivize participants to join research activities
• The complexity of the space — We cannot download competitive apps, test them, and easily understand the competitive space

She further addressed how to leverage research, and make B2B research more strategic:

1. Collaboration is the key
2. Openness: Acknowledge that B2B research is different in nature than B2C
3. Empathy: Switch from a customer panel to a data-driven recruitment process
4. Strategic thinking: Develop a reach roadmap based on the product roadmap to anticipate projects, invitations, and gaps of knowledge.

7. Looking Ahead: The Future of UX Research in 10 Years

The last session was hosted by June Cho, a Developer Evangelist at Zeplin. June has over a decade of experience in working closely with developers, technical leaders, and C-suite execs from companies like Tesla, Google, and the NBA, June is passionate about improving alignment between designers and engineering. At Zeplin, June focuses on connecting design to development and helps teams deliver on the promise of design. Prior to Zeplin, June worked at Microsoft as a Sales Engineer on the Global Black Belt team as the technical resource for the top 100 Azure spend healthcare clients—such as Johnson & Johnson, Humana, and GlaxoSmithKline.

The future of UX Research is undoubtedly bright, yet there are many challenges that lay ahead for this field. What new tools will be available? How will the core skills change over time? Does AI, Web3, and IoT dictate new user experiences? Is there a better way to collaborate across teams to deliver features faster?

During his session, June explored some of these seemingly-impossible questions — bringing these big ideas to life just a little bit faster. The key takeaway to remember from his sessions are:

• The need to technically level up (including devs) is rising
• Collaboration across disciplines must be easy for Web3 to work
• The future of work and products will fundamentally change to ownership

This article talked about the highlights of the first day at Savvy UX Summit 2022. Stay tuned to read the articles on the second and third days of this year’s summit. If you are interested to become part of our annual summit, we’re always looking for enthusiastic speakers willing to share their expertise with our global audience. For more information contact us at summit@uxtesting.io.