Two groundbreaking talks about inclusive design and research.
Making space for difficult conversations
How UX and behavioural science helped include customers experiencing vulnerability.
How do you research difficult experiences without making the research experience more difficult for participants? In this talk, UX Designer Olga Drewnowska and Behavioural Scientist Bryony Williams from Standard Life share how their collaboration helped pave the way for conducting sensitive research more safely, thoughtfully and inclusively, and how it increased confidence in tackling similar research across the organisation.
Using examples from serious ill health, bereavement and research with visually impaired users, they share lessons learned and practical approaches for engaging vulnerable audiences. Attendees will leave with ideas they can apply within their teams and organisations to make often overlooked voices more visible and better represented in the design process.
Olga Drewnowska is a UX Designer of 6 years at Standard Life, specialising in making financial services flows simpler and more modern on both app and web, with a strong focus on accessibility and user research.
Bryony Williams is a Behavioural Scientist at Standard Life. She has 5 years of experience helping teams understand customer behaviour and apply behavioural science to improve customer experiences and outcomes.
404: Pension Not Found
How patriarchal systems shape women’s financial futures.
Every pension product carries traces of the people who built it, their expectations and their idea of what a “normal” user looks like. These assumptions quietly shape services that exclude women. In this session, Afreen Saulat will use lived examples to show how historical patriarchal systems, from coverture laws to gendered credit scoring, have embedded bias into pensions, mortgages and algorithmic underwriting. She will offer pragmatic solutions for auditing sampling and labelling bias, and share how building smaller, higher quality AI models can reduce discrimination. Participants will leave with a framework for historical impact auditing and practical tools to take back to their teams.
Afreen is a digital anthropologist and founder of 100kicks, a creative research consultancy helping teams design with care. Her work explores how systemic bias embeds itself into financial services and what designers can do about it. She has spoken at MozFest and writes the Fiction Informs Reality newsletter on imagination and futures.