A conversation with interaction designer Treasure Brown on how she got her start in UX, what trends she sees in terms of DE&I within the design industry landscape, and why she’s always been driven by impact work. 

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Q&A with Treasure Brown on UX, Impact and Design 

Treasure Brown joined frog a little over 6 months ago, and despite starting at the height of lockdowns and a global pandemic, she has made herself right at home in frog’s new virtual, global studio.
I spoke with Treasure over video chat about how she got her start in the world of UX and experience design, her journey through biomedical engineering, web design and advertising, and what drives her most as a designer. Aside from using design to solve everyday problems big and small, Treasure loves to sing and read tarot—that is when she’s not recording her own industry-focused podcast <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-creative-block/id1499067122" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Creative Block</a>.

Sydney Morrison: Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at frog. 
Treasure Brown: I am an interaction designer based in the frog Austin Studio. I learned about frog a few years ago from a previous New York intern who spoke so highly of her time here—she had so much enthusiasm for the work and really loved the company, so I decided to check it out. I was really in awe of all the work that was being done. I remember discovering the Yona project, and just being so impressed that this team was trying to solve a problem like re-designing the speculum. So, I made it my mission to come work here.
Then I met someone from the Talent Acquisition team at a conference called “Where are the Black Designers,” and I kind of just cold emailed her. I told her how my values aligned with the company and what I felt I could bring to the role and she got back to me! The rest was history!
SM: You mentioned that you finished your graduate school program recently. What were you studying? Where did you go and what was that process like? 
TB: I went to a program called VCU Brand Center, which is connected to Virginia Commonwealth University and they are really known for their foothold in the advertising industry, but I studied experience design, which was kind of natural for me because of my past experience in web design. 
SM: How did you make the shift from web design to experience design? 
TB: I actually started out wanting to be biomedical engineer, but I ended up studying visual communication, technology and marketing in undergrad, which is where I really learned about web design and coding. I had a professor there named Dr. Jerry Schnepp, who had created a sign language interface for the internet, which I thought was super cool. And then I ended up doing my senior project with him—we did a study on the usability of touchscreen prototypes. That was really my first taste of experience design. Then after graduating, I took a little break from it and worked in digital marketing, but I always just felt called back to it, because I wanted to help people in a way that wasn&#8217;t like being a doctor or a lawyer, but more in a creative capacity.  
SM: That’s super interesting, my background is also in biology and visual art, which also combines the creative, strategic and analytic. I’m interested to know how you discovered design as a field? 
TB: So, as you probably know, design in our community is not something that&#8217;s seen as like, a lucrative career. It wasn&#8217;t something that I was introduced to at a young age, it was something that I really had to kind of dig through the weeds to find. I&#8217;ve always been creative. My dad, he built computers, and my mom, she&#8217;s like, super crafty. So creativity and technology were always in my household.  
SM: Now that you’re working in design, what are some of the biggest misconceptions about it as an industry or field? 
TB: Prior to becoming a designer, I think the industry felt really gate-kept, in a way. I don’t think people really understand what design is or what designers do. From the outside looking in, I think the biggest misconception is that designers just make things pretty—and honestly, up until a year or two ago, I thought the same thing. But I’ve since discovered that design is really all about problem solving.  
SM: When we think about design as solving problems, how do you use design in your everyday life? What’s most inspiring to you about design as a tool for problem solving?   
TB: Design, for me, is a way to create things in the world—to solve for people’s everyday problems and to make life a little easier. But I&#8217;m a huge advocate that design is everywhere—it exists in everything. Take parents for example, they may not consider themselves to be designers, but they end up inadvertently creating rituals to support their families and they constantly solve for everyday problems, like preparing dinner, cleaning up, or organizing a household. They are designers because they are making it easier for their families to navigate life. This is a form of design that people don&#8217;t necessarily consider to be design in the traditional sense. There are so many other examples of this—like teachers, doctors, creatives. Whenever you are providing a solution to a problem, you are a designer. You may not consider it, but I call it design.

SM: I think it’s true that people are designing every day—it may not be web design, per se, but it’s still essentially using different strategies to solve problems. Given that the design industry can be somewhat exclusive or closed-off to some, what would you like to see change most in the design field in terms of accessibility and education?
TB: That’s a packed question! So, of course, first, you have the pipeline problem that exists in the design industry. Talent mostly comes from the same few renowned schools or institutions, but there are people who exist and that are innovative in their own way that maybe don&#8217;t have a design degree—or at least not one from the fancy schools. So I would love to see people being able to harness their creativity and be able to bring that into the industry.

