Join UX Riga 2019 and learn more about
Speakers 2019
Andreas Refsgaard (DK)
Artist and Creative Coder Based in CopenhagenAndreas is award winning interaction designer. He uses algorithms and machine learning to make unconventional connections between inputs and outputs, which allows people to play music using only eye movement and facial gestures, control games by making silly sounds and train algorithms to decide what is funny, funky or boring. His works have been published in New Scientist, Vice, Gizmodo, PSFK and Designboom. He has worked with Google Creative Labs, Carlsberg, Philips and LittleBits.
Andreas Refsgaard (DK)
Artist and Creative Coder Based in Copenhagen
Joe Macleod (SWE)
Founder of andEnd, Author of the Ends BookJoe has decades of product development experience across digital, physical and service sectors. Previously Joe was Head of Design at the award-winning studio Ustwo. He has spent 3 years on the Closure Experiences project researching, writing and publishing the Ends book. Founder of andEnd, the world’s first customer ending business. Joe helps some of the worlds leading businesses understand and action better consumer off-boarding. This helps them align with new business models, increase consumer engagement, raise customer satisfaction, broaden business influence, pre-empt legislation, and maximise sustainability.
Joe Macleod (SWE)
Founder of andEnd, Author of the Ends Book
Emilie van Spronsen (NL)
UX Designer at Koos Service DesignWith a background in Interaction Design at Delft University of Technology, Emilie has an unlimited curiosity to human interactions and a passion for graphic design. She had started her working career as a digital designer at bunq, a new independent, mobile bank. At Koos she’s translated many service concepts into finger licking UX prototypes in a wide variety of industries.
Emilie van Spronsen (NL)
UX Designer at Koos Service Design
Yuri Vedenin (BEL)
Founder & CEO at UXPressiaFounder and CEO of UXPressia and seasoned UX coach, Yuri is on a mission to help teams and organizations to become more human-centric.
He has co-founded and actively contributes to the three professional communities in Belarus: for UX specialists, Product Managers and Business Analysts. Yuri conducts workshops and speaks at different conferences related to UX, CX and Product Development all over the world: EuroIA (Dublin), UX Salon (Tel Aviv), World Information Day (Berlin), Product Development Days (Krakow), UXistanbul (Istanbul), ProfsoUX (Saint-Petersburg), etc.
Yuri Vedenin (BEL)
Founder & CEO at UXPressia
Madara Zelčāne (LV)
UX / Service designer at TetMadara's objective at TET is to promote the culture of user-centered design. She improves digital products and inner processes of the company in providing customer-based services. Her faith is rooted in user-centered design solutions, which are based on qualitative and quantitative research. Madara has experience in working with corporative companies, where the main challenge is a collaboration between departments by providing service to an end user.
Madara Zelčāne (LV)
UX / Service designer at Tet
Jim Kalbach (USA)
Head of CX at MURAL, Author of Mapping ExperiencesCo-Founder of a leading UX design event in Germany IA Konferenz with extensive background in journalism. In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation. He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix. He is also very passionate about jazz.
Jim Kalbach (USA)
Head of CX at MURAL, Author of Mapping Experiences
Floor Smit (NL)
New Business Developer at Koos Service DesignFloor is Senior consultant with a masters’ degree in International Law at the University of Leiden (NL). Because of her diverse background (law, recruitment, marketing, business process management, just to name a few), she adds a new flavor to the specialized Koos Service Design team. Having worked in large and complex organizations for the majority of her career, Floor can easily relate and empathize with the challenges her clients face. Her goal is to create tangible and actionable solutions, so her clients can have a real impact. For this reason, she is a strong believer in combining Service design and UX design: their complementary traits do just that for the client and for the end user.
Floor Smit (NL)
New Business Developer at Koos Service Design
Hidde Burgmans (NL)
Senior Consultant at Koos Service DesignFormer product owner of RTL XL with 4+ mio users. Upon receiving his master in Strategic Product Design (TU Delft, NL) Hidde devoted his first years on delivering digital products. Back in the Service Design landscape he now combining his experience in both scrum and design to bring innovative concepts towards actual development.
Hidde Burgmans (NL)
Senior Consultant at Koos Service Design
Jaana Metsamaa (EE)
Lead Product Manager at PipedriveJaana is an experienced product manager with a passion of building teams and diving deep into the new and unknown. She has a diverse background in leading products in different sectors with very different business models. Starting with IT agencies, a fintech payment platform, competing with likes of booking.com and today developing Pipedrive to make salespeople unstoppable.
