UXDX Community:From Design Thinking to Product Decisions and AI Evaluation

Designers are not just shaping interfaces, they’re shaping how product decisions get made. In modern cross-functional teams, the real leverage of design lies in improving how design, product, and engineering collaborate to explore problems, test assumptions, and move forward with clarity.
In this talk, Dian shows how designers can apply design thinking beyond the design phase to influence the entire product development process. Through practical examples, including mini design sprints, cross-functional workshops, and shared discovery practices, he demonstrates how involving non-designers earlier can lead to better alignment, faster learning, and more confident decisions.
The core idea is simple: when designers make their thinking visible and collaborative, they don’t just improve outcomes, they improve how teams work together to reach them.

As AI agents move from novelty to core product functionality, UX teams are stepping into an unexpected new responsibility: designing and managing evaluation systems that shape how AI behaves.
In this talk, Melissa Wittmayer shares practical insights from building multi-layered evaluators— trust, momentum, and sentiment —to monitor and improve AI agent experiences in production. She breaks down how designers can create meaningful evaluation frameworks, integrate them into existing UX workflows, collaborate with cross-functional partners, and support teams through the mindset shift this work requires.
Attendees will leave with a clear picture of why UX is uniquely positioned to guide this evolution, how to overcome the initial overwhelm, and how these evaluators open up entirely new avenues for design impact. The result: a more accountable, measurable, and human-centered AI ecosystem.