Andreas Orphanides, Lead Librarian for UX Strategy (second from left) flanked by other NC State University Libraries’ User Experience staffers, from left to right, Meredith Wynn, Robin Davis, Beatrice Downey, Sarah Hawks, Erik Olson, Amir Blair, and Josh Boyer.
Dre Orphanides co-chaired the organizing committee for the UX Y'all conference at Raleigh’s Union Station the first week of October. He worked with two other co-chairs to plan, coordinate, and launch this flagship event for the Triangle chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA).
Featuring four keynote speakers, fourteen other speakers, and over 375 attendees, the conference was one of the biggest events that the national UXPA has ever produced. The Libraries’ UX department and Adam Rogers represented the Libraries at the conference.
The conference theme centered around the idea of “the breaks.” Whether that meant lucky breaks, what caused you to apply the brakes, or what things you have broken (either by accident or design), the conference looked for lessons from breaking apart systems, designs, culture, and our environments.
“When I proposed ‘the breaks’ as a theme, I was going for something that was relatable and flexible, that would be easy for speakers to apply to a wide variety of experiences,” Orphanides says. “What makes ‘the breaks’ so compelling is that it's really about change and its consequences (anticipated or otherwise)—breaking up, breaking down, having a breakthrough, putting on the brakes—and how we respond to that change. The inspiration really did come directly from Kurtis Blow's original lyrics, but of course it was fun to drop a hip-hop reference into a conference. My hope was that doing so would motivate participants to really run with the idea, and it seems like it worked!”
Keynote speakers were:
Orphanides found Saffer’s keynote particularly thought-provoking for how it framed the types of tasks that AI is best suited for, as well as the presentation by Sumonthip Gmitro and Michiko Stas of VMware about trauma-informed user research practices.
“A theme that was present in a number of the talks was the idea of ‘UX professional as user advocate’: the position that it's our job in the organization—and our ethical imperative as UX professionals—to support users' interests in particular, even when those interests end up in conflict with organizational goals,” Orphanides says. “I hope that participants left the conference feeling empowered to fight the good fight on behalf of users.”
“I look forward to UX Y'all every fall, and I am especially proud that a Libraries colleague, Dre, was on this year's planning committee,” says Robin Davis in User Experience.
“There were several presentations about creating inclusive user experiences, including the insightful keynote by Michelle Chin on decolonizing design systems. In our UX department, we talk a lot about inclusive design, particularly when it comes to web forms and text readability, so that presentation had a number of takeaways that are relevant to our ongoing work.”
Davis also found a very pleasant surprise hatched by Orphanides and the other organizers. A sudden breakdancing performance to go with the conference theme!
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