Secondly what I’ve seen more and more is that we are pushing the needle on diversity, however, we’re lacking on the inclusion part. So, we’ve made room in these spaces, but then people have to bend and conform to fit in it, rather than making room for those people to feel comfortable enough to create freely. It’s not just design, it’s something I&#8217;ve seen in advertising, in the medical fields, everywhere. It’s like, you can come in, but we&#8217;re not going to make it comfortable for you to be here. So you&#8217;re going to want to leave. I think that’s something that has to change in order for people like me and you to stay. We have to make room and we have to allow people to feel comfortable enough to share their ideas.
SM: What are some of the most exciting programs you&#8217;ve been able to work on at frog?
TB: I&#8217;ve learned so much, I don&#8217;t even know where to begin! But I will say my first program was to create a connected medical device and I was extremely excited to work on it because the capstone I did for my master&#8217;s, was based on developing connected wearables for pregnant women. During that time, I did a lot of research on the inequity of care, where Black women are up to 11 times more likely to die during childbirth than other women. To be able to work on something that was similar was really exciting for me because I was able to take my knowledge and research that I had done in the past, apply it to a real-world problem, and actually see it come to life.
I’ve also learned a lot about the design process, as before it was always just me, you know, doing what I do. But in working with a team I&#8217;ve gotten a lot more structure within my process, which is weird to say because frog is not really a “structured” place, but I feel like I&#8217;m growing as a designer here.
SM: Have you hit any major challenges yet?  
TB: I think one of the biggest challenges that I personally struggle with is just having the confidence to not feel like an imposter. It’s always looming. But I know I have to just be myself and trust myself. I think it’s also really helpful to speak up and be open and honest with people about what’s going on. Being honest with people helped me feel more confident in what I was doing. Because it&#8217;s like, everybody goes through it—but girl, you got this!  
SM: You have a podcast about human centered design and how it can be applied to unconventional scenarios. I loved the recent episode where you talk about applying UX frameworks to romantic relationships. What inspired you to want to create a podcast addressing these everyday design challenges?  
TB: The Creative Block podcast started as the Justice podcast a little over a year ago with two of my classmates, Danielle Scott-Patxot and Jeremy Stokes. We came together to create thought leadership for our master&#8217;s thesis project. A through-line in our project revolved around empathy, so our podcast actually did not start with human-centered design, it was originally going to be a podcast about understanding and learning empathy, and how that applies to different problems in the world. We recorded a few episodes, and then realized that there were not many voices like ours in the podcast space, having the same types of conversations from the perspective of Black and brown creatives. So we continued to do it, and we’re in our fourth season now. As we continued to develop the podcast, we decided that we were going to take a new approach and really try to infuse more everyday topics into our content to make it more relatable to those people who may not be UX designers or may not even consider themselves designers or creatives at all. It’s been great to see how design influences your everyday life.
SM: What advice do you have for people looking to enter the design field?  
TB: My first piece of advice for people looking to get into design is that relationships are huge. The design world seems big, but it&#8217;s actually not that big. It’s important to create genuine relationships with people and create genuine connections. I&#8217;ve gotten to meet and collaborate with some of the most creative and amazing people that I probably would have never gotten to cross paths with.
Second: Do your research! Tons of people reach out to me and ask how I got my start in UX, and I always tell them, there are tons of disciplines under the UX umbrella. It&#8217;s very important that you know what type of work you want to do, because that&#8217;ll make all the difference when you&#8217;re looking at different companies to work for or different projects to freelance on. I knew I wanted to create impactful work, so I looked at companies that did that work. I was drawn to frog, for instance, because it was one of those companies that really pushes the needle on innovation and always has people at the center of what they do. For me, when I work on a project, I want to know that it will influence society in a way that makes it better and pushes it forward rather than just being cool or only for entertainment’s sake; real impact is what matters to me.

For more resources on UX and design, check out more of Treasure’s recs:  
<a href="https://uxdesign.cc/">The UX collective</a> on medium does an amazing job of breaking down new emerging tech, and all sorts of things that relate to UX.  
Podcasts—including <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-creative-block/id1499067122">The Creative Block</a> by Treasure &amp; co, and <a href="https://www.uinarrative.com/about">The UI Narrative</a> by Tolu Ajayi, who is also amazing at breaking down different disciplines under the UX umbrella, and different applications of frameworks and methodologies.  
<a href="https://www.instagram.com/ollyandfranc/?hl=en">@Ollyandfranc</a> is a duo from the UK on Instagram who provides tons of resources for new designers or people looking to get into design.

