Enjoy presentations you missed, or watch one you loved again from our collection of recorded online speakers. All presentations are organized by date and by topic. We’ll be adding to this list, so check back often!

By Date

2026

Feb 2026 – Emily Ogle “Making AI a ‘Good Place’: Usability and Accessibility” https://bit.ly/4qQmkM6

Jan 2026 – Anne Cantera “The ABC’s of Conversation Design” https://bit.ly/4sSB52U

2025

Oct 2025 – Carianne Tuckley “Sexy vs Scrappy Tech: Using IA and AI to Help Real People Do Everyday Things” https://bit.ly/3WUZkie

Sept 2025 – Michele Oliver “Beyond Personas: Designing with Jobs-to-be-Done in Mind” https://bit.ly/3IGrf1Z

July 2025 – Thomas Stokes “Calculating ROI in UX Research: Quantifying the Value of UX to Business Leaders” https://bit.ly/4fbtkik

June 2025 – Sean Van Tyne “Moving from Product-centric to Customer-centric” https://bit.ly/46iG6ci

May 2025 – Dee Sadler “Measuring and Managing Success: For the Individual, Team, and Leadership” https://bit.ly/4kCPMCm

March 2025 – Amit Sathe and Marina Lin “The Experience Scorecard” https://bit.ly/3QOq5lv

2024

June 2024 – Dennis Cheatham “Translating Theory to Designing for Memorable Experiences” https://youtu.be/jwHwc_I-zfU?si=nJW8zyAi68REZd3F

May 2024 – Kelsey Thomson “Augmenting Human Insight: Enhancing Listening in Qualitative Research with AI” https://youtu.be/7vxlfNSyNuU?si=aBv6OBI67iDSts0I

By Topic

Accessibility

Feb 2026 – Emily Ogle “Making AI a ‘Good Place’: Usability and Accessibility” https://bit.ly/4qQmkM6

AI

Feb 2026 – Emily Ogle “Making AI a ‘Good Place’: Usability and Accessibility” https://bit.ly/4qQmkM6

Jan 2026 – Anne Cantera “The ABC’s of Conversation Design” https://bit.ly/4sSB52U

Oct 2025 – Carianne Tuckley “Sexy vs Scrappy Tech: Using IA and AI to Help Real People Do Everyday Things” https://bit.ly/3WUZkie

May 2024 – Kelsey Thomson “Augmenting Human Insight: Enhancing Listening in Qualitative Research with AI” https://youtu.be/7vxlfNSyNuU?si=aBv6OBI67iDSts0I

Business Side of UX

July 2025 – Thomas Stokes “Calculating ROI in UX Research: Quantifying the Value of UX to Business Leaders” https://bit.ly/4fbtkik

June 2025 – Sean Van Tyne “Moving from Product-centric to Customer-centric” https://bit.ly/46iG6ci

May 2025 – Dee Sadler “Measuring and Managing Success: For the Individual, Team, and Leadership” https://bit.ly/4kCPMCm

Conversation Design

Jan 2026 – Anne Cantera “The ABC’s of Conversation Design” https://bit.ly/4sSB52U

Information Architecture

Oct 2025 – Carianne Tuckley “Sexy vs Scrappy Tech: Using IA and AI to Help Real People Do Everyday Things” https://bit.ly/3WUZkie

Personas

Sept 2025 – Michele Oliver “Beyond Personas: Designing with Jobs-to-be-Done in Mind” https://bit.ly/3IGrf1Z

Product Design and Managment

June 2025 – Sean Van Tyne “Moving from Product-centric to Customer-centric” https://bit.ly/46iG6ci

May 2025 – Dee Sadler “Measuring and Managing Success: For the Individual, Team, and Leadership” https://bit.ly/4kCPMCm

March 2025 – Amit Sathe and Marina Lin “The Experience Scorecard” https://bit.ly/3QOq5lv

June 2024 – Dennis Cheatham “Translating Theory to Designing for Memorable Experiences” https://youtu.be/jwHwc_I-zfU?si=nJW8zyAi68REZd3F

