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My talk from UX Australia, Melbourne 2016

What is trust and what does it mean? I’ll explore the concept of trust, why it’s so important, boundaries and context, how we can earn it and what it means for business. I’ll illustrate how we might leverage trust to design products and services that encourage an equitable society.

Jake Causby is CX Design Lead at Westpac. He’s has 20 years’ experience designing digital solutions across a range of industries at both enterprise and startup levels. A strong advocate of Lean and Agile methodologies, Jake is a big fan of design, strategy, research and avoiding dangerous situations.

My slides on slideshare

The audio on the UX Australia website

This is a talk I gave at the local Sydney IXDA with Jason Davey

What is Lean UX? No really. I’ve read some stuff about it and it’s great in theory but I’m finding it hard to implement. 

In a practical talk about how to apply the methodology, JD and JC will show you the tools and give you the inside story on how they’re using Lean UX in Westpac to kick goals. How do they test? How do they learn? How do they get the rest of the business to buy into their approach?

Slides on Slideshare

Watch the video

What’s next for Interaction Design? The future is now! Robots, autonomous machines, AI, IoT, sensors, data, networks and intelligent systems. Here’s a whirlwind review of some of the more transformational aspects of Interaction Design in the coming years, as portrayed by a select few of the fantastic speakers at interaction16 in Helsinki earlier this month. #IXDASYD #IXD16

View slides on slideshare

Watch the video

Talks I haven’t mentioned in my recap, but rate highly that you should watch over at Vimeo: Marko Ahtesaari (Design, Science & Music), Joe Macleod (Closure Experiences), Simone Rebaudengo & Nicolas Nova (Smart Frictions), Josh Seiden (Learning from Live Systems), John Rousseau (Passengerhood – on the road to autonomy), Josh Clark (Magical Interfaces and the IoT)

One of the criticisms we’ve all heard about the Agile methodology is that it encourages mediocrity. It clouds our long-term vision with small-scale “quick wins” and forces us to focus on gradual improvements on an unambitious existing product. This talk aims to dispel this myth by distinguishing the difference between vision and process. The truth is that Agile does not stifle creativity, it does not prevent us from looking further into the future. I’ll give real-world examples of ways teams can continue to foster their long-term ambitions whilst maintaining a process which focusses on the here-and-now.

View my slides on slideshare

Listen to the audio on Agile UX 2015 site

The journey from ‘secret design business’ to ‘design transparency’. It’s my own journey at Atlassian, relevant to anyone who is on, or about to embark upon, a similar journey. Industry leaders paint a picture of how things should be, and that’s great, but I’ve always had trouble bridging the gap. HOW do I get there? What do I do first? They make collaboration and design processes seem simple, but the truth is they’re hard. You may need to change both your own, and your team’s habits. This talk aims at bridging the gap by learning through some of my wins and even more importantly, my failures.

The talk will consist of the following ideas, each of which will have real examples, good and bad, and will conclude with a brief discussion point. I’d love to harness the wealth of experience in the room to broaden my talk, but also to emphasise the fact that the journey never ends. We’re all changing and adapting our process to constantly improve the outcomes of our work.

Cultural changes

I’ll give brief rundown on some of the key cultural shifts that need to occur and how to empower yourself to help facilitate them. The key benefits of these culture shifts (iterative value over perfection, forming trust, cohesion, buy-in and the importance of defining success criteria) and some things to look out for (managing expectations and the need to have a clear agreement on who the design custodians are).

Channels for sharing

• Experiences my colleagues and I have had using email, wiki pages and agile planning boards
• Design walls; when you’ve never before used one first hand it’s like flying blind. I’ll walk through what I tried, what was successful, what failed, what I learnt and how it has evolved over the last 2 years
• Things to be mindful of when communicating designs
• Getting the most out of your design critiques
• Examples of when it’s perhaps best not to share concepts

Collaboration

• Creating a comprehensive collection of visual material
• Designing with developers or other designers
• Engaging with people who feel uncomfortable working away from their code editor; sketching, prototyping, story telling
• Prototyping; when to start moving designs into code
• Improving design velocity
• Using a pattern library and making all design files accessible and versioned
• Creating a shared understanding
• Helping developers become more UX-aware
• Making sure technical issues don’t stifle ideation

The slides from my talk at UX Australia

Audio on the UX Australia site

It’s not often you get the opportunity to spend two years doing what you love in a new country with the potential upside of making a huge impact in a company in which you own some equity. So I’m excited to be moving to London to do just that for the next two years.

I’ll be analysing their business processes and identifying opportunities to leverage technology to streamline those processes, as well as working on their external-facing software product. The product is in its very early stages so there’s a massive opportunity to help shape and steer the product into the future.

The company was established back in 2005, and although I’m a founding equity holder, they’ve never actually had a full-time designer on site so I anticipate this role will require quite a bit of educating and cultural change. The current small team of two tech guys there are very comfortable and used to their waterfall approach to software development so I’m hoping it won’t be too much of a struggle to convert them to the enlightened ways of lean and agile.

Wish me luck!

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Desktop Magazine as part of their campaign to raise awareness of the up-and-coming UX Australia 2012. The article can be found here:

http://desktopmag.com.au/features/qa-jake-causby-ux-designer/