Debbie Levitt | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Debbie Levitt, CEO of Ptype UX & Product Design Agency, has been a UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a “serial contractor” who lived in the Bay Area for most of this decade, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Oracle, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.

Debbie is a speaker and trainer who has presented at conferences including eBay’s Developer Conference, PayPal’s Developer Conference, UXPA, and WeAreDevelopers. She is an O’Reilly published author and one of few instructors on the planet recommended by Axure. Her newest training program is DevOps ICU, which teaches non-UX roles how to measurably improve DevOps results by correctly integrating UX practitioners and processes.

Outside of UX work, and sometimes during UX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave. She’s now a Digital Nomad splitting her time between the USA and rural Italy.

* All of my presentations are available in session lengths as well as in interactive workshop lengths. Just ask for what you need!

* I write all of my own material and can write or customize a presentation or training just for your company or event.

Learn more at https://DebbieLevitt.com

View all of my free and paid self-paced video courses at https://Ptype.Academy

Current position (3)

UX Designer & Strategist

Ptype UX & Product Design Agency

Author of "DevOps, Product Design, and UX" column

CMSWire

Freelance UX Strategist and Designer

Toptal

Degrees (1)

Music

Tufts University

1989 to 1993

Presentations

Presentations (6)

DevOps ICU: (Correctly) Integrating UX, Product Design, and Agile

UX is driving you crazy, a black throwing off timelines and killing ideas. UX doesn’t seem Lean or Agile. They’re too siloed and not collaborating well with engineering. Can’t anybody make wireframes? Can’t we circumvent or exclude these people?

Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-Centered Design process are good investments that more than pay for themselves.

This session will explain how the UX process fits into Agile, saves companies money, augments DevOps goals, and increases customer satisfaction.

This session is also called DevOps ICU: Improving DevOps Results by Integrating UX Practitioners and Processes when for a DevOps audience.

Let's Not Congr-Agile-ate Ourselves Just Yet

Agile teams and organizations need to focus on so much more than their software development methodology, flavor of Agile, or measurements of agility. If we’re not building what is valuable to and desired by customers, who cares if estimations were accurate, productivity was good, and efficiency was glorious? This is where UX specialists shine and are valuable investments.

Debbie Levitt’s stories of being a 20+ year UX specialist in a Fortune 500 that misunderstood, belittled, circumvented, and overruled User Experience specialists will have you laughing, cringing, and wondering if these disasters are happening in your organization… and if your DevOps are in the intensive care unit.

Stop Evangelizing UX - And What To Do Instead

No other role at your company spends time and effort evangelizing themselves. Developers aren’t making PowerPoints to explain to execs why it’s important to hire specialized, trained developers. QA isn’t holding meetings to ask for enough time to cycle through their complete and important process. It’s just us and it’s making us look weird and whiny. More importantly, it’s rarely working.

This session will examine the pitfalls of evangelism and what actions we can take instead. We’ll be focusing on who and how many UX experts we should hire, the role of UX managers and leadership, processes, workflows, tools, and improving collaboration between UX and our cross-functional teammates. We’ll also learn how to measure the positive effects correctly integrating UX practitioners and processes has on DevOps.

How UX Solves Problems for Developers

The execution of a product's design is often more important than the original idea. And very often, developers and dev teams are left feeling like they just have to build what the client asks for, even if it's a poor idea or poor execution.

Adding UX to the process can be a winner for you and your client or startup.

Remote Work: Efficiency, Focus, Tools, and Techniques

Remote work! Where do you start? What are the tools and techniques that will help you get it right? Who is it wrong for?

The Four Horsemen of Bad UX®

An easy way to explain bad UX in a product is what we like to call, “The Four Horsemen of Bad UX.” These are the things that announce the possible downfall of your site, page, or mobile app. It’s not enough to say, “Users aren’t happy.” Categorizing the unhappiness helps guide the solutions.

The Four Horsemen of Bad UX® is my registered trademark.

Workshops (1)

DevOps ICU: Improving DevOps Results by (Correctly) Integrating UX

90 minutes

Agile methodologies lack the details of how UX fits into software dev projects. Some suggest that a Product Manager describing features is enough for developers, UX should train others to do their specialized jobs, or excluding UX experts solves them being “too siloed” and “not collaborative.” This happens with no other role in software dev; it’s hurting culture, efficiency, and productivity, and creating poor products for customers.