Time: April 10, 9:45 am – 10:45 am
Speakers: Craig Boassaly
Creating truly accessible digital experiences requires more than just passing a validation check; it demands a strategic shift in how we plan, design, and maintain content. This session explores the complete lifecycle of accessible content from web and documents to video, demonstrating why accessibility must start at the planning stage.
Time: April 10, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Speakers: Matthew Luken
Design plays a critical role in digital accessibility. This team can help reduce 67% percent of defects & violations. Join us to learn best practices that all designers – UX, UI, Content, UX Researchers, and Graphic Designers – should be implementing to ensure their designs are as accessible as they can be prior to development.
Time: April 9, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Speakers: Jeremy Perkins
How do you reinvent the digital identity of a 100-year-old institution? For the University of Baltimore, the answer was to become different by design. Their website redesign project set out to do more than refresh the university’s website—they aimed to create a bold, user-centric platform that stands apart in higher education. Through deep collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and an unwavering focus on accessibility and intuitive navigation, we delivered a site that’s vibrant, responsive, and authentically UBalt. The result: a web presence that not only honors the university’s legacy but propels it forward, engaging students, faculty, and the community in dynamic new ways. This case study shares the journey, challenges, and creative solutions that made UBalt truly different by design.
The live session is canceled, but the speaker is providing a recording of the talk after the conference.
Time: April 4, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Speaker: Cheryl Cline
To reach the widest audience, user-experience writers must strive to write inclusive, accessible copy. I will critique real-world examples of UX copy, list resources that UX writers and teams can refer to when ideating and iterating, and address some of the pushback that UX writers and other stakeholders often face when advocating for an inclusive user experience. Attendees will come away with an introductory framework for evaluating website and UX copy.
Time: April 3, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Speaker: Bill McLaughlin
Is a full website redesign out of reach? No problem. In this session, we’ll guide you through smart, strategic updates that can significantly boost your website’s performance. We’ll explore practical ways to enhance your website, making it more effective at engaging prospective students, even with an incremental investment end effort. This session is perfect for higher ed marketers looking to maximize their site’s potential while staying within their current framework.
You’ll learn how to:
Time: April 3, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Speaker: Courtney Fleeger
Join a step-by-step walkthrough on how to leverage Figma, a collaborative tool for interface design, to bring your UI concepts to life. Designed for both beginners and those experienced with Figma, you will learn more about:
This session is ideal for designers, developers, and product teams aiming to enhance their UI design process and establish a strong foundation in design systems.
Speaker: Erin Easter, Jason Kirchgessner, Aaron Wagner
In 2023, COUNTRY Financial expected to redesign its online quoting applications for auto and home insurance. What it didn’t expect was that it would totally recreate its customer experience, user experience, and design processes along the way. In this presentation, we’ll learn how COUNTRY redefined its User Experience Design Playbook over the course of their quote redesign efforts. We’ll review how COUNTRY User Experience partners with value stream owners, business partners, and developers throughout design. We’ll also learn more about COUNTRY’s repeatable design process that includes six stages: Strategy, Discovery, Definition, Design, Implementation, and Measurement phases. Finally, we’ll talk about lessons learned along the way and how this process is being rolled out to additional efforts in the company.
Speakers: Jeremy Perkins
When managing multiple websites under a single brand, having a flexible design system is key. Temple University has a mature Drupal component framework that needed to be replicated in Figma so that internal groups at Temple could sketch out new web pages, allowing them to experiment with content while easing the path to development. In this session, we will walk through how we organized, architected, and built a library in Figma with dozens of components, variants, properties, and styles. We will highlight some differences between Figma and CSS, workarounds, and demonstrate how the library allows prototyping new pages in minutes.
Speaker: Kelly Delahanty
After DM-ing my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I realized that running a usability test and running a D&D session had a lot in common: you do a lot of perpetration, figure out how to schedule around multiple busy people’s schedules, ask people to complete different tasks, and then have to sit back and resist the urge to jump in with the solution as they hopefully don’t accidentally set everything on fire. All this can be a lot to deal with, but I’ve got some tips make your UX process – and your adventure – less stressful.