Presentations: Design & User Experience

Effective UI Download sample chapter from “Effective UI“
By Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, and Robb Wilson

Design is your site’s front door. If you have a clean and clear design, people sail in. If your gateway is cluttered, you risk confusing or alientating potential users. But sites have competing needs, especially with an ever growing onslaught of new content that needs to be included. This track focuses on best practices and clever solutions to design challenges on the web.

Sessions are being confirmed daily. Please check back often to see the latest program content.

Blurring the Lines: From Human Centered Design to Customer Driven Development

Alon Salant (Carbon Five), Jef Cunningham (IDEO), Rob Spiro (Aardvark), Maria Giudice (Hot Studio, Inc. ), Moira Gunn (TechNation and BioTechNation)

Designers are being asked for iteration and agility through software development, while a human-centered approach is now increasingly a requirement for development teams and business owners. We’ll focus on the emerging integration of these extremes and showcase the new ideas, tools, and techniques that are evolving into an increasingly overlapping and blurred terrain of conflict and collaboration.

By the Book: Examining the Art of Building Great User Experiences in Software

John McRee (EffectiveUI)

Unlike building a bridge where engineers can precisely plan ahead for the challenges ahead of them, the process of software development is more comparable to that of war, where the battlefield is complex, dynamic and unpredictable. Using examples from his new book, published by O’Reilly Media, John McRee will discuss “Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software.”

Designing for Play

Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!)

It's already a commonplace that social design has a lot to learn from game design but less has been said about the role of play in digital experiences. After childhood, play rarely "just happens," but you can design for it. Just like games, musical instruments are designed to be played. The goal is not to make the musician fail. The trick is to marry a range of freedoms to serious constraints.

Designing Reputation Systems

F. Randall Farmer (MSB Associates), Bryce Glass (Manta Media, Inc.)

Designing web reputation systems is hard and, inevitably, some of your quickest, most common-sense inclinations will turn out to be… well… wrong. If you've ever thought "All I Need is 5 Stars", or "Competition is Always Good" then you may have fallen prey to a reputation "think-o."

Designing Social Interfaces

Erin Malone (Tangible UX), Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!)

Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. We will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.

Hit It (Hard) with the Pretty Stick

Jenny Lam (Jackson Fish Market)

Most folks building websites and software will nod their heads in agreement when someone makes the argument that visual design is critical to a great experience. And yet, visual design is often applied after the fact to an already poorly designed website, and created by the lowest paid person on the team.

Social Gold: Game Design of Farmville

Amitt Mahajan (Zynga)

Amitt Mahajan will discuss how to design and develop big social games that reach millions of users daily. Examples from the Facebook game FarmVille and Zynga’s other top games, are used to illustrate ways to capture large audiences and retain them.

The Right Way to Wireframe

Russ Unger (Draftfcb), Todd Zaki Warfel (Messagefirst), Will Evans (Semantic Foundry), Fred Beecher (Evantage Consulting)

This workshop will be presented in 2 parts and will revolve around a single design problem. When the workshop begins, the leaders will present the design problem to the participants. In these groups, attendees will tackle the design problem through sketching and review sessions. At the end of the sketching activity, the teams will each choose their best sketch and will refine a final solution.

The UX-Driven Startup: Crafting an Effective Experience Vision

Alexa Andrzejewski (Adaptive Path)

What kind of experience do you want to create? Having a concrete answer can set your startup apart and drive design decisions. Whether you have an established product or an idea you can't wait to get off the ground, this workshop will equip you to craft a concrete experience vision that can drive development and ensure that the experience surrounding your product is not accidental.

Using Gameplay to Make a Big, Boring, Complex Industry Approachable and Fun

Cordell Ratzlaff (Kapitall)

Few things are as uninspiring as a traditional financial services web site. Borrowing techniques from video games and social networking, Kapitall aims to transform the way we learn, collaborate and trade. We’ll show how we designed a user experience that gets people actively engaged in what many find to be a complicated and intimidating process.

Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

Jeff Veen (Typekit)

After 15 years of contenting ourselves with system fonts, type in images, or hacks with Flash, we can finally use real fonts on the web. With broad browser support for CSS @font-face, a new era of web typography is dawning. But that's only the beginning. New technical hurdles, new font formats, and new licensing restrictions need to be considered.