Jaana Metsamaa (EE)
Lead Product Manager at Pipedrive
Ieva Treija (LV)
Certified Facilitator in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodIeva has over 10 years’ experience in marketing. For the past two years, she has run her own marketing agency Marketingfans. Ieva has discovered that companies often struggle to find the right creative and strategic solutions. So she started to look for ideas how to help her customers and discovered the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. This method is useful for fostering innovations, making strategic decisions, building teams and creating products. The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a unique method as it facilitates engagement as well as hearing, taking the opinion of each and every member of the group into account.
Ieva Treija (LV)
Certified Facilitator in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method
Liga Letina (LV)
UX Riga conference Co-founder & Curator, Head of UX/Digital Service design at If P&C InsuranceLiga is passionate to introduce customer centricity into company cultures and also introducing UX to IT & digital product development routines. At If P&C Insurance, she is responsible for introducing UX and Service design in previously engineering-led, classical finance industry company in order to improve and innovate insurance digital services. In about a year design sprints, codesign workshops, team research sessions has become a common practice for digital product development in If and Liga is using her IT background, merging the outcomes of service design workshops with actionable outputs for Agile development teams.
Liga Letina (LV)
UX Riga conference Co-founder & Curator, Head of UX/Digital Service design at If P&C Insurance
Mike Dick (USA)
Lead of Design Systems at Survey MonkeyA design-engineer solving large-scale design system problems. Mike leads the design systems team at SurveyMonkey, where they’re building next-generation design tools that merge the gap between design and engineering. Previously, he led systems at Twitch, Amazon, and Quora. He has built two startups, nvite (acquired by Eventbrite) and Cage (acquired by bitConfused).
Mike Dick (USA)
Lead of Design Systems at Survey Monkey
Rolands Krumbergs (LV)
Chatbot Solution Team Lead at If P&C InsuranceRolands is software engineer passionate about customer centricity and feedback culture in software development. At If P&C Insurance Rolands is leading a team developing chatbot solutions for customers reporting accidents (insurance claims) in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Rolands has gained a lot of knowledge and experience regarding building chat bots and dialog systems both in professional and academical fields.
Rolands Krumbergs (LV)
Chatbot Solution Team Lead at If P&C Insurance
Jana Krivorotko (EE)
Lead Product Manager at PipedriveJana started her journey in Pipedrive working on Growth Projects in Marketing, eventually moving to Product Management building out the core of the product. She is currently leading a team of PMs working on time and communications, supporting meaningful and efficient sales interactions. Previously co-founded a senior healthcare marketplace, aiding with both business strategy and fundraising activities. It got the team to participate in TechCrunch Battlefield but also got Jana close to fainting on the stage. If you want to get along, talk product, music, and fitness.
Jana Krivorotko (EE)
Lead Product Manager at Pipedrive
Mark Garner (DE)
Business Development at the Design Sprint AcademyMark spent a number of years working in a variety of startups. In 2016 he discovered Design Sprints and fell in love with the process. He now works on Innovation and Business Development at the Design Sprint Academy. The Design Sprint Academy have been adapting and developing the Design Sprint Methodology and are today one of the leading practitioners running global training and facilitating sprints with customers like Google, Redbull, Adidas, Proctor and Gamble, and HSBC. His entertaining storytelling style helps to convey the value of the methodology and lessons learned from the DSA's countless Design Sprints.
Mark Garner (DE)
Business Development at the Design Sprint Academy
How to actually make Service design part of company's internal culture? We often hear about the internal struggles our clients face when implementing bigger service design projects. Because guess what? Culture eats strategy for breakfast! Floor shares the tools, ideas, and methods that her organisation added to their usual approach in case with KPN - Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company and Rijkswaterstaat - Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. Floor will share some examples as well as explore the term of 'culture', what can be learned from the behavioral design and how it interacts with implementation.
Can design have a greater impact beyond commercial settings? Jim shares his story of applying design thinking techniques and experience mapping to a very real-world problem: hate. Framing an experience map is tricky, as we have to determine what to show from research, as well as what to leave out. Jim shares his approach to these tricky questions as he delved into researching and facilitating a mapping workshop with ex-violent extremists.
WHY should you be using Design Sprints?
In this talk Mark will provide insight into WHY Design Sprints can help you to build better products that your customers will love, WHAT a Design Sprint entails and he will also tell you 3 ways HOW to implement Design Sprints in your company!
