Attendees

UX Professionals often feel burdened with the responsibility to protect, elevate and advocate for the humanity and needs of people who engage with the experiences they help design. They often work the closest with the complexity, messiness, and beauty of what it means to be human. And yet, this responsibility often causes professionals - without the language or frameworks to articulate why it's happening - to experience moments of anxiety, burnout, low motivation, apathy, fatigue, and other difficult challenges.

The ability to recognize and rise above the personal risks of this profession are a couple of the most critical skills rarely being taught, leading to an unsustainable career and potential harm to both the professional and others. Vivianne Castillo, a UX Researcher with a background in counseling & psychology, would like to change this and has crafted a unique workshop to teach these skills.

During this workshop, attendees will cover a range of topics, case studies, and techniques related to the unique challenges of self-care and self-awareness. Including:

If you want to become a more holistically-grounded, self-aware, and empathic UX Professional who is able to practically apply new ways of working and thinking to both your professional and personal life, this workshop is for you.

Vivianne Castillo is User Experience Researcher with 7+ years of psychology and research experience spanning multiple contexts, cultures, and industries. Vivianne is also an international speaker whose work and opinions related to diversity & inclusion, ethics and the role of shame in UX have been written about in Slate and Fortune.

Prior to becoming a UX Researcher, Vivianne worked primarily in the arenas of human services and counseling, where she tackled issues like shame, empathy, vulnerability and compassion; she credits her previous experiences as a human services professional, multi-cultural upbringing, and her love for cognitive behavioral psychology as major influences on her approach to research and innovation. Vivianne currently works within the Office of Innovation at Salesforce where she leverages research to help C-suite executives across various industries and Fortune 500 companies strategically convey what is really meaningful to their internal and external customers and understand the human aspect of their business problems.

In many organizations, research is seen as a checkbox in the development cycle, rather than an ongoing process of building knowledge and understanding of your customers. This leads to researchers themselves being a bottleneck for many teams and frustration on both sides.

Some organizations have taken a different approach - choosing to view research as an activity and a practice that many teams and roles engage in, allowing researchers themselves to be “player-coaches” on their teams - alternating between providing guidance and being in the field. This workshop will help attendees understand what the role of a researcher is in these kinds of situations and how to build programs and processes that empower partner teams to take part in (and own) research activities themselves.

Through a number of case studies and activities, we will cover:

This workshop is ideal for experienced researchers and research leaders who are interested and capable of bringing change to their organization’s research practices and want a better understanding of how this can be done.

Behzod Sirjani studies how people work and work together. He is currently the Head of Operations for Research and Analytics at Slack, where he supports a team of people who help make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive for Slack employees. Behzod also cares deeply about sharing and teaching the practice of research, both through and outside of his work at Slack.

Prior to Slack, Behzod spent 4 years at Facebook working on business tools, video products, and hardware, where he also co-created and led a mentorship program for junior researchers. Behzod has experience conducting and teaching about research in consumer and enterprise settings in North America, Europe, and Asia.

When you do research, it’s essential to know that you’re speaking to the right people. Even more so when you're doing qualitative research. As qualitative research sample sizes are generally small, the people taking part in your study can make or break the quality of your research outcomes.

Finding the right people to take part in research is a skill, for some people, it’s their bread and butter. More and more, research teams are building in-house recruitment teams of one or more to do participant recruitment for them, and researchers are generally expected to be able to recruit their own participants, too. Despite the importance of good participant recruitment, it’s still a little talked about space and it can be difficult to know what industry-standard and best practices are.

This workshop is ideal for anyone wanting to develop their research recruitment skills and learn more about the ins-and-outs of recruiting quality participants using a humane and ethical approach.

In this one-day workshop, we’ll cover:

Sarit Geertjes has years of experience recruiting research participants at global tech companies. She is currently designing research recruitment services and processes on the Research Ops team at Atlassian. Before Atlassian, Sarit worked as a Participant Recruitment Coordinator at Google, where she learned the ins and outs of the role which led her to a new-found passion in this space.

Prior to finding Research Ops, Sarit has worked in Human Resources, Customer Service, and has a Masters in Social Psychology. Turns out that this was the perfect combination to prepare her for a career in Research Operations!