Join us for an in-person event of UX insights, discussion, and networking with fellow professionals in the community. This month’s talks feature three diverse and timely topics:
- UX Leadership by Paul McInerney
- Service Design by Arun Martin
- Voice Assistants for the Elderly by Noah Qu
Whether you're leading teams, shaping services, or designing accessible voice experiences, there’s something here for you.
We don’t meet in person often — so this is a great opportunity to reconnect, meet new peers, and engage in meaningful conversation beyond the screen.
Limited seating: Seating at the venue is limited, so please register ASAP. Registration will be closed if/when the the venue reaches capacity.
Venue logistics: Access to the venue requires that attendees obtain a guest pass. This guest pass will be issued about 5 days prior to the event. People who have registered will receive an email with the venue address and their guest pass.
ABSTRACTS
1) UX Leadership: 3 Common Challenges
This talk covers some common challenges faced by UX leaders: (1) driving improvement (UX maturity), (2) keeping the lights on (UX operations), and (3) supporting and leading people (people leadership). This talk presents personal insights based on comparing notes with a wide range of UX leaders across different disciplines and organizations.
Paul McInerney has over 30 years experience in a full range of UX roles, most recently as a Senior Manager of UX Research. He has authored over 20 articles or talks on UX best practices presented in venues such as the international conferences of the User Experience Professionals Association.
2) Nobody Owns the Whole Journey: Enterprise Service Design pilot projects
This talk examines three service design pilot projects run inside an enterprise org, and how one service designer built buy-in with cross-functional teams and developed a repeatable pilot model. Along the way, pilot projects revealed the hidden backstage dependencies, the content subsystems nobody mapped, and the moment teams finally zoom out and see the whole journey together for the first time.
Arun Joseph is a senior service designer with Sun Life. Earlier, Arun had worked at global organizations such as IBM and Ernst & Young (E&Y). He is a co-organizer of the online Service Design Book Club and founder of Service Design Journeys.
3) Impact of Voice Assistant Instruction on Older Adult Self-Efficacy
Voice assistants are often positioned as low-cost, hands-free support tools for older adults, yet we still know little about how they influence self-efficacy in everyday use. This talk presents findings from two mixed-method studies that examine how voice assistant support compares with human assistance and how instructional strategies used by voice assistants influence older adults’ self-efficacy. Study 1 shows that a voice assistant delivering instructions increases older adults’ task-specific self-efficacy to a level comparable to a human-operated voice call system. Study 2 shows how two instructional strategies used by voice assistants influence older adults’ self-efficacy in using assistant support.
Noah (Zijie) Qu, Ph.D. is a mixed-method design researcher working at the intersection of Human Factors and Interaction Design. He researches voice assistants for older adults and AI clinical decision support tools for primary care doctors. He uses mixed methods to design and investigate human-technology interaction and to develop design guidelines.
Noah received a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto and an M.A. degree in Digital Direction from the Royal College of Art. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Wellness and Health Enhancement Engineering Laboratory (WHEEL) at the University of Toronto.