Conference Program
Saturday March 22, 2025 | Platform Calgary
Explore future-focused topics, including emerging trends in UX, AI and Design, Design Thinking, HCI, Human-Centered Design, and more.
Saturday March 22, 2025 | Platform Calgary
Explore future-focused topics, including emerging trends in UX, AI and Design, Design Thinking, HCI, Human-Centered Design, and more.
#Leadership
Just 10% of companies have executive-level UX design roles. Over my career in UX, my teams and I have been shushed, downsized, told to make things look pretty, left off the roadmap and uninvited from big meetings. If only we could get a seat at the table – things would be different. But after decades fighting to get my seat, I arrived to find a mirage. Looking back on past failures and triumphs I now realize that every UX designer and team has absolutely everything they need to start leading their companies today.
#Leadership
This panel explores how to promote cross-functional teamwork, demonstrate design’s value to stakeholders, and build trust through open knowledge sharing. Learn practical strategies to align teams, advocate for design, and balance delivery goals while fostering a culture of collaboration and shared success.
#AI/Service Design
UX practitioners often focus on designing user-centric products—but as UX leaders, we have an opportunity to think bigger. Service design is the practice of organizing all elements of a business—its people, tools, and processes—to create seamless interactions that enhance experiences and, ultimately, drive better outcomes. In this talk, we’ll explore how User Experience and Service Designers can amplify each other, the typical overlap of UX leadership and service design, and how all of us can improve our practice with a service design mindset.
#UXR
Does using data to inform your design and drive outcomes feel as daunting as developing a time-traveling DeLorean? In this Back-to-the-Future-themed deep dive, we'll share stories from the past, present, and future to help you feel less like a mad scientist and more (Mc)Fly with data-driven design.
#UI/Craft/HealthTech
Great UX goes beyond screens, it’s about designing seamless, end-to-end service experiences. However, UX designers often face challenges when translating digital interactions into holistic service solutions that involve multiple teams, operational realities, and business constraints.This workshop is designed for UX professionals looking to elevate their prototyping and facilitation skills by working cross-functionally to quickly test and refine multi touchpoint innovative solutions.
#Leadership
Join us for Championing the User: Creating Cultures that Advance UX Maturity. Learn to assess UX maturity, foster user-first cultures, and drive collaboration. Discover strategies to elevate UX at every level—whether through cross-functional pods that break silos or communities of practice that share knowledge. We'll explore real-world successes and failures, equipping you with actionable insights to champion UX and position it as a key driver of organizational success.
#AI/Service Design
"Service Roadmapping in a Product World" shows how understanding your organization's core purpose transforms strategic planning. Moving beyond features and products, we'll explore how to identify the fundamental activities that deliver value to users, and how these shape more meaningful roadmaps. Learn how organizations' services provide a framework for planning beyond traditional product boundaries, helping teams focus on what truly matters. For UX practitioners seeking to align their planning with their organization's essential role and responsibilities rather than just its digital products.
#UXR
You’ve been promoted to a management role, and now your most important task isn’t polishing prototypes or writing research reports—it’s building a high-performing team. The challenge? You were trained as a designer or researcher, not as a hiring expert. In this talk, I’ll show you how I applied my research process to build and scale a successful team. You’ll leave with actionable templates, strategies, and methods for growing your team even without a hiring budget. This session is for you if you are a manager, considering management, or just curious about how hiring managers make decisions.
#UI/Craft/HealthTech
In 2024, I collaborated with Vanderburg University to design an AI tool that predicts enzyme structures, bridging UX and scientific innovation. Science-tech products come with unique challenges, and I want to show how I leveraged UX methodologies to solve complex problems in this space. I’ll dive into how I adapted design for scientific workflows, tackled unexpected hurdles, and helped advance computational chemistry—proving that great UX can drive scientific breakthroughs.
#Leadership
Explore how UX fits into the broader experience equation. Cory Davison, author of The 4X Method™, challenges the conventional thinking about UX as a silo and presents a proven framework adopted by many fast-growing companies to connect key experiences, and deliver measurable business impact. You will leave with a practical framework to align UX with broader company goals, bridge company silos, and connect experiences to deliver greater value to users while driving growth.
