Speaking & Presentations

Invite Us to Speak

Creative Director Cindy Brummer regularly speaks to groups about UX design, strategy and leadership and how user experience can be leveraged to improve organization goals.

She engages audiences through interactive segments, audience participation, and humor. Her goal is to help audiences take valuable information back to their roles in the workplace.

Current presentations

“Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso”

Synopsis

When Ted Lasso went from coaching American football to soccer in the UK — a sport he knew nothing about — everyone assumed he would fail. But his leadership style took a broken team and turned it into something special.

Product leaders can learn a lot from Lasso’s style. Leading a strong product design team is a lot like being a good coach. The trouble is — it isn’t easy.

In this talk, UX leader Cindy Brummer will explain 8 lessons product leaders can use with their teams for better outcomes.

Key Takeaways:

List 3 audience takeaways from your proposed session.

  1. How to be vulnerable with people you supervise without losing authority.
  2. How to encourage your team to critique you in a positive way.
  3. Why sometimes you need to lose in order to do the right thing by your team.

Rethinking user personas for inclusion

Synopsis

Designers need a new framework for creating user personas — one which emphasizes behaviors over demographics to be more inclusive and guard against biases.

In this session, the speaker will review the common pitfalls of typical personas and why they fall short. Then, the speaker will walk through a better framework for creating personas and how designers can use this in their everyday work.

Learning Objectives

  •  An understanding of why typical personas can be harmful
  • A framework for creating personas based on behavior and inclusive design
  • How to evaluate/test personas to ensure they provide value

“Inclusive Hiring for UX Teams”

Synopsis

How do you hire your designers or — for that matter — anyone on your team?

Is the result of your hiring process a team hailing from a wide range of backgrounds — ethnic, generational, geographic and even interests? Or are you still struggling to create a diverse team?

Hiring for diversity is tough when you’re not recruiting effectively. It’s even harder if the process you use isn’t deliberately designed to minimize the impact of our cognitive biases in the process.

In this session, Creative Director Cindy Brummer, explains how companies can implement a more inclusive hiring process that will attract quality candidates and ensure that teams are fairly considering all candidates. She’ll walk through examples of how she’s failed at diversity hiring in the past, and what steps her company now takes to improve inclusion and diversity.

This presentation will cover:

  1. What mistakes companies currently make in their hiring process that leads to exclusion
  2. How cognitive biases affect hiring outcomes — and we don’t even know it
  3. Methods for recruiting qualified candidates
  4. What to include in the job description to improve inclusion
  5. What changes to make in the hiring process to improve inclusion

Learning Objectives

  • The cognitive biases to be aware of
  • How to improve the job description
  • Specific changes to the hiring process to reduce bias and improve inclusion

Cindy also offers the following presentations:

  • Avoiding the Unintended Consequences of Design
  • Affinity Mapping for Better User Insights and Team Alignment
  • Bringing Design Thinking to the Everyday
  • Designing Your Process

Have an upcoming event in need of a speaker?

Cindy is available to speak to groups of 15 to 500. Right now she is speaking virutally! Contact us about how to book her for your next business or professional event.

Our Solutions

We help you understand your customers through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, from user interviews through usability testing.

We design the experience that best suits the customers' needs and motivations through wireframing, visual, and interaction design.

Lower the risk of innovation through our design sprint process. Our certified facilitation experts will help you pinpoint an idea, then prototype and test to give you solid answers.

Our experienced, full-stack team is well-versed in building features and enhancements on a continuous basis. We work with you to decide the platform and develop custom solutions.

Companies we’ve worked with