From North Stars to Guardrails: vision to values 3973 84 minutes

Vision and Values Masterclass: From North Stars to Guardrails

Values shape our behaviors. Vision aligns our direction. Yet too often, teams treat both as background noise— implied in roadmaps, buried in backlogs, or lost in delivery. Values are an issue of ‘alignment’ in AI. See: See Why Agentic AI needs user values 

We can no longer rely on values being implied. They need to be designed. Especially when designing for Inclusive AI.

In AI, drift shows up as bias or hallucination. In organizations, it shows up as cynicism, burnout, or “just following the process.” In both cases, it happens when nobody is checking alignment anymore.

“Drift” is an LLM behavior, where the language model erodes or ‘goes off-script’ over time. It’s important to design for it. Likewise, when values aren’t operational, they drift. And when they drift, culture follows. A poster on the wall doesn’t help you in a tough call. “Integrity” means nothing if it’s not part of your decision flow. Culture erodes when values aren’t in the room for trade-offs.

In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers will provide tested methods for bringing back values into AI design conversations (guardrails, drift) and to your team. He’ll connect vision (roadmaps) to values (principles) and share strategies for preventing cultural and AI drift while designing ethical and inclusive guardrails.

Why this matters:

AI is accelerating every decision, every interaction. Without grounded values, we risk automating bias, scaling harm, or following whoever shouts loudest—whether that’s a populist politician or a billionaire troll.

If you don’t design values into the work, you’re designing drift into your culture.
And in an AI-driven world, drift means bad experiences and compromised product development.

Join Frank to explore how to operationalise your organisation’s values, build meaningful guardrails, and design against drift. Because vision without values is chaos—and values without vision go nowhere.

Agenda: From North Stars to Guardrails: vision to values

1) Principles: How to operationalize your values at the design level 2) Guardrails: Defining guardrails for your design, AI strategy and your culture 3) Drift: Avoiding drift in LLM design and in your culture 4) Q&A

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s 25 years in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

35 min Visiontyping- Prototyping Future Scenari...

60 min Designing from Values, Driving with Visi...

57 min Why Contextual Inquiry? Contextual inqui...

Beyond Empathy: Designing with Lived Experience 3917 SEPTEMBER 26th  9:00AM PDT; 12:00PM EDT; 17:00PM BST (London); 18:00PM CET 22:30 PM IST 60 minutes

Designing with Lived Experience

Two problems with how products are built:

First, most product teams start with assumptions. We segment audiences, write personas, and sketch journeys, often looking at users’ world from a narrow ‘use case’ lens. Agile zooms us even closer: ‘As a user, I want to X, so I can Y”. In working in this way, we don’t get the opportunity to fully appreciate the underlying lived experience that compels users in one direction or another. Lived experience can help avoid the risk that users feel you got it wrong. It can illuminate your team on unappreciated bias, harm, power imbalances and more.

Second, when we do user research, we explore a problem space with empathy (Rethinking Empathy masterclass), extracting ‘user needs’ and capturing user requirements. Too often, we listen to people’s stories but still create solutions based on our own assumptions, priorities, or institutional logic. We “consult” with lived experience but don’t let it guide how solutions are defined or decisions are made.

The result? Services that may be functional but feel not quite right, extractive, or even harmful.

If we want services, products, or systems that truly work, we need to move beyond collecting lived experience as data. We need to design with lived experience as a partner in solutioning and co-creation.

About this Masterclass

A lived experience approach flips the script. Instead of beginning with what we think people need, we start where they actually are. We listen to their stories, trace their relationships, and understand the cultural forces at play. This isn’t just about empathy. It’s about shifting power.

In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers, will explore how lived experience can change how you approach the designing of products and services. He’ll show how beyond a data point, lived experience can replace classic approaches to Human Centered Design with a focus on appreciating the culture, identity, or relationships that shape someone’s daily experience.

Agenda- Beyond Empathy: Designing with Lived Experience Masterclass

• Lived Experience- Why Listening is not enough
• Identifying your Lived Experience and your user’s Lived Experience
• How to move your Human Centered Design approach to a more relational framework where stress cases and trauma-informed become default
• Q&A

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s 25 years in the field. How to access this masterclass...

• Open Circle: FREE (Get it FREE>> Join Open Circle)
• Inner Circle: Included in your $99 a month Inner Circle membership (50% discount available) for all events plus Digital Library 250+ videos, mentoring, hands-on workshops and more...

1 hr 20 min   Reading Circle- Design for R...

Download the Impactful Reporting workbook..

