Scott Snibbe | CEO, Eyegroove
Music's Visual Future
What is the successor to the LP, MTV, and YouTube? How will music meld with video, graphics, and interactivity? And will any of it make money? Snibbe will present some history, and current examples of interactive and visual digital music experiences, along with the debut of Eyegroove, a new social visual music platform that will be released around the time of this talk.
Scott Snibbe is an entrepreneur and media artist, founder of Eyegroove and Snibbe Interactive. His award-winning music apps have featured collaborations with Björk, Beck, Philip Glass, Metric, and Passion Pit. He was one of the early developers of Adobe After Effects, a pioneer in gesture-based interactive experiences, and is a renowned innovator in interactive art and human-computer interaction research.
Ethan Marcotte | Independent web designer
Rolling up our Responsive Sleeves
We’ve discussed at length the fundamentals of responsive design, combining fluid grids and media queries to create more flexible, device-agnostic sites. So does that mean responsive design is a magic formula that solves all our problems? Well, no. But thankfully, we didn’t get into web design because we wanted to be bored.
In this session we’ll review strategies for handling trickier elements that’d make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Attendees will understand the fundamentals of responsive design.
- Attendees will gain some technical strategies for tackling technical challenges in a responsive layout.
- Attendees will have a framework for discussing design changes in a responsive layout.
Steve Portigal | Founder, Portigal Consulting
Interviewing Users: Uncovering Compelling Insights
Find out how to interview users to mine the most useful and accurate information for your design.
Interviewing users is undeniably one of the most valuable and commonly used user research tools. Yet sometimes we forget that in order to gain the most useful insights, we need to continually practice and develop this skill. People tend to “wing it” and without good interviewing skills, insights may be inaccurate or reveal nothing new, suggesting the wrong design or business responses.
This session will look at how to frame the research problem so it has the most impact on the team and their design. Steve Portigal will explore the importance of rapport-building, offer new listening techniques and review different types of questions and question types. He’ll also devote some time to discussing what type of participants to recruit and how to find them.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Framing a research problem.
- User insights to drive innovation, not just evaluation.
- How to ask open-ended generative questions.
Nick Myers | Director of User Experience Design, Fitbit
Spanning the world: Designing for multiple platforms
The moment you design for more than one platform life gets really complicated. And the problem is compounded by new gadgets entering our world every day with different form factors, sensors, and usage patterns. Shooting for consistency can be a great start for a multi-platform approach but when you decide to design for a diverse population and your mission is to help them live better you’re in for a wild ride.
Learn how to create a multi-platform system that supports many diverse human needs and different contexts. Hear how to design complex features across multiple devices that interact seamlessly together. And learn how to help people have a better, smarter experience across their world.
Indhira Rojas | Product Designer, Medium
Bits and Pieces: A Systems Approach to Web Design for Brands
Find out how you can approach web design to support and enable continuous brand and product development.
Digital brands are dynamic, each aspect in constant iteration and evolution. In this session, Indhira Rojas will cover different case studies and work strategies that utilize a systems thinking approach to web design. She’ll also offer tips on using style guides and pattern libraries to accelerate the web design process and enable brand and product documentation.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Learn how a systems approach to web development leads to more effective product/brand development.
- Find out how to use style guides and pattern libraries to document the components of the product or brand, enabling iteration and a shared resource.
- Discover how these principles can be effective and beneficial for small projects as well as complex brands with many components.
Tuesday, November 18
Sara Wachter-Boettcher | Content Strategist, Editor and Writer
Orchestrating Content
Templates, trainings, threats: Sara Wachter-Boettcher has tried everything to get content from clients sooner—and mobile hasn’t made things easier. But in this talk, she’ll teach you practical approaches and activities anyone can use to bring harmony to the content process.
Instead of planning pages, now we’re asking stakeholders to prioritize and manage a million bits of modular content. So how do we keep our subject-matter experts from feeling overwhelmed, prevent carousel-obsessed executives from endless homepage arguments, and get the content we need to make design and development decisions?
The answer is in using content strategy as a means to orchestrate, not dictate. Orchestra conductors don’t control all the instruments or the people playing them. Instead, they:
- Unify performers. Learn how to get your ensemble cast of content producers rallied around shared priorities and goals from the start—and see how understanding their politics and processes can improve design and development, too.