Sydney Morrison

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5 tips to consider when designing your next virtual event


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Virtual Events Are the New Normal

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to keep us all socially distanced, virtual events, webinars and conferences have become an essential way for organizations to transition away from in-person experiences. At the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the entire live event and entertainment industry seemed to pause and with it came staggering <a href="https://www.livedesignonline.com/business-people-news/2020-pandemic-impact-covid-19-live-events-industry" target="_blank" rel="noopener">economic impact</a>. With this transition, and in typical design fashion, we saw an opportunity to think about how the in-person event experience. We got to work redesigning virtual events to include innovative and interactive online end-to-end experiences that would build on essential IRL event elements, including virtual spaces to share stimulating content with attendees, remote tools to foster meaningful interactions and relationships between participants, and virtual spaces for attendees to network and connect. We realized that there was an enormous opportunity to design and build unique virtual emotional experiences by leveraging our remote <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/product-service-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">technology</a>, <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/growth-strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">strategy</a>, and <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/customer-experience-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">customer experience</a> capabilities. 
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How can designers impact the virtual event space? 
When we received a request from one of the largest media companies to develop a virtual event strategy and experience that would have a lasting impact on participants, we were able to put our “human-centered” lens to the test. Rather than simply trying to recreate the feeling of “in-person” while we’re all quite obviously remote, we dug deep into the objectives of our client’s event requests and needs in order to create concepts for digital products and features that could be easily integrated into common video streaming services. One major goal was to limit screen fatigue and increase virtual engagement; think AI chatbots, AR Totems and virtual conference stages. 
Already, there have been excellent examples of innovation in the virtual events arena. The online gaming platform Fortnite launched a completely riveting virtual experience where people could join in with personalized virtual avatars from around the globe to enjoy a new kind of musical journey with <a href="https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/astronomical" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Travis Scott</a>, who virtually performed the world premiere of his new album. And when it comes to professional sports, the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/24/21337326/nba-microsoft-teams-together-mode-basketball-virtual-experience-fans" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NBA has made a swift virtual “restart”</a> by integrating new technology into the fan experience, including <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/microsoft-teams-together-mode/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Together Mode,”</a> which uses AI to segment and integrate screens so people appear to be closer to each other in the virtual crowd. Fans are also now able to contribute to the game by “digitally cheering” and clapping via their phones on an NBA app. All together, these experiential elements elevate the virtual experience quite gracefully.
In the months since global lockdowns have taken hold, frog has helped multiple organizations make the transition from live to virtual event planning. Although it had not been one of our core capabilities before the pandemic, we (like so many of our client partners) were able to quickly pivot, given that our human-centered approach to experience design offers unique tools to create memorable and meaningful virtual event experiences. Below are some of the most important insights we’ve gained about the planning and execution of virtual events.

Just because your organization has a go-to app for internal meetings doesn’t mean it should also be your go-to app for an external virtual event. To identify the correct platform for hosting your virtual event, consider the audience that will attend the event: Is there a standard virtual platform used in the industry or age group? Are they primarily expecting to receive information or are they expecting to participate and engage with speakers and other attendees? Answering such questions will help you pick the platform that works best for your audience and your event.

Identify the appropriate virtual platform

As we said, planning a virtual event requires a different set of skills, tools and expertise than planning a live event. That means the people helping to plan, organize and manage a virtual event should be different, too. Be sure to include IT and technology team members on the virtual event team, along with content and event producers to help you identify and troubleshoot problems before (or during) your virtual event.

Build a virtual event management team

In the early phases of planning your virtual event, you should identify the core values, content and goals of the event. These factors will affect every aspect of your event design, from the platform you pick to host the event to the sessions and activities that fill the schedule. We’ve found that applying design principles and practices (as well as collaboration software like <a href="https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&amp;ai=DChcSEwj_ieD1yKDsAhUUj8gKHSTtAtMYABAAGgJxdQ&amp;ae=2&amp;ohost=www.google.com&amp;cid=CAESQOD2AKhD2uDROCgVTqHn7ZBvIp3ZihrJDqMw1C_csDAOC_NpZ0lcGFG7X49XMhQy4RpDS6ackuHR4x54tj4ga6U&amp;sig=AOD64_0aYsaAhnGD0rCyOvhfcgQ5BrYgsQ&amp;q&amp;adurl&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi11tH1yKDsAhVOhOAKHXGfAg8Q0Qx6BAghEAE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Miro</a>) during the planning process results in more coherent, impactful and productive event strategies and frameworks.

Get creative with your event strategy

By this point, we’re all familiar with “Zoom fatigue.” Luckily, there are plenty of tools for making your virtual event more participatory, memorable and engaging. Creating virtual breakout rooms or other themed non-session rooms for participants to have side conversations or meet by chance is one way to help recreate the spontaneous possibilities of a live event. But you can also embrace virtual spaces by exploring fun features like event-specific filters or experiences like collaborative online games.

Make sure to engage your attendees

If you’ve been working remotely during the pandemic, you know that simple technology issues like one participant’s poor internet connection can easily derail a virtual meeting or process. But in addition to planning for such typical technological complications, virtual event organizers must also anticipate new and unfamiliar challenges that can turn a seamless session into a frustrating experience. Your event planning team should try to outline scenarios and responses ahead of time to make sure there’s a plan in place to keep the event running.
In the past year, so many of our routines, tools and expectations have changed. We at frog have needed to adapt along with everyone else, but our diverse capabilities and expertise as experience designers have enabled us to create innovative, unique and memorable virtual experiences for our new remote normal. Partner with frog today to take your organization’s virtual events to the next level.