* The sprint is a five-day process developed at Google Ventures for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
Designers today are caught between shunning redline specs and being overwhelmed to learn new skills to bring their designs to life. Out of this tension comes design systems – not only a more efficient way to design, but a better way to collaborate together. In this talk, Mike will share his experience leading design systems for companies like Twitch and Quora, and deep dive on how SurveyMonkey's design system was built to empower design and engineering teams to come together to refresh their 20-year-old product.
While in theory Service Design and Scrum complement each other in an amazing way, putting it into practice is a form of art. We believe that the key role of future UX-designers is being the linking pin between both these methodologies. Taking up this crucial role, even the most talented UX-designers could use some help in their constant switch between the details of realization and the abstract of the design strategy.
Koos Service Design have created a tool aka product experience canvas that guides their UX-designers in their mission towards customer greatness. They believe this tool offers UX-designers guidance within their day to day job trying to bridge the two strongest methodologies of our time: Scrum and Service Design. During this workshop Hidde & Emilie will make sure to put the tool into context and show you the value by using it straight away.
Designing a solution to a problem can be a really long and drawn out process, but it doesn’t have to be. Find out how to channel your inner Usain Bolt by learning the concepts, benefits, and process behind a design sprint from the fastest of the fast Pipedrive sprinters. Then, whether you fail or succeed, you can do it fast!
Who is this for? Any role involved in building products from problems to solutions, but mainly those who are involved early enough starting from the problem definition space (product managers, product designers, etc.)
The purpose of the session is to introduce the principles of Design Sprints and putting empathy and user research in it. We showcase tools and techniques to demonstrate this as an effective way of working. It will provide a method to bridge the gap between strategy and execution to solve big problems and test new ideas. This is a hands-on fast-paced workshop for those wanting to understand their audience, improve efficiency, reduce risk when investing in new products/services.
The workshop will highlight Empathy Mapping: a useful tool that can be used to get the information from the heads of participants regarding their customers, users or whoever they are trying to build empathy for. Participants will get familiar with the tool (they will fill in Empathy Map) and will see the benefits of it’s usage by applying it right on the workshop. The aim is to show how simple technique (Empathy Mapping) might help to better understand your users or customers or even colleagues, their needs and problems, and via that understanding come up with a better solutions to these needs and problems.
Supported by UXPressia
How confident are we that the service we design meets user needs at all points of experiencing it? Service blueprint method helps to understand underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that make service possible. And helps you to take small and large decisions about actions you can take to make the experience better for users. Madara will share practical examples of using the method in improving services. We will visualize existing services based on Service blueprint method, which helps to discover weaknesses and identify opportunities for optimization.
Supported by Tet
Rolands will briefly talk about building various types of dialog systems and tools to use. Participants will be able to build their own chatbots by trying out different conversation strategies to mitigate typical pitfalls, using machine learning principles to understand user intents. DialogFlow will be used as a main tool, other tools will be described and demo’ed. Rolands will also touch few UX considerations and challenges to keep in mind when designing chat bot conversations. Be ready to dig in hands on!
Supported by Oracle
WHAT IS LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® METHOD?
Have you heard of the saying - we don’t know what we know? This can be attributed to the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. The aim of this method is to make it possible to visualize what cannot be said out loud, because our hands are connected to 70 to 80 percent of our brain cells.
WHAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE DURING THE WORKSHOP?
Participants in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshop will use the special selection of LEGO® bricks to solve a predefined challenge. This session will give the opportunity to experience how different are we and how differently we see answers to the same questions. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is also an amazing opportunity to experience that it is possible to put all those different opinions together within one common vision or strategy.
WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?
The overall aim of this LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshop is to give you an idea about how you can use this method to solve everyday challenges within your company. However the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method can only be used in the supervision of certified facilitator.
Andreas will talk about how machine learning became an integrated part of his personal practise and curriculum for teaching designer and artists about digital interactions. He will discuss four aspects of unconventional connections: inputs & outputs; his playful machine learning approach and how to train the algorithm without loads of data and expensive computers, as well as how to get started with machine learning.
The ills of consumption have a common source - endings. We design rich, emotional and meaningful experiences to on-board the consumer to a product or service. But, in contrast, the off-boarding of a consumer experience is barren of emotion and meaning.
Researching this theme over the last few years revealed a far more profound story. Its origins deep in hundreds of years of social history, with closer ties to religion and death than to business.
This presentation takes the audience through a remarkable story of why consumer endings have been distanced in the customer lifecycle. And why they are now vital to modern business.
WRAP-UP!
