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!

Derek Tholt, Digital Product Manager at Huntington Bank

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

Professionally, I am a (brand-new) Digital Product Manager for Huntington Bank. After going to work for a small, San Francisco-based FinTech in 2021, I am back at Huntington in the digital space as of November 2023. I held various roles at Huntington from 2013 to 2021 – anything from branch banking to sales support for our large team of Mortgage Loan Officers to running a large team during an acquisition. I truly consider the last ten years of work as a paid internship having learned so much about banking, home lending, and the FinTech space.   

Outside of work, you can find me in one of three places: an airplane, a car, or the left side of my couch. I love to travel domestically and try to get on a plane every eight weeks or so to visit family and friends. I joke that I keep Frontier Airlines in business. I am also a car fanatic. I am a member of a few local car clubs one of which I have a fabulous group of friends that get together often. Each April, a national club, famously known as The Car Gays, meets at the famous Tail of the Dragon at Fontana Dam in North Carolina. We rent cabins and spend all day out on the roads and all night by the bonfire.   

At home, we have a few rules: have a healthy salad for dinner every Monday, never show up to a special event in a dirty car, always lead with kindness and an open mind, and never miss Jeopardy. I have been with my husband, Tristan, since 2007.   

Tell us about your path to become a Product Manager. How did you end up in this role?  

This new role fell into my lap after being notified of a layoff at my last gig. When I left Huntington in 2021, I went to work for Blend Labs, which provides point-of-sale lending solutions for hundreds of banks (including Huntington.) At Blend, I worked with the banks and credit unions on understanding their product roadmaps for large deployments and ongoing projects. I also managed numerous sales tools. My experience at Blend was invaluable to bring back with me to manage digital lending products at Huntington which includes mortgage, home equity, automotive, and unsecured loans.   

I am taking this new opportunity to try to poke some holes in the way the teams at Huntington do things. My manager told me to be a fly on the wall for a while and try to ask Why as much as possible. I’ hope to add a passion project to my book of work and encourage teams to use the modern tools provided to make navigating our workload easier, faster, and more transparent. Gone are the days of saving a file to your computer and attaching it to an email!   

What’s something you wish more people understood about your role or trends you’re seeing in the industry?  

Industry-wide, traditional banks are now competing with the Venmo and Chimes of the world. Large banks are often held to different regulatory standards than small, digital companies, so they need to be very deliberate in how new features are launched to customers. Think about how you do your banking today and ask yourself, “Would I consider using a bank that doesn’t have a great app, the ability to send money immediately, and provide real-time alerts for privacy and security?” Most would say no, so banks must always stay abreast of the latest digital banking trends and evaluate and prioritize ongoing enhancements. I’m excited to be a part of the life cycle of these initiatives and ultimately see them go live for customers and colleagues.   

What is something you’re most known for at work, and how do you use that as part of your professional identity?  

I have always been known for asking a ton of questions. It’s hard for me to understand my expectations if I’m not fully immersed in the product or tool I manage. I love to find a beta environment and try to break things. I also try to understand one basic concept: how are end-users consuming our product, and are we working to make it better? Once I understand this concept better, I love to be a helpful resource to anyone working alongside our team.   

If my colleagues remember one thing about me, it’s that I never claim to know everything. One of the most under-utilized phrases in life is “I don’t know” – as long as it’s followed by “but I will find out for you,” makes for the most transparent, honest, and trust-building experience one can have at work.   

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

Listen to learn. Don’t listen to speak next.   

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!

Podcast:

The Design Systems Podcast

https://www.designsystemspodcast.com

The Design Systems Podcast features fantastic conversations with great guests, with new episodes every week.

In a recent episode, “From Consistency to Contribution: How Design Systems Grow Trees with Jay Smith at REI,” host Chris Strahl and guest Jay Smith discuss the goal of “creating models that encourage flexibility of use while slowing down the rate of change.”

Book:

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

https://bookshop.org/p/books/paved-paradise-how-parking-explains-the-world-henry-grabar/18727296

The impact of design decisions is far-reaching, and in Paved Paradise, the author discusses the myriad ways 20th Century Infrastructural design decisions continue to shape our world in surprising, heartbreaking, and comical ways.

Listen to Terry Gross interview the author on Fresh Air here: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/09/1174962751/paved-paradise-examines-how-parking-has-changed-the-american-landscape

  Blog Post:

Expressing Ideas Through Mind Maps by Tasha Markovich, UX Matters https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2022/12/expressing-ideas-through-mind-maps.php

Local UX Researcher Tasha Markovich highlights the under-utilized visualization tool “mind maps,” fleshing out best practices culled from her experience creating them for a variety of contexts, and reviewing some of her favorite digital tools for hosting collaborative mapping events.