#AI/Service Design
In this session, we will explore the impact of AI on on work with a focus on UX professionals. I will introduce a framework on AI literacy, emphasizing the competencies relevant to user experience design, including ethical considerations, human-computer interaction, and adaptive design.
#UXR
There is a lot of research from both academia and industry, describing how UX professionals can collaborate better with developers. I know, because I also published papers on this topic. These papers describe the challenges of having to work with developers who are typically focused on rapid launches, sometimes delivering experiences that come at a cost to the target user. But what happens, when the target user is the developer? How does one learn to see developers as users? How does one learn to navigate the challenges of working in a domain that is so technical, where the users speak languages that are so ‘foreign’. In this 25 minute talk, I will speak about my experience as a Developer experience - UX researcher.
This will be a talk worth listening to for:
Attendees will come away with insights on:
#UI/Craft/HealthTech
Extended Reality (XR) introduces unique challenges for UX designers, as traditional 2D tools like Figma often fall short in conveying spatial experiences. This talk explores why prototyping is essential for XR applications and how it differs from 2D design. We’ll discuss key characteristics of XR experiences, common pitfalls, and practical methods for building effective prototypes. Attendees will gain insights into tools and techniques to better articulate their vision and create immersive, user-friendly XR experiences. Whether you’re new to XR or looking to refine your workflow, this session will equip you with the skills to prototype with confidence.
#Leadershp
Ever tried designing something by committee? Probably didn't end well. In this electrifying session I’ll present a rapid-fire method to crowd source great ideas and swiftly align on what's good and what's not. If I can do it in less than 30 minutes, you can too.
#AI/Service Design
In this session we’ll explore how to design AI-powered experiences that remain resilient when things go wrong. Drawing from real-world experiences, we’ll discuss the importance of preparing for AI failures, maintaining user trust through transparency and empathy, and providing practical strategies for creating effective fallback solutions. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to ensure AI systems recover gracefully and continue to empower users even when the technology falls short.
#UXR
In the high-stakes world of healthcare, fast and effective UX research is paramount. Common misconceptions include the belief that only extensive and large UX studies deliver value, or that tests must be perfect to provide insight.This presentation will try to resolve this contradiction by sharing a real-world case study of a usability test designed to fit given circumstances and specific events.
#UI/Craft/HealthTech
A light-hearted (and sometimes irreverent) look at the designs we love to hate. From Netflix's infuriating autoplay to Sonos' disastrous app redesign, bad design seems to be having a moment. We'll take a broader look at the current technology environment to explore how these user hostile decisions happen and discuss how UX Designers and their allies can increase their influence, so we can get back to making the world a better place for users.
#Leadership
Using core UX skillsets of human-centred curiousity and openess to better understand the needs of leadership and others within our organizations.
#AI/Service Design
AI gets a lot of attention as an emergent technology with the potential to replace UX designers and researchers. But AI is only one of many factors contributing to the actual mechanism behind layoffs and reduced job opportunities: Job Consolidation. Businesses use Job Consolidation as a strategy to keep costs low by reducing total head count and assigning employees additional roles and responsibilities. This session will discuss trends in Job Consolidation affecting UX professionals and its impact on career growth in UX.
#UXR
Join us to explore the evolving discussion on qualitative and quantitative methods in UX research. We'll address questions to demystify and clarify similarities, differences, and limitations between the disciplines, and show how mixed methods can take research to the next level and drive UX innovation.
#UI/Craft/HealthTech
In the fast-paced world of UX, maintaining consistency and efficiency across products isn’t just a challenge—it’s a governance problem. A well-structured design system can bridge the gap between design and development, accelerate workflows, and drive cohesive user experiences. But how do you ensure its success? In this talk, I’ll share my experience as the Senior User Experience Architect for the City of Calgary, where I built and now govern our Design System. From balancing stakeholder demands to setting UX standards and managing agile component prioritization, I’ll reveal the strategic playbook for making design systems scalable, adaptable, and impactful.
#Leadership
The impact of design on businesses is growing and the demand for design talent continues to increase. We see more designers taking on leadership roles in companies across different sectors. Management consulting organizations highlight the strategic value of design in business. However, the reality within many organizations tells a different story, with thousands of design teams operating at varying levels of influence and integration into business strategy.
