Leah Buley
Analyst at Forrester Research
Clearleft Says
Over the years Leah Buley has been constantly rated as one of our highest ranked workshop leaders by attendees, and as one of the nicest people in the world by our event manager Kate. Her UX Week keynote went down a storm, so we can’t wait for her to share her thoughts on design leadership with you!
The Modern Design Organisation
Companies from IBM to GE and Capital One are finally making serious investments in design as a strategic differentiator. Does that mean we’re done? Has UX finally arrived? If only it were that simple. With the ascent of UX comes new questions. Today, companies struggle to understand the relationship between user experience, customer experience, service design, and innovation—what Jesse James Garrett called “the great convergence.” The reality is that many UX teams are still stymied by questions about what experience design professionals are empowered to do, and what’s somebody else’s job. In this talk, Leah Buley will share her research into the differences between a ho hum UX organisation, and world class one. She’ll also discuss what work still remains to be done for all user experience professionals to step up to the opportunity that’s now in front of them.
UX as a Team Sport
A smart Apple designer once said: “design is a distributed social process.” The fact is, UX isn't something that you can do alone — even if you work as a team of one. Great design is born when smart and creative people work together, driven by shared passion for solving problems in a human way. To do that, you need people to work with you, to share what they know with you, and most importantly, to believe that human-centred design matters.
In this workshop, you'll learn how to be a confident, effective leader of an inclusive UX process that makes your teams — and your customers — love you just a little bit more than they already do.
Using standard UX activities, we’ll examine and discuss the inter-personal dynamics of UX work. In this workshop, attendees will:
- Work together to plan a UX process using tools like design briefs and research plans
- Analyse how group dynamics in that process influence how successful they are
- Review effective techniques for addressing questions, objections, and conflict in the UX process
Recommended for UX teams of one (of course!), as well as any UX practitioner who regularly works with cross-functional teams.
About Leah Buley
Leah Buley is the author of the book The User Experience Team of One and a principal analyst at Forrester, a research and advisory firm. At Forrester, Leah researches and writes about the evolving role of user experience in business. Prior to Forrester, Leah was a design strategist at Intuit and a lead experience designer at Adaptive Path, working for clients in financial services, social media, consumer products, and non-profits.