Re-framing our purpose as designers through ethics, values, and personal experience give us opportunities to create positive impact in society. Born in a chemical valley in Ontario, Canada, Levon Sharrow’s design ethos and process has been shaped by environment, curiosity, empathy, and advocacy. This talk will shine a light on alternative approaches to data, challenging best practices, and prompting designers to reflect on their own purpose.

We have learned to promise our customers golden mountains - our product is better than our competition, unique, and changing the lives of users. However, we have not always learned how to actually to deliver these promises. We focus on attracting the customer or on one key moment, forgetting how important the perspective of experience is in the entire service.

The key to building any successful product is a strong partnership between designers and developers. However, the journey from concept to code can often be bumpy. In his talk, Joel dives into the nuances in designer and developer collaboration, exploring ways to communicate design intent, establish expectations, and navigate professional relationships.

Through my years as a professional I have encountered the topic “how to convince your boss/your client/your colleagues/that guy from sales of the value of UX”. It is a valid question, but do you understand why they struggle to understand? Do you understand why it is not part of their vocabulary? Join me in a quest to understand the people around me in my role as someone who designs experiences.

Every designer needs to become a planet friendly designer. Whatever facet of design you work in, we tend to stick to patterns to help make content easy to understand but can they be better? These trends and patterns tend to be tried and tested but do change with new devices and faster connections but do we know how they can impact on the planet.

Consumer and citizen identity systems have unique challenges. One of these challenges is how to please all the people all the time. What considerations do UI/UX designers need to make and how can they make use of identity protocols to surmount challenges? What to consider when to ensure their mass-adopted identity service works for all?

With a strong Consumer Insights and Data Science team, Netflix is committed to hearing from as many users (230+ million customers across 190 countries) as possible to ensure their needs are met. Fonz will share real-life examples of how Netflix uses user research to gain a deeper understanding of their users, and how this has led to successful design solutions.