Public Speaking

2023

Learnings From Multi-cultural UX (Research) Experiences🗣🗣

Spoke for UX Research and Strategy Group; Watch here: https://youtu.be/yQaAFSEulco

Navigating cultural differences in the workplace while working with colleagues or researching with people from diverse countries is a challenging journey. I have learned from several situations where misunderstandings, communication gaps, and surprising feedback occurred. Despite the difficulties, I feel empowered now to navigate such situations.

While first-hand experiences can provide strategies for navigating these challenges, having frameworks and increased awareness can empower us to create respectful team dynamics, reduce our biases, and be more empathetic and inclusive.

In this talk, I aim to broaden your perspective on cultural diversity and its impact on your (professional) life. I will share three lessons learned from my own cultural experiences and connect them with frameworks. My hope is to encourage you to reflect on your own cultural background and how it affects your work, team dynamics, conducting research, and meetings.

Spotlight on Women in IT

Spoke to Phil Alsop from Digitalisation World; Watch here: https://youtu.be/5wY8MDBojYU

2022

FigJam’in Through the Roads Less Travelled: Our experience conducting a fully collaborative Product Audit Workshop 🗣🗣

Spoke at Config 2022; Watch here: https://youtu.be/d14aKD0EyM4

Want to have buy-in from stakeholders for improving the user experience of your products? Raise design maturity? To take a holistic outlook on your product flows? What better way than to make your colleagues and management experience it! Learn how we approached a fully collaborative product audit.

To make it fun and engaging, we made it fully movie-themed!
Participants were invited to come with a curious mindset and look at things with a fresh perspective.

TEMPLATE to run your own product audit: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1105904361184701147

SLIDES: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1105906239651615482

Embracing the complexity of humans in an HCD process 🗣

Spoke at Mobile UX London 2022; Watch here: https://youtu.be/dbneGJYc6q4

Human-centred design implies thinking beyond users, thinking about all humans that our design decision impact.  However, we often forget about the humans in the HCD process which is us, our teams, and our stakeholders.

Thinking about and empathising with the humans in our process can help us improve our collaboration. Designing and structuring our collaboration (especially during remote times where we aren't in the same space) can result in improved design maturity. Embracing the complexity of humans and our collaboration can enable us to be supportive of each other. It can also foster better bonds amongst the team as we all are working towards a common goal - improved user experience, and better products. 

In this talk, I shared learnings (both wins and failures) on how the team at Mendix is approaching collaboration in the product discovery, design and development process with over 10 disciplines.

2021

Lessons from co-creating a process 🗣

Spoke at a mini-conference between Mendix and Instapro design teams; Watch here: https://youtu.be/dbneGJYc6q4

In our business unit, we are co-creating a product discovery, design and development process. I am leading this initiative together with our Senior Product Manager and a Software Delivery Manager. In this talk, I shared my learnings from our work so far. I discuss how such a process helps in alignment, buy-in and maturity improvement. The key takeaway for me from this process is to “Embrace the mess and enjoy the journey”!

Lead better development through structured collaboration 🗣

Spoke at Mendix World 2021; Watch here: https://www.mendix.com/videos/lead-better-development-through-structured-collaboration/

In this talk, I will share 3 steps towards structuring collaboration in your organization. I will detail is the Process Blueprint that we have in collaboration with Design, Product Management, and Engineering.

Succeeding in a multicultural context through trying, failing and learning 💬

Interactive session at UXinsight Festival 2021

In this interactive session, I will share three lessons from my failures on how experiencing cultural differences and understanding the nuances empowered me.

2020

Featured on the ResearchOps podcast 🎧

The one where Brigette and I talk about ReOps, Service Design, moving abroad, race, gender and inclusion. We recorded this in Aug 2020.

You can listen to it here.

Driving inclusivity and diversity — applying Farai Madzima’s talk to our field 📝

Workshop at UXinsight Festival 2020,

During this session, we looked at some of the D&I challenges we face as UX Researchers — what are they and how can we try to solve them? Blogpost here.

Workshop: How to get started with ResearchOps 📝

AmsterdamUX, July 2020

The goal of this workshop was to help create awareness about ResearchOps, identify current operational challenges and ways of solving them. This session is most valuable if you do (a lot of) research as part of your job - like UX researchers, service designers, UX designers.

2017-18-19

Understanding cultural differences and their impact on design 🗣

Talk at Inclusive Design 24 (2019), UXCamp Amsterdam (2018), UXCamp Nordic (2018), World Interaction Design Day Amsterdam (2018), Rotterdam Cocktail hours (2018)

In various talks on this topic, Anna, Marta and I explored how cultural differences can impact user research, interaction design and visual design. You can watch the talk here: https://youtu.be/W8ZseiI5zIk

Workshop: Research Skills Framework, Netherlands edition 📝

ResearchOps community, June 2019

Youp and I hosted the Netherlands edition of the researcher skills workshop on 13th June 2019. The workshop had 16 enthusiastic participants - UX researchers, product owners, UX designers - with experience ranging from 0-10+ years of experience.