Surprise and Delight

June 2024 – Dennis Cheatham “Translating Theory to Designing for Memorable Experiences” https://youtu.be/jwHwc_I-zfU?si=nJW8zyAi68REZd3F

Usability

Feb 2026 – Emily Ogle “Making AI a ‘Good Place’: Usability and Accessibility” https://bit.ly/4qQmkM6

June 2024 – Dennis Cheatham “Translating Theory to Designing for Memorable Experiences” https://youtu.be/jwHwc_I-zfU?si=nJW8zyAi68REZd3F

UX Research

July 2025 – Thomas Stokes “Calculating ROI in UX Research: Quantifying the Value of UX to Business Leaders” https://bit.ly/4fbtkik

March 2025 – Amit Sathe and Marina Lin “The Experience Scorecard” https://bit.ly/3QOq5lv

May 2024 – Kelsey Thomson “Augmenting Human Insight: Enhancing Listening in Qualitative Research with AI” https://youtu.be/7vxlfNSyNuU?si=aBv6OBI67iDSts0I

Don’t see your presentation on this list? Reach out to us via our Contact Form!

Blog Posts:

5 Things I Learned About Leadership from the Death & Rebirth of Microsoft by Dare Obasanjo

https://dareobasanjo.medium.com/5-things-i-learned-about-leadership-from-the-death-rebirth-of-microsoft-3eaf42567061

How much influence does a leader really have? A TON, especially over the culture of a workplace, which impacts everything that comes out of it. In this post, Obasanjo talks about what Microsoft’s Lost Decade was like from the inside, and what it was like after. An illuminating read.

Don’t make “data-driven product decisions”—build a data-driven semantic environment by Pavel Samsonov

https://uxdesign.cc/dont-make-data-driven-product-decisions-build-a-data-driven-semantic-environment-3220d177b73f

A fantastic look at why it can feel like you’re speaking past coworkers when presenting data insights. Samsonov talks about how companies develop collective mental models, and how no amount of data-points can hope to dislodge these assumptions. To change people’s minds, you’ll need to change the semantic environment of your organization.

“When you over-rule designers’ judgment about users’ needs, you are telling them to spend less energy solving problems and more energy selling you on solutions.” –Jonathan Korman

Podcast:

Rosenfeld Review Podcast

https://rosenfeldmedia.com/podcasts

Influential industry publisher Lou Rosenfeld hosts a variety of guests on topics of import to UX and Product Design. Recent episodes have offered interesting perspectives on both working with AI and working on AI. This show is a treasure trove of names and concepts of import in our field.

Book:

The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-art-of-explanation-how-to-communicate-with-clarity-and-confidence-ros-atkins/21172586?ean=9781472298416

Clear communication is essential to rallying your team, persuading your boss, and having impact in your role. BBC journalist Ros Atkins shares what’s he’s learned about effective messaging.

In Pop Culture:

Controversy around Crush! Apple’s iPad Pro Commercial

It turns out human being have a deep emotional connection to the physical world and don’t enjoy seeing objects that signify their culture being obliterated by a hydraulic press. Why is that sentiment perpetually surprising to tech people?

This ad was great in a lot of ways, and while its easy to see the elegance of the visual message (“You can do all these things with our tidy, clean, ultra-thin device!”,) and there is value to controversy in advertising (when was the last time anyone cared about an Apple ad?,) the general reaction to its release highlights how the insider nature of the industry leads to big, faulty assumptions. Early Aughts Apple was able to capitalize on the promise of “culture in your pocket”; but now? The optimism is gone, and a reckoning with how absolutely under attack non-tech people feel about the role technology plays in their lives is in order.

Have you read, watched, or listened to something really great and UX-y lately? We’d love to share it!

It’s still true: understanding your users makes you a better designer, better designers make better products, and better products result in bigger companies (among other things).

When you work with printmaking ink, or oil paint, you must learn to work with solvents. Solvents are the eraser mechanism for oil-based media, just as water is for water-based media. To control a mark, you need to be able to remove it. Creation is entwined with destruction.

