Sponsored Sessions
Don’t miss these excellent talks by research leaders, presented by our EPIC2024 Platinum Sponsors!
Impact Tracking: Tradition to Innovation
Jeanne Bard, Lead Researcher, Atlassian
Sam Ladner, PhD, Sociologist
Tuesday, August 20, 9—9:30 am
Presented by Atlassian
Building Tools That Empower Researchers
Julie Norvaisas, Vice President of UX, dscout
Wednesday, August 21, 9—9:30 am
Presented by dscout
Impact Tracking: Tradition to Innovation
Tuesday, August 20, 9:00 am–9:30 pm US Pacific Time, Broad Stage
What can researchers learn about impact-tracking from other established professions? For some fields, impact tracking is integrated into their processes, such as program evaluation for nonprofits and health outcome assessments in medicine. Other well-established fields, such as the legal profession, do not typically engage in impact tracking due to the unpredictable nature of case outcomes. Researchers working in both the private and public sectors usually aim to achieve specific outcomes, yet we don’t often have direct control of actions (or lack of action) taken as a result of our insights.
Researchers working within the tech sector must contend with an additional hurdle: the tech industry has historically lacked consistent, validated methods for measuring impact. Over the past several years, many tech companies developed bespoke approaches rather than adopting established methods from other professions. This trend of innovation in methods and metrics for impact tracking presents some opportunities, but also several pitfalls. How can we ensure these approaches align with the value provided by researchers?
JEANNE BARD is a Lead Researcher at Atlassian on the Transformations and Platform Team, which is dedicated to ensuring the Atlassian platform meets the needs of enterprise customers. With nearly 20 years experience conducting qualitative research across diverse sectors such as retail, healthcare, and B2B software, she’s spent the past 12 years leading research focused on new product innovation for digital and hybrid physical-digital software tools. Based in Portland Oregon, she’s an active member of the local design research community and served as Leader of IxDA Portland for five years.
SAM LADNER (she/her) is a sociologist who helps teams innovate, design, and learn. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector and Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. Dr. Ladner has been an EPIC member since 2010, and has served on many committees, including as Co-Chair of the annual conference, and instructor since 2018. She has worked on dozens of advanced software projects at Microsoft, Amazon and many other client companies. She recently retired from Workday, an enterprise software company, as a Senior Principal Researcher studying the future of work. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and lives in the Bay Area with her husband.
Building Tools That Empower Researchers
Wednesday, August 21, 9:00 am–9:30 pm US Pacific Time, Broad Stage
How should research tools support us during this moment of foundations, displacement, and innovation? Julie Norvaisas, VP of UX at dscout, last spoke at EPIC in 2014. Since then, she has advanced her career from executive leadership in big tech, to now leading a team designing a tool that empowers top research teams. She will reflect on the intervening years and share insights from her current role researching researchers.
JULIE NORVAISAS has 25 years of experience in Design and Research. She first attended EPIC in 2009 and presented a paper in 2014. Now the VP of UX at dscout, she previously spent nine years growing and scaling the User Experience Research practice at LinkedIn, and prior to that, worked as an innovation, strategy, and product design consultant. At dscout, she leads the Design and Research teams, collaborating with the Product team to create tools for some of the world’s top Design and Research teams. She also focuses on community building and staying current with industry trends during these transformative times.