About Aleks Melnikova
Aleks is a co-founder of Cosmic Velocity, a London-based service design agency who design inclusive digital products, services and training. Their mission is to make the world more inclusive by design.
Before starting Cosmic, Aleks has led various design teams across top UX/product design agencies such as ORM, Foolproof, BIO, Radley Yeldar, Publicis Poke and Inviqa (ex-Webcredible), delivering successful products and services with and for many clients in travel, finance, real estate, and healthcare, as well as systems for internal audiences. She has degrees in both Art and Service Design, which have expanded her confines, so she loves to experiment with new methods, approaches and tools.
Tools she has designed and launched helped people and teams find books for kids with diverse representation, understand how to work with dyslexia, find inclusive imagery and content and make research activities inclusive. Her current area of interest and focus is inclusive research and ways to lower the barriers for researchers to be able to advocate for it and conduct it.
Demystifying Inclusive Research
It's time for tangible inclusion. Making your research inclusive is paramount, otherwise, how are you designing for the real world?
Inclusive research is not a mysterious art and is not unattainable. One of the main barriers we see for designers today is the lack of material on inclusive research techniques, ways of framing questions and the setup needed to conduct truly welcoming sessions for a diverse range of participants.
This talk will help you understand exactly how to plan and conduct research with participants with disabilities, how not to be afraid to do so, and how to feel empowered to interact with the diverse populations we design for. We will talk a lot about our human differences, differences that are often a part of our identity, differences that are often forgotten when designing products and services, and can prevent us from equal participation in those. How might we better understand and design for these differences?
Aleks will take you through everything you need to know from recruitment, planning, moderating, and environment set-up to analysis in order for you to conduct your own research with a diverse and truly inclusive audience.
Aleks is speaking on day one, June 18th
Day one focuses on UX Research.