We meet new people all the time. We expect a lot of them, but what do they expect of us? In this talk, we dissect the meaning of trust, the science behind trust, how our perception, bias, and biological evolution play into who we trust, and finally some tool to help build trust and become self-aware.

 

The feedback our products receive in product and through HaTS is extreme by any standards. Extreme love, and extreme frustration. Why is it like this? How seriously should we be taking it? And how should we be using this feedback to understand how to make our products better?

 

 

 

We’re told that when we build good products with our customers’ experience in mind, and when we aim to truly include everyone, that the accolades, loyalty and money will magically follow. Can we trust that this edict is true? Can we actually fall back on being good in the world and somehow the business case will make itself? Let’s refer to research and case studies in the industry around these themes to examine the evidence and decide if it’s true (and/or in what circumstances it is and isn’t true).

 

As designers, one of our goals is to be confident in our design decisions so that we can provide the best solutions to the problems we’re solving. However, the complicated process of design does not instill a lot of confidence. There are many solutions to any one problem, and we’ve got lots of problems to tackle in a very little amount of time. We face a lot of pressure to get everything right and perfect. Confronted with these challenges, how do we learn to trust our gut? How do we build confidence in our abilities so that we also build trust in our design? This talk will look at three plays to build design confidence.

 

 

It was the early 2000’s and as the internet and user generated content was exploding Encarta was holding on to it’s editorially curated “trusted content” approach. Instead of embracing the new opportunities Encarta, the billion dollar cash cow, was struggling to find a new way forward. I’ll share stories on how I ended up at Encarta and why my background gave me a unique perspective on the challenges it faced. I’ll also share how, as the new outsider, I built trust with the team to eventually help pivot to a new product solution.

 

 

The new Atlassian design principles are here! You’re probably thinking: That’s nice, but how do I know when to use them amongst allthethings and alltheotherthings?

In this talk, you’ll see and hear what some customers have to say about what these principles mean to them. By hearing their stories and their perspectives, you’ll have a deeper understanding about what the design principles stand for, and therefore what you and your team can stand for, when it comes to making the best experiences for our customers.

Having worked with teams from startups to governments, Dom will discuss why building trust is a crucial component in allowing teams to be more autonomous, and how peer-to-peer feedback fits into the picture. You’ll walk away equipped with techniques for giving and getting better feedback – and a little extra empathy, too.

 

As the number of women in design and design leadership continues to grow, there’s a groundswell of positivity and badassery happening around the company. But how did we get here? How do we grow and most importantly how do we harness this momentum to get us to the next level?

In this panel, Atlassian design leaders open up the conversation about finding their voices as leaders and working as women in tech. Come along to share in their experiences and help us start talking about how we build out a community within and outside of Atlassian.

 

Ever feel a disconnection between what you’re trying to do as a designer to solve customer problems, and what the goals of the business are?

We’ll talk about how designers can work with product analysts to map user value to business metrics, allowing them to understand the intersection between design and business value and trust that we’re doing right by our users.
To do this we will look past MAU and WAU to understand how users’ in-product actions ladder up to business value.

 

At Atlassian we're pretty good at building in the right way. We have no problem with shipping it. We do, however, struggle with making sure we're building the right things for the right reasons.
This is the story of how one team, on the quest for confidence in backlog priorities, developed a process to build trust in the problems being solved.

We brought together team members from Design, Research, Product Management, and Technical Development to make sure we were solving the right problem for the right reasons.

 

 

A showcase of the most important examples of how we (Atlassian Identity) broke our customers' trust with regards to security and privacy, what we learnt from it, and how these learnings can be useful for you.

 

Did you know that it takes us only a few milliseconds to trust or not trust someone based on how they look?

The way our natural inclinations and cognitive biases affect us is beyond our control, making us trust certain people but not others. This can have serious implications when we interview customers.

We are very likely to believe everything they say when we trust them. Or, ignore something they say that doesn’t match our existing beliefs.

Come join as we learn about how to tackle this problem, by learning and being aware of our natural tendencies and biases and by developing a healthy-doubt mindset. It is a mindset that encourages us to think, question and validate, preventing us from placing blind trust in everything a customer says.

 

 

Our design org has bought in to the power of content and UX design pairing closely, and we’re starting to see some of the benefits. But, as UX and Content Designers, we’ve made of plenty of mistakes in working with each other. Our journey is one you don’t have to go through.

We’ll share examples of our failures, our successes, and practical tips for how to build your UX and Content Design partnership.

We have new designers joining us all the time, with lots to learn about our products and our design process, as well as lots to share from their own experiences. What would it take to build a culture of great design mentorship at Atlassian to help each other grow?

In this talk, we will share stories from previous mentorship experiences and our our current experience working together in a mentor mentee relationship (the highs and the lows) to dig into the behaviours that help cultivate a productive mentor/mentee relationship.

 

 

How did the Jira Service Desk team ship a total redesign to customers that are highly sensitive to change? The answer is simple: we did it slowly, built our customer’s trust, and fixed what broke along the way.

