UX Australia 25 Session 7

Many UX practitioners excel at understanding users but struggle to get strategic buy-in. Our valuable insights often fail to influence key decisions because they aren't framed using the language of business impact. We advocate passionately for the user, but is HCD always the most persuasive approach for executives? To bridge this gap, this talk focuses on the crucial mindset shift required to become a strategic partner. We'll concentrate on three core skills: building Business Acumen to grasp the bigger business picture, using Storytelling with Data to craft compelling narratives, and developing Proactive Alignment Seeking to pinpoint where user needs fuel business goals. Through real-world examples, you'll get practical techniques to reframe findings, articulate value persuasively, and find that crucial sweet spot. You’ll leave equipped to increase your influence and strengthen UX's role in helping your organisation succeed.

There are incredibly effective principles and patterns for government service and content design. However, complex services like statutory planning have historically resisted these same principles, patterns (and hard work) that have made other digitised services feel simple. At myLot, we’ve made headway by using large-language models (LLMs) to deal with the immense number of variables that come with a seemingly straightforward question like “can I build a shed in my backyard?”, but it’s brought with it a host of new design challenges and nuanced trade-offs. What about statutory planning justifies the use of LLMs? How do we make the affordances of LLM interactions clear, while still leveraging government service design patterns that we know to work? How do we design good content when it’s all generated by an LLM? And how do we make sure that content is not only clear, but also accurate?

What if you can see something is broken—but you don’t have the power to fix it? This talk explores what it means to practice service design, not from a position of authority, but from the ground. Drawing on 20+ years of work with professional services firms navigating complexity, competing agendas, and cultural inertia, I’ll share what actually works when you’re trying to improve systems without a formal mandate. We’ll unpack common misconceptions (“People are just resistant to change” “that’s a leadership issue”), reframe what influence looks like in real workplaces, and explore how people, strategy, and systems interact beneath the surface of process maps and plans. We will end with 10 practical ways to lead service design without power—and a reminder that culture is the real strategy, and trust is your most strategic tool.

This talk explores how UX research can draw inspiration from futures design practices to transform insights into narrative-driven stories that engage and inspire both stakeholders and team members. Through examples from global case studies and Designit's own work, this session addresses the common challenge many researchers face - ensuring their insights don't get disregarded. By leveraging practices like design fiction, speculative prototyping and visual storytelling, research findings can become powerful catalysts that foster empathy, drive innovation, and spark meaningful change.