Afterparty & Networking
Facilitating Strategic Conversations Through Experience Mapping
What do you do with a map after it’s created? After introducing a broad concept of mapping, this workshop will focus on how to facilitate conversations with your team or client. You’ll learn concrete ways to bring maps alive and make your UX insight actionable through examples and hands-on exercises such as:
✅ Initiating a project;
✅ Conducting research;
✅ Creating an illustration;
✅ Engaging teams;
✅ Strategic alignment;
This workshop is suited for designers, product managers, marketing specialists, and business leaders looking to understand how to better get an overview of the customer experience. The course assumes some familiarity with product or service design and/or customer experience management, though that is not a prerequisite.
N. B. Tickets to the workshop are sold separately and limited to 25.
Build Creative and Interactive Websites with Machine Learning
In this workshop interaction designer and digital artist Andreas Refsgaard will show you how to make simple websites that can be trained to react to costume inputs from users.
The workshop will work as a hands on introduction to machine learning with a focus on creating your own interactive applications that live on the web.
Learn how to:
✅ Make interactive websites that can learn and react to user input from webcam and microphone
✅ Train supervised machine learning algorithms in minutes
✅ Use the friendly ml5js library that builds on top of Tensorflow.js
N. B. Tickets to the workshop are sold separately and limited to 25.
Service Design Fundamentals - Prototyping Services
When applying service design methods, the convention is to start with persona, journey maps or experience maps, and ideate on them, but the real challenge to make the change is to prototype and validate the new service or service improvements.
What?
In this workshop:
✅ - Liga will briefly touch the service design fundamentals;
✅ - You will work in teams prototyping a service - in actual service design doing.
We will:
✅ - Look into quick ways to test & iterate on your customer experience as a holistic process or physical/environment experience.
✅ - Prototype a service process using desktop walkthrough, cardboard prototyping, and theatrical rehearsal methods.
✅ - Explore several other prototyping, also digital prototyping methods.
The workshop will be a mix of theory and hands-on experience, focusing on practice yourself.
Who is it for?
The workshop is targeted for product managers, product and service designers, UX designers - best if you are familiar with basics of service design and want to learn how to apply it beyond the screens and digital product design.
You might come from digital or finance, banking, telco, government, health or any other industry serving B2C or even B2B customers and willing to improve your service.
N. B. Tickets to the workshop are sold separately and limited to 25.
UX Camp
☝️ For the first time in the history of UX Riga we are inviting everyone to participate, share their knowledge and experience at the UX Camp.
It's unconference - there is no programme - it will be formed by you during the day! Make your own experience by 1⃣ becoming a speaker or 2⃣ choosing from parallel sessions to attend.
It's your chance to participate in the creation process - it can be your first speaker experience - taking over the stage or just spend a day learning, networking and inspiring from others!
Everyone is invited to run a 20 min session!:
➡️ Workshop;
➡️ Discussion;
➡️ Case study;
➡️ Do a pilot meetup or conference talk;
➡️ But first of all - be open minded & support others
You are invited to talk about digital product making, design, psychology, research or less professional topics, e.g. how to make a pitch, presentation secrets, or life / productivity hacking.
It's unconference, so make it quick, dirty, no polished slides required. It's a friendly environment with focus on sharing.
Registration, Coffee break
Introduction & Opening of UX Camp
UX Camp Sessions (3 x 20 min)
UX Camp Sessions (4 x 20 min)
Wrap - Up!
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Meet The UX Riga Team
Liga Letina
CuratorLiga was the crazy one, willing and believing there has to be a UX focused conference in Riga. Liga is curating the lineup and looks after attendee needs.
When not organizing UX Riga, Liga is leading the UX team at If P&C Insurance, and running service design workshops,
Liga Letina
Curator
Renars Jansons
PartnershipsSince UX Riga day one, Renars is making sure that event is organized each year and is responsible for sponsor and partner management.
When not organizing UX Riga, Renars is the CEO of CUBE Systems. In his free time, Renars is dedicated to renovating his family house.
Renars Jansons
Partnerships
Inese Tauriņa
Event ProductionInese is the production mastermind of UX Riga, making sure that everything at the event is at the right time, at the right place and taking care of our attendees' experience.
Alongside UX Riga, she is also part of Digital Freedom Festival core team, a board member at Transparency International Latvia, the Executive Secretary at the Latvian Public Relations Association.
Inese Tauriņa
Event Production
Sanita Kovaļeva
Speaker affairsSanita is involved in curating UXRiga content, making sure our lineup matches the industry trends and attendee needs, but also brings some new, unexpected topics and thought perspectives. Sanita will also take care of our speaker experiences.
Outside UX Riga, Sanita is UX/Service designer or can be found somewhere outdoors trekking, kayaking, climbing or backpacking around unfamiliar terrains.