In this talk, I will detail how we adapted our design process to ship using a controlled group of early access customers. This group allowed us to work closely with our customers, get consistent feedback on our solutions, and iterate based on real experiences.

You will learn how we built our customers trust in us, how we worked with our customers to support them through the change, and why shipping too fast can negatively impact your customer’s trust in your team.

 

When our users and customers agree to take part in research, they do a trust fall. When they open up to us in interviews and usability tests, they give us a tiny window into their lives. How we treat this opportunity (or rather privilege!) not just affects the outcome of our research but might also determine whether they choose to talk to us in the future or not.

In this talk, I will cover 5 steps we can all take to build trust with our research participants, and look after their interests even when they are not looking. We will flip the experience inside out and look at it from their eyes - from the point of first contact through to the research session and after.

 

In 2003, Lego was near bankruptcy. The consistent growth of the company had stalled, and they were millions of dollars in debt. The years that followed involved dramatic changes in the company, the product lines, and their business strategy, and today Lego is one of the most trusted companies in the world. How did they do it? Drawing from both business case studies and my own personal fandom, I’ll discuss 5 lessons we can learn from Lego about product focus, experience, innovation, quality, and customer centricity.

 

Writing a hypothesis is talked about all the time. Sure, but as a collective Product team, are we actually any good at it?

The takeaways from this workshop are understanding how slight nuances of language and levels of specificity of a hypothesis alters the outcome of a design. As we learn together, we will teardown broad hypotheses and show how lack of specifically makes for indefensible results. Once we’ve baselined, we will teardown a well written hypothesis and repeat an exercise to illustrate the delta of the approaches, and why outcomes via this framework are now defensible.

Come to this workshop if you are interested in an alternative method to add to your design toolkit, or want to up-skill your Product and Engineering partners.

 

Whether it’s influenced by a cultural, personality or gender trait, everyone has a default interaction style, whether we recognize it or not.
Have you ever noticed in meetings that there’s always someone who dominates the conversation; someone who is hesitant to contribute; someone who might drone on with irrelevant details, or even someone who loves the sound of their own voice?

 

This role play in the form of a card-based game will help to identify and run scenarios using a combination of interaction styles – some of which will clash and cause unnecessary friction. Through a couple of rounds, we’ll encounter some monsters and identify which ones we want to battle, and tips for how to tame these, the next time you encounter them.

 

Format: 60 minute workshop, where you’ll identify some of the monster traits you might exhibit and build empathy for how your monster is affecting your colleagues. You’ll learn tips on how to tame these default monsters and improve how you communicate within your teams. Happier teams lead to high performing teams, because shouldn’t we all be a little less monstrous at work?

 

 

As a product matures, features can become obsolete and underused. As we add new features in, removing these old features keeps the UI from becoming cluttered, distracting, and hard to use.

But for customers, it can be frustrating having something they use - and maybe even depend on - taken away. Without adequate communications and allowances, we leave customers feeling like we don't care about them, and insecure about what other features they may lose in the future.

In this session, we'll look at specific techniques to help maintain customer trust and minimize the disruption of feature removal. We’ll then work in groups to put this into practice and create a plan for removing an existing feature.

 

Have you used the ADG sketch plugin lately? It’s more than just a provider for the GUI Pack! The Design System Tools team has been busy building new features that make it easier for you to create Atlassian experiences by helping you to:

• Find the right component for the job with our intelligent visual search

• Generate realistic sample data (including our own set of AI-generated faces!)

• Design responsively and accessibly with the ADG grid in mind

• Match your colors and typography to the ADG specs

Our users trust designs that operate consistently and feel fluid—just as much as our designers trust the tools they use to build them. This workshop will offer designers the lowdown on how to go from 0 to 100 with the Sketch Plugin and design beautiful, uniquely Atlassian experiences. If you want to become a Sketch wizard, this is the workshop for you!

 

They say to understand someone you need to walk a mile in their shoes, and yet many of us have not heard from our customers with disability, or experienced using our products with any impairment. Without this experience it can be easy to overlook the impact of the choices we make in our work. Designing for accessibility is essential in building our customer’s trust, playing as a team, and avoiding high profile court cases. This workshop involves hearing from people with lived experience of disability and features activities where we can experience some of the barriers ourselves.

Designing for platform is a relatively new challenge for Atlassian. Initiatives such as Fabric and Jira Simply Powerful have only been around for a couple of years. As such, they require a very different approach to product design.

In addition, product designers need to learn how to work effectively with platform teams. The element of trust that has to exist for this relationship to be successful.
In this talk, you’ll hear from both platform and product designers as they share their experiences working together, as well as the strategies they found most effective for making it work.

 

 

Designing for the enterprise comes with a unique set of challenges. How to ensure readability and accessibility at scale? How to meet the needs of multi-layered organizations? How to build and sustain trust, when your software is considered a mission critical?

For years my team has been focusing on serving our largest customers with Data Center instances up to 120000 users. We've released features in Jira that help accelerate and scale the full potential of every team’s work. We spend a couple of dozens of hours a year talking to enterprise users - and we gathered a vast repository of insights.