I’ve been thinking about solvents and materiality in general, probably because I’ve been spending much more time glued to a screen. This is something I don’t think people working in tech really understand on a gut level: no one else has the relationship to computers that we do. Even people who are working with computers all day are not so immersed in them the way we have to be. They don’t see computers as a medium they’re working through. For most people (Yes, most. Yes, still.), a computer is more like an expensive plate their work is trapped inside, and they are a hostage negotiator.

It matters because I suspect this disconnect between designers’ assumptions and user sentiment around their relationship to computers is part of the puzzle of why many in the UX field feel (according posts I’ve come across in the last 6 months) they aren’t making a good business case for the role true user research plays in creating a better product. UX’ers believe our unique blend of research and design ultimately contributes perhaps the most value of any department in a tech company to that company, so this ought to be a pretty easy case to make. How have we lost the faith?

Let me ask a different question: when was the last time you observed someone using your product IRL?

If you are responsible for the design of a product and you’re relying exclusively on a contrived series of tasks that you dreamed up with no meaningful pushback from your team, and loaded into a website that lets you test small pieces of your designs anonymously and asynchronously to be your only window into how your product is being used, then you may well be de-risking some small element of the design of a product. And you could probably think critically about this information and spin it up into a compelling case that if you had gone with the initial, untested version, usage would have been impacted by X, and over the last quarter the combined impact from not testing would have likely resulted in a decrease of Y & Z, etc.

(Side note: If you don’t have friends in your marketing department, make some. Marketing is a very mature field and they have all sorts of battle-tested ways to justify creative decisions in a corporate space. Messaging is a collaborative process, a two-way street. When I hear people complain about the “design maturity” of a company, I can’t help but wonder how much of our message is lost on leadership due to the fact that the UX field still has some growing up to do.)

Regardless of strides towards better internal marketing of UX, however, you’re never going to have the real impact that truly good design can have by focusing your efforts on hedging your bets and checking a box. You don’t get credit for innovating if you’re not innovating. To put it bluntly: maybe we can’t make the case for real UX research because we haven’t been doing real UX research.

Your customers are not going to love a product they are actively erasing with their behavior. “Good enough” for people who live and breathe computers (you) and those who managed to find a user testing site on their own and voluntarily opt in to participation in such tests (your participants) is not going to tell you anything even remotely meaningful about what will be good enough for “most people” (your actual users). You might be shocked how many of your existing customers are “most people.” And even more shocked how many more customers you could reel in if you were actually designing a product for them.

It’s a scary time to think expansively in a field that is feeling the squeeze. But here’s a secret: it’s never going to feel safe or easy to rethink something. It will only make sense to take the risk of trying something new when you start to recognize that you can’t afford to keep doing what you’ve been doing once it’s stopped working. Don’t stare down that black hole. Instead, get curious about your customers. Like, your career depends on it curious. How are people really using what you’re making? What do they really think of it? What little hacks have they come up with, what do they complain to their colleagues about?

How can you find this information in an organization that wants you to keep your head down as close to your screen as you can physically get it? Customer service is a great place to start. Ask if you can see call logs, or summaries of meetings. Ask if anyone in the department would be willing to hop on a call with you so you can pick their brain. Build relationships with actual coworkers in this space and make these calls a regular check in.

Take a deep dive into the reviews of your product on an App Store or G2. You’ll have to sift through lots of unhelpful feedback, and correct for the unfortunate tone internet communication has coalesced into, but there are kernels of real insights sitting there like free flecks of gold in a stream.

If CS or Sales does customer visits, ask if you can join. See if you can set a time to observe actual users using your product. Prioritize this. I know it’s uncomfortable, but so is getting laid off. Find a customer company that’s geographically near your own home and see if you can’t set up a visit there. See if you can’t buy them lunch. If they’re all working in-person, they will likely be thrilled to see a visitor with donuts and gladly let you watch them work in exchange.

If you secure such a visit, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to have that aha moment, especially if you haven’t done a lot of this kind of work before. Being a physical person with strangers is more uncomfortable for some people than others. Give yourself permission to be uncomfortable, but do it anyway. This is the first of many such meetings you’ll have if you do your job right.

