speaker lineup
Norah Leibow
TALK
Good enough is better: Why letting go of merit makes us better human-centered designers
Imagine it: there’s no screen. Your end users are developers. The scope is so ambiguous that you need to first surface the motivations from inside the code—swimming out into a technical, nebulous sea to find the human problem underneath. Norah will guide the audience through deeply technical problems where a designer isn’t usually found, and posit that this is exactly where we belong.
The gap between dense technical problems and end user products is widening in the age of AI. Norah reimagines the tidy handoffs our design processes were built around and instead proposes how to solve for outcomes in spaces that may not have a beautiful interface. She will share that the tools needed are the ones we are already familiar with, they just produce different outcomes: a journey map that follows data instead of a person, or a system instead of screen flows.
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Norah Leibow (she/her) is a designer/researcher at Nava, where she is a design lead for a technical, federal project team and founder of the Developer Experience Community of Practice.
She came to technical design from the built environment: at Arup she bridged digital innovation and architectural lighting, designing UX for two digital twin platforms and serving as global workplace lighting lead for Salesforce. She co-authored Nava’s DevEx framework, and has spent over a decade working in highly technical teams to deliver human-centered products.