In my talk I will summarize the most common themes we observed in our enterprise research (while not being shy from busting some admins' myths), and I will give you a crash course of designing for scale.

 

Managers, just like us individual contributors, are continuously learning and honing their craft to become better people leaders. As much as your manager plays a key role in your professional and personal development, you can play a role in theirs. Put bluntly, this talk is about how to build an authentic bond of trust with your manager and train your manager to be successful at managing you.

Natalie Johnson and Lucy Denton, a.k.a the ecosisters, have been experimenting with new ways of working with their new manager, Matty Schreck, for the past couple of months.

They will share how they have helped their manager grow in managing a team of women, building trusting relationships and being vulnerable, giving feedback, understanding different was of influencing outcomes, and kind of just generally how they get him to agree to things they want…

*Disclaimer: No Mattys were harmed in the making of this presentation.

Why is it important to be precise when depicting data? To keep our users’ trust we take care to ship a features that are consistent with our design guideline and our brand; and copy that fits our voice and tone.

 

Yet we break these rules every day when visualising data. Take for example Jira reports, which have not been modernised in a decade. Their appearance breaks the flow of the experience and many reports bury the lead by contradicting basic principles. The countless consumers of these Agile reports might question how serious we are about capturing information... after all imprecision is not lost on our highly technical user base.

 

The great news? We hire smart people who can easily learn new stuff! All it takes is some training on the basics of stats and data vis; and the extension of our Design Principles to cover the depiction of data.

 

It's part-and-parcel of any interview script to ask customers about their "pain points". This lightning talk by the enthralling speaker Jay Rogers exposes why customer pain points are mostly useless in driving product design. In part, because these assessments ignore the real function of pain and how organisms (including organisations) react to pain.

 

 

Why do we think we have to provide developers with every single detail of a design before they can get started? What if you could sketch on a white board and get back exactly what you meant as code? We spend too long agonizing over specifications because of a lack of trust. In a high trust relationship between development and design, we embrace uncertainty, and collaborate on solutions. I will go through techniques to help designers and developers collaborate on ideas early and often.

 

Trust is a key element is building psychological safety, and one of the defining characteristics of teams that GSD in tech (according to a recent study of Google). We will take a look a how the work environment can emboldened workers to suggest changes and even challenge assumptions resulting in more team engagement, creativity, and productivity.

 

Effective communication helps us reduce stress and build trust. Without it, teams underperform and lines of communication sever. We can communicate more effectively with our family, friends, and fellow Atlassians by practicing Non-Violent Communication, a framework developed by psychologist Dr. Marshall Rosenberg.

In this talk, we'll look at insights and strategies using Non-Violent Communication techniques, and walk out with practical ways to empathically connect with ourselves and the people around us.

 

In late 2018 Atlassian released next-gen projects, otherwise known as "the new Jira", to the world. It was the culmination of 2+ years of work across multiple teams and projects, and by all metrics was a success.

But throughout its development, customers had lost trust in our product. The Jira that our customers were using was not the Jira that they knew and loved. We had radically changed the product, without empowering them with the right information.

This talk will be a reflection on the mistakes I made with Jira Software Cloud's content design during the development and launch of next-gen Jira, what we did to correct them to regain the trust of customers, and what I've learned as a content designer.

 

A bit more than a year ago, I became aware of p-hacking: the accidental or deliberate fudging of numbers to prove hypotheses in medical, social and psychological studies. Once you know about this, you'll see it everywhere. And it’s only the beginning: bad experimental setups, hopeful interpretation of data, small panels for tiny effect sizes…

In a world where the main motivations of many researchers is not necessarily about delivering correct results, it is important as design professionals to learn which research outcomes to trust, and which ones to treat with a level of ‘healthy scepticism’. This is about never switching off your brain, and about reading the fine print, understanding the bigger picture of science, and not giving in to the allure of just believing research outcomes because they support what feels right.

At the end of the talk, you might really wonder what you actually know. Or don't know. But you might be better equipped to tackle this in the future!

 

Few people have been as good at building trust as con artists, even if it is unwarranted trust. Obviously, our goal is not to abuse people's trust, but nevertheless there are lessons in how trust is built and maintained that we can take from con artists. Using examples of famous con artists from history - from Gregor McGregor and Victor Lustig to JR Brinkley and Charles Ponzi - I'll examine the psychological foundations of trust. This includes the distinction between cognitive and affective trust, the role of decision theory, in-group biases and much more.

This will be distilled into two heady brews: first, some practical advice for people trying build trust in their products and processes. Second, through examining how con artists distort our reasoning, I’ll share some advice on how to trust yourself when making difficult decisions.

 

At Atlassian, we constantly work with new people, new teams, and on problems we’ve never tackled before. Change is constant, and there’s never enough time to do everything you want or need to do. I’ll share my wins, failures, and learnings in my own career in building trust with colleagues while still unplugging by 6 pm every day (and on weekends!). I'll give practical steps you can enact when you walk out the door, and help you establish a reputation for solving problems and delivering quality and impact while not burning out. This talk is all about practical advice, and will include callouts for introverts, global and remote concerns, and overcoming resistance from others.