Kirsty Styles

Marketing, communications and data

Compere for the day

Kirsty has a decade of experience creating projects that help peoplebetter understand complex ideas. For five years, she worked as atechnology journalist in London covering mobile, startups and techgiants. Here, before many people knew these issues were coming,she focused on ethical questions of technology, such as itseconomic, environmental and social impact, which included creatinga standup comedy show.

She is now interrogating ‘public’ ‘journalism’ at the University ofCentral Lancashire – including through standup comedy – where shehas borrowed from a public engagement initiative done by theuniversities sector. She also works at Liverpool-based charity TheReader, which rebuilds lives and communities by getting peoplereading great literature aloud together.

Lou Cordwell, OBE

CEO, magneticNorth

Redesigning success

How can we redefine the concept of success to better reflect the values and ambitions of a creative culture?

In recent years we’ve seen a growing number of organisations set out more ‘purpose driven’ visions for their futures. And yet, the reality is that most companies continue to use the traditional measures of growing profit, productivity and shareholder value to define success. What if we redesigned the mainstream success benchmarks to prioritise an alternative set of measures and behaviours that are better aligned to the delivering happier and more creative working cultures?

About the speaker

Lou is CEO of Manchester based digital design studio, magneticNorth. Founded in 2000, the company quickly established an international reputation with an award winning client portfolio.

Alongside the day job, she is also a board member on Greater Manchester’s Local Enterprise Partnership, Chair of Design Manchester and a passionate campaigner for gender equality in business and the tech industry.

Lou was awarded an OBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours for services to the creative and digital economy.

Magnetic North
Design Manchester

Basak Haznedaroglu

Consultant and Coach

About the speaker

Basak is a multi-disciplinary thinker, consultant, educator, and coach. After spending years as a design executive, leading design and research teams and developing strategies at visionary companies like InVision, Microsoft, and Foursquare, she strives to help companies and people transform and become more innovative, creative, and intentional.

She also co-founded OpenIDEO Berlin to create social impact through workshops and initiatives and design solutions to our world’s biggest challenges in sustainability, healthcare, education, and more. And, she is an ambassador of Geekettes and Hexagon, aimed to empower and support women and non-binary people in tech.

Alley Rutzel

UX Director, Google

Collaborating in a Global Workforce

As the need for employees to collaborate with remote colleagues continues to grow, corporations and organisations must learn to adapt. Unfortunately, not all have the right tools or processes to support this process well. Join Alley Rutzel as she discusses how to enable workplace transformation through connecting people in real time from across the globe to collaborate as productively as if they were in the same room.

About the speaker

Alley is the Director of User Experience for G Suite focused on delivering the tools and resources needed for our customers to have effective, productive meetings. Her vision is for people from across the globe to collaborate as efficiently and intimately as if they were in the same room. Prior to her role on G Suite, she led UX for Shopping in the Ads organisation and oversaw the launch of Google Shopping Express. Before joining Google six years ago, Alley was a UX Manager at Amazon.

Clara Kliman Silver

UX Researcher, Google

Understanding Designer-Developer Collaboration: Insights from UX Research

How do designers and developers collaborate? Which tools do they use? Where are the biggest pitfalls and pain points?

This talk will discuss research on how designers and developers work on co-located and geographically-distributed teams, leveraging a wide variety of tools to enable team members to design, develop, and collaborate.

Through a variety of research methods, we investigated how design tools and systems help and hinder their experiences. We will share our research methods so you can address your own team’s productivity and review which design tools are being used.

Additionally, we will provide a high-level overview of practices for tool integration and ways to avoid fragmentation to work together more productively as a UX team.

About the speaker

Clara Kliman-Silver is a UX Researcher at Google who interested in how designers and developers create products. Previously, Clara held UX design and research roles at companies in the artificial intelligence and healthcare spaces.

She is also the Director of Americas for Ladies That UX and co-organises its San Francisco chapter. Clara holds an Sc.B. in Cognitive Science from Brown University.

Gemma Germains

Head of Customer Experience, CANYON Bicycles

Connecting the dots: From content design to customer experience

The best thing about age is hindsight. Connecting The Dots looks at how we amass experience in the most unusual places. It also offers practical advice for levelling-up your career. You should probably see this talk if you’re frustrated by your career progression. You shouldn’t miss this talk if you’re a content designer who doesn’t feel like a ‘real’ designer. About the speaker With almost 15 years experience, Gemma can confidently call herself a creative industry veteran, with the battle scars to prove it. Gemma was co-founder of Well Made Studio and spent 6 years fighting to highlight the stupidity of unpaid internships and the scarcity of female leaders. As Head of CX at CANYON she gets to work with a global team of cycling experts and enthusiasts to deliver a best in class customer experience.

Camille Gribbons

UX Designer, Booking.com

“This Design Sucks” and other anecdotes from launching a travel app in Indonesia from 7,057 miles away

When global company Booking.com decided to take things down to a local scale, they had no idea how challenging it would be to tackle a market across the world. Indonesia is one of the fastest growing markets in 2019, and by deciding to target that market, the team quickly learned that there was no way to be successful without help from the locals. In the talk, designer Camille Gribbons will share UX learnings and funny anecdotes about the unique challenges of designing for a brand new market and just how much cultural perspectives matter to the design of a product.

About the speaker

Camille Gribbons is a product and user experience designer with a passion for new product development and design thinking. She currently works on the Next Billion Travelers track at Booking.com where she has handled all design for a new product called BookingLokal – a brand new, localized travel app for Indonesia.