As design leaders and practitioners, we should increase our business IQ and understand how profits and efficiencies are generated. We must help our teams understand and articulate the impact and contribution to the business. We must strengthen collaborative ties and support the healthy balance of product teams. We must get out of our comfort zone, integrate into strategic development and actively interact with business leaders to develop stronger organizational partnerships. We must foster a relationship based on mutual trust with our cross-functional partners to increase our influence and impact in the organization.
As design leaders, we must evolve beyond our traditional role as champions of process and craft and fully embrace the broader business context in which we operate. By positioning ourselves as business leaders, not just design leaders, we can increase the strategic impact of design in our organizations. We are elevating the value of design and ensuring that it plays a central role in shaping the future of organizations. Let’s continue to lead the way.
He/Him/They
VP Experience Design and Research at Thinkific
UX Researcher, Google
Partner, Chief Experience Officer
He/Him
Managing Director, UX and Product at Evans Hunt
She/Her
Senior Human Factors Research Associate at W21C
She/Her
Service Designer at J5 Design
She/Her
Senior Manager, User Research at Cisco
She/Her
Design Research & Strategy Leader
She/Her
Founder-CEO at 4Xperience
Director, Service Design for the Government of Alberta
Principal at Human Insights
UX Manager, Neo Financial
He/Him
Director of Design and UX
He/They/Him/Them
Vice President, Design Lead, Morgan Stanley
She/her
Manager, Digital Content at University of Calgary
She/Her
UX Designer at J5 Design
She/Her
Human-Centered Design Lead at W21C
She/Her
Digital Lead at J5 Design
She/Her
UX Designer at J5 Design
He/Him
Digital & User Experience Strategist
He/Him
Senior Content Architect at the City of Calgary
She/Her
Manager, Digital Experience, University of Calgary
She/Her
UX Architect at City of Calgary
He/Him
Product Delivery Lead at Government of Alberta
He/Him
Data Scientist and Applied Researcher
She/Her
Researcher at the City of Calgary
VP of Product, Motivity
He/Him
HCI Researcher + Prototyper
He/Him
Senior UX Researcher at Morgan Stanley
She/Her
Senior User Experience Architect at City of Calgary
She/Her/Elle
Director at Paradox Learning
He/Him
Manager, Business Relations Technology & Information Services, Enbridge
Spaces are limited, act fast
Friday, March 21, 2025
Students/unemployed get 30% discount.
Enter code STUDENT30 at checkout.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Tickets available until March 20, 2025
2 days before the event
The Platform Innovation Centre is an innovation basecamp to all— a single point of access to resources, supports, programming and events to help startups successfully launch and grow their business.
Cisco is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era.
building UX communities in Alberta
Building on the success of our previous UX Camps in Edmonton, the 2025 conference promises to be an engaging and dynamic gathering of UX professionals, designers, developers, and innovators from across the province.
The partnership between Calgary UX and Edmonton UX represents a shared vision of fostering a thriving user experience community across Alberta. By joining forces, these two groups bring together the unique strengths of their respective regions, creating opportunities for collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovation.
Calgary UX is a vibrant community fostering connections among UX professionals through workshops, networking, mentorship, and creative collaboration.
Our goal is simple: to connect and grow a community of people across disciplines and industres that share a passion for design and UX.
We acknowledge that the Calgary area where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet is a place of confluence where the sharing of ideas and opportunities naturally occurs. Indigenous peoples have their own names for this area that were in use long before Scottish settlers named it Calgary.
The Métis call the Calgary area Otos-kwunee. In the Blackfoot language, they call this place, Moh-kins-tsis. The Stoney Nakoda Nation refer to the Calgary area as Wîchîspa Oyade and the people of the Tsuut’ina nation call this area Guts-ists-i. We would like to acknowledge that we are located on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 Region in Southern Alberta.
This includes: the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai collectively known as the Blackfoot Confederacy; the Îethka Nakoda Wîcastabi First Nations, comprised of the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations; and the Tsuut’ina First Nation. The City of Calgary is also homeland to the historic Northwest Métis and to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. We acknowledge all Indigenous urban Calgarians, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, who have made Calgary their home.
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