Article:

New Yorker – “What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?” by David Owen https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-hidden-cost-of-free-returns

This thought provoking article about the reverse logisitics industry provides a window into the world of physical product development, where many of the same concerns digital product designers face also pop up. The author discusses how snags can lead to design innovation when someone takes the time to really look at the process. “You can’t beat the information you get from a product once a customer has touched it.”

In Pop Culture:

Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day – It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, S16 E8

The longest running live action sitcom in American history ended their latest season with a deep dive into tech hell, where every device Dennis encounters seems to be conspiring against him. You can stream the episode on Hulu.

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

Shannon Kelly is a senior UX strategist at OverDrive in Cleveland, OH.

As a user experience professional, you have many skills, methodologies, and tools at your disposal. With so many methods available, learning them all can be overwhelming (like those listed in Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions by Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington.) 

But when standing out amongst your peers in an ever-fluctuating job market, sometimes you need to know more than traditional UX methodologies to put you ahead. You may need (and have attained) extra experience or skills to differentiate yourself from competitors for specific industries or positions. Let me preface this by saying you should NOT be a jack-of-all-trades and apply for jobs with multiple roles rolled into one. Instead, gaining some basic understanding of a different skill set makes you more marketable to hiring managers because it shows you can communicate effectively and work collaboratively. 

Here are three skills recommendations I believe can make you more marketable as a UX professional: 

1. Analytics

Traditional UX methods (User interviews and usability testing) are revered as providing qualitative data findings. As a researcher, you synthesize the information from these studies and make recommendations based on results. These methods are the holy grail of discovery and the primary methods for finding the “why” behind user behaviors. Due to testing budget and time constraints, limited sample sizes may not always provide a sense of urgency among stakeholders, and as the saying goes, “There is a big difference between ‘what people do’ versus ‘what people say.’” 

Analytics data can help support (not replace) traditional research and provide (often massive amounts of) quantitative usage data. Having a skillset like Google Analytics (GA) in your toolbelt is one of the most undervalued skills a researcher can have. GA lets you quickly gather historical user behavior on a website or application and find out what areas your users are interested in, what they’re trying to do, and what areas are problematic. 

Some key areas of analytics to learn:

• Segmenting Traffic Channels and User flows
• Tracking user retention and falloff (bounce and exit rates)
• Event and conversion goal tracking

By pairing qualitative and quantitative data, you can effectively convey a greater sense of urgency to decision-makers.

2. Conversion Rate Optimization

One of the skills I’ve learned over the years that helped prime my career in UX was Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is increasing the likelihood that website or application visitors will accomplish a desired action. A conversion can be anything actionable & measurable and is tied to a business goal. Some examples of conversions include adding an item to a cart, making a purchase, or filling out a form to download a PDF. The conversion rate is calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of sessions. For example, if you had 25 conversions from 100 sessions, your conversion rate would be 25%, or 25 ÷ 100 x 100 = 25%.

Often, the goal isn’t just to increase conversions but to increase the rate at which people convert. If marketing sends enormous amounts of traffic to a website, but users aren’t converting, the answer isn’t more traffic. The goal is to make incremental and measurable changes that help improve how users use the site and get them toward a conversion goal. 

From personal experience, becoming a CRO specialist allowed me to learn Google Analytics, heat-mapping, and A/B testing platforms and become more familiar with digital marketing practices. It also taught me to tie design updates to quantifiable improvement metrics, sell ideas to stakeholders, and set goals for project work. When I had measurable project improvements, it helped me sell myself come annual review time and eventually changed the trajectory of my professional career in design. 

3. Previous Transferable Skills

Is there anything you did in a previous job (anything at all) that you gained experience in and qualifies you for the position you’re going for? Did you work in restaurants or another customer-facing service job? What about customer support? Perhaps you’re a graphic designer who wants a change. Maybe you’re a writer, a psych major, a former medical professional, or military personnel. Either way, whatever experience you have, some skills you attained are likely transferable to the UX field. 

For example, a former restaurant cook who decided to make a career change into development. While learning to code in school, he worked as a software consultant (or, dare I say, researcher?) and talked to restaurants to help improve their point-of-sale (POS) systems for order fulfillment. Thanks to his restaurant experience, he could communicate effectively with his restaurant employees, understood their needs and feedback, and conveyed that information to the developers to enhance the POS platform.

Especially if you’re transferring to a UX career, think about all the things at your former position(s) that you’ve learned, gained skills in, or even the processes you thought could be improved. Maybe you were a nurse and found the internal patient portals frustrating – what would you have fixed? Perhaps you traveled the world through the military and studied different cultures – sounds a little like ethnographic research. Whatever you’ve done, something can be transferable. 

