Austin Design Week Presentations: 2019 & 2020
Austin Design Week (ADW) is an incredible resource for the Central Texas design and creative community. Because it’s free and open to such a wide range of disciplines, ADW helps increase accessibility and collaboration. As part of a community-focused company, I felt it was important for us to share what we were learning with the larger Austin creative community.
I organized ADW talks in 2019 & 2020. Below, you’ll find an outline of each talk we gave.
Austin Design Week Talk 2020 – Turning on a Dime: Pivoting Your Business to Empower Communities During Times of Crisis
In 2020, I organized a talk for the 5th annual Austin Design Week (November 9-13th, 2020) about Favor’s COVID-19 product and program work. My goal was to share best practices about how to create great products in times of crisis.
Talk Description
In tech, rapid change is inevitable. But in rare instances, you hit inflection points where your business can be changed in ways that lift up your community. Many businesses have experienced some of these key moments during COVID-19 and other recent events in our communities and the world. In these moments, you have to decide to either maintain the status quo or pivot your product and service offerings to support the people around you.
At Favor, we’ve always been about delivery, but in 2020, we’ve been laser-focused on how to pivot our core offerings to support our fellow Texans.
This talk will focus on the challenges of designing products and services in these moments. We’ll focus on how we’ve risen to the occasion at Favor by walking you through a few case studies from our recent Products & Programs. Along the way, we’ll offer some key insights about how you might approach these kinds of challenges.
How DID OUR TALK FIT with the ADW 2020 theme "Embrace _"?
We’re focusing on helping as many people as possible in our local communities work, live, and thrive. We want every organization (for-profit tech companies like ours included) to own the responsibility they have to their communities. We have some key takeaways from how we’ve been able to rise to the occasion over the last few months. We’d love to share what we’ve learned about embracing ambiguity and being willing to listen to your community to discover the best ways to help.
In 2019, I organized a talk for the 4th annual Austin Design Week (November 4 - 8th, 2019). My goal was to focus in on how my team was designing persuasively for our independent contractors at Favor and the unique challenges that arise when you design for users that you can influence but don’t directly control.
Talk Description
The gig economy is now composed of 60 million workers and it's growing at an incredible pace. As designers, we must constantly ask how to best design for a completely flexible, on-demand workforce - users that we can influence, but don’t directly control.
At Favor, designing for our independent contractors is at the center of everything we do. The beauty of the rise of on-demand work is that people have the freedom to work when and where they want, but this presents unique business challenges that arise from increasing autonomy and flexibility among workers.
This talk focuses on the challenges of designing for this space and includes tips about how to design a great and engaging customer experience when you can’t directly control the full user experience from end-to-end. We also touched on the legal constraints that make designing for a flexible workforce difficult.
How DID this fit with the ADW 2019 theme "Make Space"?
We at Favor focus on helping as many people in our local communities work, live, and thrive as possible. There is a history of companies exploiting on-demand workers, though, so it was more important than ever that we design with the intent of growing and supporting this growing community of flexible workers and share what we learned. We believe that it’s possible to design for a flexible workforce without being evil and wanted to share these best practices with others.
Due to COVID-19, ADW went digital this year, allowing us to share our talk with the Austin creative community and beyond.
