I've given a number of in-person and virtual presentations and workshops on the topics of user onboarding, ux design, and more. Here's a selection of my previous speaking work.

Workshop & talk: “Create a user onboarding compass”

The “Onboarding Compass” workshop gives teams a process for designing user onboarding that guides users from different situations to the same destination of success. I’ve run half- and full-day versions of this workshop internationally at events including UX London, UX Days Seoul, UX Days Tokyo, and IxDA Sydney. It has occasionally been given as a talk, as well.

Photograph of people collaborating over a table on a shared onboarding compass template
Collage of 3 photographs of action shots from my workshop, taken at UX Days Tokyo. Top left: Images of circular onboarding templates. Bottom left: People at a table discussing storyboards. Right: People discussing circular templates posted on the walls.

Synopsis: Onboarding is not just a single event in the user’s experience. It is a process that links together many events, over time, to acclimate people to a new product or service. A well designed user onboarding experience will set up new users for success, adapt to changing situations, and guide them through multiple stages of their product journey. Through a combination of lecture and exercises, this workshop teaches teams how to identify and prioritize key onboarding actions and scaffold key onboarding actions with guidance that leads to next steps.

You can read here to learn about my process of designing this workshop via storyboarding.

Panel: “Growth Design: Elevate Outcomes Before Outputs” via the Adobe Design Circle

December 2020

I was honoured to participate in this panel event, hosted by Adobe Design Circle and facilitated by Andy Budd, alongside Growth Design experts Molly Norris Walker, author & head of design and user research at InfluxData, and Chetana Deorah, director of product design at Coursera. In this lively virtual session, we talked about the burgeoning discipline of Growth Design, how to structure teams around growth, and how it relates to other design activities like user onboarding and product design.

Image with panel synopsis and 4 profile photos of the panelists

You can watch the 1 hour recording here (requires registration).

Talk: “Onboarding for the long run”

“Onboarding for the long run” is a 1-hour presentation about designing onboarding not just for the first run, but for the long run. While designing onboarding for the long term can sound daunting, I break things down in this session to make the process more tenable. First, we’ll understand the different opportunities during which onboarding techniques are helpful across the customer journey. Then, I’ll show how having a diverse toolkit of onboarding methods helps users in different situations. I wrap up by walking through activities we can do with our teams to build onboarding for long-term benefit in our products.

  • Photos of "Onboarding for any situation" presentation from stage
  • Screenshot of presentation in progress in Keynote

This talk has been shared at An Event Apart in 2017, and you can watch a webinar recording in UIE’s All You Can Learn Library. Contact me if you’d like to have me present this topic at your event.

Talk and workshop: “New users matter, too!”

“New Users Matter Too” was a presentation series I created as part of First Time UX, my personal research project on onboarding design. I gave this talk in a variety of lengths, from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, and occasionally as a 90 minute workshop.

I’ve presented and run workshops on this topic at An Event Apart, Webdagene, SXSW, UX Australia, the Bentley University in San Francisco, Groupon, and Google.

Watch a video of the presentation from Webdagene 2015 and from An Event Apart, Orlando, 2016.