It is essential to be transparent about your unique experiences and how they distinguish you from other applicants in the industry. Highlight these relevant skills in your resume, portfolio, cover letters, and interviews. Promote yourself and your expertise – it’s not just about your UX knowledge but also your ability to apply past experiences effectively.

Our guest authors are carefully selected to spotlight thought leaders in Ohio’s UX community. Interested in sharing some insights? Or would like to hear from a local UX superstar? Reach out to uxakronteam@gmail.com to pitch us post ideas and author suggestions.

Michael Rucktaschel, Product Owner at Top Echelon

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

I have an active and outdoorsy lifestyle. Outside of work, I really enjoy spending time on anything with two wheels; mountain biking, dirt biking, and motorcycles. My wife and I also enjoy snowboarding, sand volleyball, and hiking with our dog! 

Tell us about your path to becoming a Product Owner. How did you end up in this role?

As a freshman in college, I saw myself working with product improvements of physical goods but I wasn’t familiar with what the position was or what the path to that career looked like. Leveraging on a general business interest, I earned my Bachelor’s in business management at Kent State University and spent time in product adjacent roles such as Operations Management, Pricing Analysis, and Brand Management.

However, none of these positions clicked as far as long-term career fulfillment. Three years after obtaining my bachelor’s and additional real-world job experience, I went back for my MBA and began to extensively network in search of a career that was right for me. Software Product Management aligned with my strengths and lifestyle goals. It truly felt like a perfect fit with my skills and experience of previous roles paving a transferable path forward. Highlighting the importance of networking, a connection of mine who had previously worked with Top Echelon Software connected me to a hiring manager and what started as a simple conversation turned into a rewarding career move as a Product Owner! 

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

Another appeal of this role is that no two days or weeks are the same. As an organization, we are constantly working to learn quickly from our users and continuously improve upon our products. I look forward to the opportunity to analyze an existing product and focus our attention on improving it… sometimes reimagining it all together, other times making only minor changes that can still generate immense value. A highlight of the day is collaborating on these solutions in a small group environment where we can play to everyone’s strengths and experience. 

What was getting an MBA like? Do you use anything you learned that surprises you?

I’m honestly surprised with how smoothly the MBA program went. I took my program 100% online and found it interesting to adapt to virtual connections opposed to in person courses like much of my undergrad. As most people probably know, an MBA is notoriously general and offers career advancement in a variety of positions and industries. This was perfect for me since I was still discovering my ideal career path. The program consisted of a breadth of business principles and decision making through practice case studies; most of these principles can be applied to product. What surprised me were the intangibles that the program indirectly taught such as the importance of reflection, collaboration, and empathy. 

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

If you’re not empowered or happy with where you are in your career, don’t remain stagnant. That’s probably good life advice too! To clarify, don’t just go find “another” new role, but constantly network, research, and work to continuously discover what’s out there. The skill sets you have developed from a variety of past experiences have given you knowledge to build upon as you search for long term fulfillment. Embrace this and take the time to reflect on your experiences; what moments or activities felt inspiring and which were draining? Then, ask yourself “why,” so that you can learn where to focus your energy next.

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!

Podcasts:

24 Minutes of UX

This is the companion podcast from the organizers of 24 Hours of UX. (UX Akron recently participated in the 2023 24 Hours of UX on May 3rd.) While recorded videos are still in the works for the event, have a listen to the podcast series.

https://24minutesofux.buzzsprout.com/1344814

The YouX Podcast

Hosts Chris and Mustafa share their unique global insights on UX design.

https://sites.libsyn.com/467499

The Interface

A monthly group chat for everything happening in content design and UX writing.

https://uxcontent.com/the-interface-podcast/

  Blog Post:

This love letter to design from a mid-career product designer is full of great thoughts and woven through with quotes from additional designers who inspired Fabricio.

Lessons of Design by Fabricio Teixeria, UX Collective

https://uxdesign.cc/lessons-of-design-75cc0731534

Case Studies:

Dan and Louis-Xavier’s Case Studies are masterclasses in presenting UX ideas. Their recent two-part study of Bing’s integration of ChatGPT is spot-on.

Growth.design Case Studies – 2 Part Bing AI Audit

https://growth.design/case-studies/new-bing-ai-ep1

https://growth.design/case-studies/new-bing-ai-ep2

Comedy Special:

John Early’s Now More Than Ever comedy special (streaming on HBO) features a joke about how the tone of the text on app permissions buttons hints strongly at what your phone wants you to do. The joke starts at 30:10 and ends at 34:45.

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