- Listen and shape. Having a great ear will help you hear problems sooner, so you can better allocate time and resources to the areas that will most shape the content’s overall quality.
- Keep the tempo. It’s hard to focus on the notes in front of you and think about where the song is heading. Learn to help your players stay focused on the details, while showing them how their part helps the whole piece come together.
Best of all, you don’t have to be a content expert to be your project’s conductor. Don’t miss this session if you’re a member of a multi-person content team!
3 Main Take-Aways:
- Unify performers.
- Listen and shape.
- Keep the tempo.
Mike Kruzeniski | Director of Experience Design, Twitter
Presentation Presentation
Giving presentations is an activity that many designers do not enjoy, so it is often avoided, not practiced, and scheduled only when absolutely necessary. It is however, an important skill for any designer working with clients, collaborating with other designers, engineers and product managers, and for communicating work with leadership in a company.
Giving effective presentations is a critical tool for building support around projects, maintaining momentum, and seeing it through to completion. While the vast majority of your time as a designer will be spent on the craft of design — exploring, sketching, and iterating on design problems — the success of your work will depend on your ability to present that work in a clear and compelling form at the right time to the right people. In this session, you will learn:
- The importance and value of being good at giving presentations, and having a design team that is good at giving presentations.
- The habits and practices necessary to become better at giving presentations.
- How to plan a presentation roadmap to build momentum over the course of a project and get feedback at critical decision points.
- How to structure presentations to funnel your audience towards your decision point.
- How to use scenarios to put your audience in the mindset of your user.
- Formats for effective and immersive presentations at the different stages of the design process.
- The habits and practices necessary to become better at giving presentations.
- How to plan a presentation roadmap to build momentum over the course of a project and get feedback at critical decision points.
- Formats for effective and immersive presentations at the different stages of the design process.
David Sherwin | Interaction Design Director, frog
Designing for Positive Behaviors and Habits
Explore a growing trend in the interactive space— apps and services that responsibly encourage behavior change in users—and discover the tools and techniques you can use to create them.
We live in a world where we expect the applications and services we use every day to not only help us do what we want to do, but encourage us to change our behavior in ways that will make us healthier, wealthier, and happier. David Sherwin, an Interaction Design Director at frog, will explore this growing trend in the interactive space, where designers are using techniques drawn from the social sciences to support (or nudge) the choices their users make. You’ll walk away from this session with a new vocabulary and tools you can use to plan, construct, and test design solutions intended to change user behavior in a responsible manner.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Find out what people mean when they say they are designing for behavior change.
- Explore the tools and techniques designers are using to design for behavior change.
- Learn how an interactive designer can responsibly encourage behavior change.
Stephen Anderson | Designer, speaker, and consultant
Information Design
More information coming soon!
Maciej Ceglowski | Founder, Pinboard
Inspiration, Visual Thinking, Design Thinking
More information coming soon!
Wednesday, November 19
Christopher Butler | COO, Newfangled
The Future of Web Design
This session with Chris Butler will put you ahead of the trends in web design so that you can position yourself for success.
It's time we reframed our entire concept of web development. First, in terms of widening the scope of what websites do today and second, in terms of understanding what web development as a discipline is becoming. Sophisticated web development is no longer about creating discreet applications, but doing information logistics.
In this session, Chris will explore the history and trajectory of web design and development and offer a glimpse of things to come.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Front-end design techniques are stabilizing and are headed toward commoditization.
- As web platforms become more complex, the use of APIs is becoming more central to web development. This is where information logistics comes in...
- Designers can position themselves around the change. This session will cover how...
Dan Roam | Author
The Back of the Napkin: Where Design Thinking Meets Visual Thinking
In this fast-paced, interactive session, Dan Roam introduces his neurobiologically-based "visual toolkit" and shows how any of us can become extraordinary visual thinkers in minutes—whether we're “creative” or not.
Our visual mind is the most powerful problem-solving machine in the universe. Yet we neglect it when we adopt traditional problem-solving approaches. We shouldn't—in fact, we're going to need our visual mind more and more as the complexity of the world increases. So bring a pen and paper, because we're going to draw the future together.
3 Main Takeaways:
- Find out how to employ design thinking—thinking with your visual mind and your verbal mind.
- Discover how you can use pictures to rapidly solve complex problems.
- Learn why pictures are the language of our visual mind.