It helps to stop worrying about yourself and start worrying about the customer: are they comfortable? Is this how and where they usually use your product? Do they mind if you take notes? Personally, I prefer not recording video in-person. People who aren’t on Zoom all day are understandably self-conscious when a camera is pointed at them. They’re doing you a favor, do what you can to put them at ease. Think of it as an exercise in being present, and just try to take in the gestalt of the thing. Aha moments will come later, on the drive home, or in a month when you’re debating button styles. Learn to shift your focus from creating a replicable process (science) to honing your skills of observation (art).

If you really cannot find a way to scare up any actual customers, dust off that resume (thinking you’re going to be able to ride things out with a company that is completely disconnected from their customer base is a bad long-term plan). But then also consider just going to any public place (a library is a great option, but even coffee shops where people brought their own device and should therefore theoretically be comfortable with it will work) to people-watch for an hour. Set your timer, don’t let yourself off the hook early. Watch people use these things we are designing out in the wild.

The designer Naoto Fukasawa said “Design dissolves in behavior.” I came across this quote in Fabricio Teixeira’s Lessons of Design post on Medium. Destruction makes space for something new, absence draws the eye to presence.

We aren’t going to change the world if we play it safe and hide behind a screen. We can’t fix something we won’t acknowledge is broken. If we keep designing for ourselves, then businesses are right to assume we have no impact on their bottom line. Maybe for a while it got comfortable to just focus on the little details of your own tasks, on turn-around time, on everything but zooming out to consider your real impact.

Maybe it’s okay to get a little uncomfortable, and to use that discomfort to refocus on empathizing with users’ discomfort. Because, truly, did you become a designer focused on the experience of users simply to make yourself more comfortable?

Further Reading

• Hypothesis-Based Approaches by Debbie Levitt in R before D
  • On starting with a problem, not a solution.
• No, AI User Research Isn’t “Better Than Nothing,” It’s A Lot Worse by Pavel Samsonov in UX Collective
  • Why cutting corners on research is a sure path to commodification, a.k.a. devaluation, of your product.
• Designers, We Have A “Figmaism” Problem by Artiom Dashinsky in Prototypr
  • Tools are great! But we need to be talking about and prioritizing strategy, leadership, making connections, and advocacy.

UX Akron is looking for more thought leaders to guest author blog posts. Interested in sharing your perspective? Reach out!

Helpful tip: Most libraries can also pull books from the entire state through SearchOhio, and from university libraries through OhioLINK. Other libraries are connected to Clevnet. Ask your local librarian about these free services.

Books That Support Context

•  Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture, by Andrew Hinton
  • You’ll discover not only how to design for a given context, but also how design participates in making context.
• Context: The Effects of Environment on Product Design and Evaluation, edited by Herbert L. Meiselman
  • For product developers and designers, learn how context works and how it influences design decisions and outcomes.
• Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, by Sam Sommers
  • A more entertaining read on just how powerful experienced situations are — and how greatly they affect how we think and act.
• Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, by Karl Fast and Stephen P. Anderson
  • Communicating information so that it is understandable is difficult. Enough! Learn how to communicate clearly.
• Creativity In Large-Scale Contexts, by Jonathan S. Feinstein
  • Yale Professor Jonathan S. Feinstein shows how cultural, economic, and social contexts can be “fruitfully” mined to help innovate smarter and faster.
• Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, by Sheryl Cababa
  • Closing the Loop will help you “…understand the systems and context that surround design decisions.”

New UX Books

• Confident UX: The Essential Skills for User Experience Design, by Adrian Bilan
• Strategic Content Design, by Erica Jorgensen
• Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon
• Laws of UX, Second Edition, by Jon Yablonski
• Universal Principles of UX, by Irene Peyreyra
• Immersive Content and Usability, by Preston So
• Design That Scales, by Dan Mall
• Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, by Ashley Shew

Information Architecture Titles of Interest

• Everyday Information Architecture, by Lisa Maria Marquis
  • Good UX starts with structured and organized information.
• Essential Topics in Information Architecture, by Anthony Rhem
  • Such topics include: Content Modeling, Metadata, Content Governance, IA and AI, IA and Big Data Analytics
• Digital Signifiers in an Architecture of Information, by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
  • A denser text covering such topics as NLP, Machine Learning, Spatial Representation, and Information Actualization.
• Information Architecture Synthesizing Through AI, by Hesham Elsherif
  • This book shows how the field of IA, UX and AI are all converging in innovation; such as through IA metadata to predictive UX to conversational AI.
• The Essence of Software, by Daniel Jackson
  • For software designers who are frustrated with common design issues, Jackson shows how to break necessary structures down into concepts for dependable results.
• Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, by Jorge Arrango
  • Written by a former president of the Information Architecture Institute, his call to action here is cautionary — that, as a creator, “you are creating a context that will affect how users behave in it.”