Impactful Reporting for UX part 2/3 3902 1 hr 5 min See part 1 here... Get the Workbook for Impactful Reporting

Impactful Reporting for UX

If stakeholders are not engaged, your reporting of User Research only gets you so far. Too many teams invest in research but fail to share findings in ways that spark action. Therefore, impactful reporting is critical. You need stakeholders to be moved to action. Like you support users with decision-making from e-commerce to healthcare, your internal audience needs their hearts and minds moved.

In Impactful Reporting for UX, UX veteran Frank Spillers will cover how to tailor your insights for different stakeholders, structure deliverables that land quickly, and use accessible formats that everyone can understand. He'll reveal secrets from decades and hundreds of user research reports, chock-full of lessons, his mistakes, and the results that led him to generate up to 300% revenue improvements on UX projects with his consultancy Experience Dynamics.

Moreover, in this workshop, you will learn when to tell deep context stories and when to keep your storytelling for UX stakeholders short and sweet.

 What we'll cover in this Impactful Reporting for UX workshop

• Types of reporting in UX research
• How to create reports that drive decisions: tips for memorable and actionable deliverable layouts
• Hands-on reporting activities (using real user research data)
• Tailoring your insights for different stakeholders
• Using AI in reporting- do's and don'ts for 2025
• Using storytelling strategically to impart contextual intelligence
• UX reporting checklist (one-pager)

About UX Inner Circle Workshops:

These workshops are live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions, with a more hands-on experience to learning the material presented. Online workshops are included as part of your UX Inner Circle membership. They allow a deep study of UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank Spiller's 25 years in the field.

66 min. Frank’s notes for this discussion...

Developing Your Improv Skills Workshop- part 2 3896 1 hr 23 min Part 2 of 2 Part 1 recording...

Workshop: Developing Your Improv Skills (for Designers)

Get out of your head. Get into the moment.

Improvisation is a professional skill and an essential soft skill in the UX designer and researcher repertoire.

Why it matters: Design work often demands quick thinking, active listening, and confidence in the unknown. This hands-on workshop uses improv techniques to help designers become more adaptive, collaborative, and creative. This matters especially in high-stakes conversations, service design and co-design sessions, and team sprints.

You'll practice core improv skills like "Yes, and...", active listening, and storytelling. Then apply them to real-world design situations. Expect to move, laugh, and build skills that stick.

Frank Spillers will build on past events like Improv for Design Innovation. In this two-part session you'll have the chance to practice and strengthen your improv skills.

Who should attend? Great for UXers, service designers, content folks, and anyone who works with people. No improv experience needed. Just curiosity and a willingness to play.

Topics we will cover in Developing Your Improv Skills:

• 5 Keys to Building the Improv Mindset
• Blending the Power 3: Storytelling, Systems Thinking and Improv
• Exercises to build confidence, listening and conversational fluidity
• Role-playing: service prototyping, personas and more?

About UX Inner Circle Workshops:

These workshops are live events facilitated by Frank Spillers, a leading UX and Service Design consultant and trainer. Workshops involve group activities and discussions, with more hands-on experience in learning the material presented. Online workshops are included as part of your UX Inner Circle membership. They allow a deep study of UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank Spillers two decades in the field. Join the monthly subscription UX Inner Circle to get this free plus 250+ videos of past events.

Why Join?

The UX Inner Circle is a professional learning community with a program of monthly events for UX researchers and designers, managers, and directors practicing UX and Service Design. We are a small group of currently 50 UX and Service Designers, Directors, and Researchers currently 100% working in UX. Attendees come from orgs like Harvard, Google, IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, Capital One, US Bank, healthcare, government, and non-profits. So why join?

• Refine or expand your current skills– push the boundaries of your learning.
• Get advice and guidance: Put a top-performing UX expert (Frank Spillers, CEO of award-winning UX firm Experience Dynamics and top instructor at Interaction Design Foundation) in your pocket. Stay connected with the latest on what Frank is thinking and prioritizing in UX and Service Design.
• Ask other UXIC colleagues anything on a dedicated private Slack channel. Also, collaborate during monthly meet-ups (Masterclasses).
• Get a promotion at work or upgrade your skills, portfolio, or process knowledge. This is the #1 reason folks keep subscribing to the UX Inner Circle.

See Pricing- starting at $99/ mo. or Inclusive Pricing (education/ nonprofit or living in the Global South) 50% discount

55 minutes No Time for Empathy Empathy gets a b...

60 min. Frank’s notes for this discussion...