Expect the unexpected

Five Tips for Virtual Experience Design 

Ioni Gliati

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The strategies used to adapt to the current crisis could be the key to long-term market disruption


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Finding a “New Normal” in an Age of Disruption

The coronavirus pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the global economy leading to an unprecedented time of disruption. From new ways of working and communicating to entire business model pivots, COVID-19 has significantly impacted communities around the world. The business landscape as we know it will inevitably be shaped by the effects of the current crisis for years to come. So, in this time of ultimate and indiscriminate disruption, what can incumbent brands do to not just survive, but thrive for years to come?
In our latest insight report, <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/the-disruptor-playbook" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Disruptor Playbook</a>, we share five disruptor strategies that brands can leverage to keep up with customers’ changing expectations. Below we dive into a few business trends we are seeing during this unprecedented time, and what companies can do to pivot, make an impact and ultimately succeed in offering real value to their customers.
With social distancing in effect, customers are looking for more ways to connect socially through video and interactive platforms
When Microsoft Teams released a new feature that allowed users to switch to virtual backgrounds, we frogs were ecstatic to say the least. But why does this customer experience play have such a powerful impact on brand perception and loyalty? Customers find value in features they can control. With the video communication market densely populated and remote education and work becoming essential to flatten the pandemic curve, the competition for video communication tools is getting fierce.
As a major player in the space, Zoom has created a strategic selling model that offers free 40 minute video calls, screenshare, and recording for up to 100 people. But Zoom also doesn’t require an account or a subscription to use the platform. By lowering the point of entry, they’ve unbundled the customer journey and increased chances that users will sign up for paid subscriptions, which offer additional features like unlimited meeting duration, cloud storage, and even reporting. But while Zoom has been the platform of choice for many, competitors are starting to catch up amid news of security concerns around video software. With privacy and security concerns on the rise, users may begin to prioritize services that offer security over just ease-of-use. 
The streaming war wages on at an all time high
With populations all over the world stuck inside or social distancing, streaming services are becoming more prominent not just in our own lives, but in our virtual social lives. According to a study by<a href="https://www.omdia.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Omdia</a>, online streaming services are likely to see growth of +12 percent over the course of the year. 
Even before global social distancing took hold, the market for streaming content had become quite competitive, meaning companies need to find ways to differentiate. Some new entrants like the mobile streaming platform, Quibi, are trying to change the way we watch. But big players like Netflix ad Hulu are still winning out based on the breadth and quality of their content alone. Aside from content and price point, the next frontier for streaming will be ease of use and overall experience. New features like social-watching, more curated selections, and control over profiles and viewing experiences will set the next generation of winning services apart.  
Telemedicine and digital diagnoses are now must-haves, not nice-to-haves
As social distancing becomes the new norm, digital tools for healthcare are becoming the only way for many people to receive non-COVID medical attention. Disruptor companies like<a href="https://goforward.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Forward</a>, a healthcare company that uses data focused on preventative health,<a href="https://snap.md/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> SnapMD</a>, and Nutriremedy are creating services and innovative customer experience models to treat and monitor patients remotely. These telehealth companies are offering comprehensive services such as virtual diagnosis, accessible prescriptions, clinical notes, and patient check-ins, which are crucial while social distancing measures are still in effect, but may also prove to be winners in the long-term as well. 
In fact, a recent <a href="https://research2guidance.com/product/impact-assessment-survey-how-corona-impacts-the-global-digital-health-industry/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">survey</a> on how coronavirus will affect the digital health industry found that respondents firmly believe the pandemic will result in the acceleration and wide adoption of digital health solutions. Startups and new entrants may have a leg up on legacy healthcare companies by being agile enough to adapt and cultivate emerging technology, but incumbents can also prepare for the future by providing relevant and personalized customer services to patients in need. The strategic play for healthcare brands is to not just focus on the buzziest new technology, but to understand where the gaps in the current services or markets are, and find ways to fill them with the right products or services that will add real value to patients&#8217; overall health and wellbeing. 
Brand success in the time of disruption
In a time of disruption, companies  making proactive decisions to create unique customer experiences that provide real value will see lasting impact on the success of their brand. The brands that are able to find innovative ways to shift business strategies based on the economic climate and needs of their customers will continue to disrupt the industries in which they live—and perhaps even those adjacent. 
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As a Business Development Associate, Sydney applies design thinking to complex business challenges. Through strategy, marketing, communications, and analytics she is able to uncover unique opportunities for frog and clients in unconventional and strategic ways.

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