UX Fundamentals

• Continuous Discovery Habits, by Teresa Torres
• Disruptive Research, by Larry Marine
• Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Drug
• How To Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert
• Intertwingled, by Peter Morville
• Mindful Design, by Scott Riley
• User Friendly, by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
• Just Enough Research, by Erika Hall
• Make Your Customers Dance, by Marc Majers
• Designing with the Mind in Mind, by Jeff Johnson
• The User Experience Team of One, by Leah Burley

On Our Radar: Coming in September

Designing Information Architecture: A practical guide to structuring information spaces to meet people’s needs, by Pabini Gabriel-Petit

From the publisher: “The book is aimed primarily at aspiring information architects and UX professionals who create information architectures. The book also helps members of web development and product teams who need to understand what information architects do to work collaboratively with them.”

Allison Nowak, Instructional Designer at OUCCAS (Ohio’s University Consortium for Child and Adult Services)

Tell us a little about yourself! What do you enjoy outside of work?

I just moved to the greater Akron area.

Outside of work I sew, listen to multiple podcasts, hike, and take care of my houseplants and three cats. I’m working on training my cats to go hiking with me. 

Tell us about your path to becoming an Instructional Designer. How did you end up in this role?

It took a few other jobs and lots of research for me to discover Instructional Design. It’s not a widely known career for people working outside of Learning & Development.

But, as I researched Instructional Design and analyzed my current & potential skillset, I discovered I already had a lot of the skills needed. So, I spent four months of full-time, self-directed study to fill the gap in my knowledge and skills. I took a few classes and consumed all the books/blogs/podcasts my mind could absorb. (Shoutout to Luis Malbas & the TLDC—your content has been indispensable!)

I landed my first ID contract in that 4^th month. That job and all work since as an Instructional Designer & eLearning Developer has been so rewarding, and downright fun. I finally feel like I’m able to use my whole brain at work and be valued for it!

What’s your favorite part of your workday or week?

When my Teams is on do not disturb, or it’s after typical business hours, and I know I have 4-6 uninterrupted hours to build something beautiful that will solve a problem.

Do you use anything in your work now that you learned in school or in the past that surprises you, that you thought you’d never use “in real life”?

Growing up with parents who struggled to use computers meant I did things like handwrite a “How to Print” guide for my mother. I was maybe 11 or 12. It was a click-by-click guide with numbers, headings, and icons. I then coached her through the steps along with the guide until she was able to successfully print on her own. She kept that guide by her printer for many years. 

Understanding the barriers to a work task, coming up with a solution that will help that person successfully do that work task, and presenting said solution in a way that can be used by that person—that’s a lot of what Instructional Design is. It was natural for me to create solutions like this. It showed up in all my previous jobs—tutoring music, caring for an elderly family friend, teaching English to adults. But it wasn’t until later in life that I made the connection that it was a valuable work skill.

Also, playing with fonts in Word ’95 when I was a kid. Selecting the most ridiculous of fonts—Jokerman ITC, Goudy Stout, Curlz MT—just to see how that would change the document. Obviously, those would be terrible choices for most products today, but I still think a lot about fonts: is it readable by my users in all formats (print, digital, up close & far away); will it display in all software (PPT, Adobe Acrobat, Articulate); and does it convey the correct tone for the product?  

If you could give yourself 10 years ago advice from yourself today, what would it be?

“Do what you love” is bad career advice. And practicality isn’t everything. You can and should find a middle ground between following your passion and pursuing a strictly-practical field. 

Do you know a stellar UX, UI, Product, or Software Designer or Researcher who has joined the field in the last five years that we should feature? Let us know!