• Capturing the Whole User Experience with Indi Young
• Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions with David Verba

The following sessions have audio available:

• Visual Vocabulary for Rich Internet Applications with Anthony Colfelt, myFamily.com
• Going Mobile: How to Choose Target Platforms and Devices? with Barbara Ballard, Little Springs Design
• Mobile Usability Testing with Barbara Ballard, Little Springs Design
• Communicating Ideas Throughout an Organization with Andrew Crow, Adaptive Path
• Learning Interaction Design From Everyday Objects with Bill DeRouchey, Ziba
• UX Design as Communities of Practice with Andrew Hinton, Vanguard

Keep checking back to this site and/or refresh the podcast feed as the rest will be going up over the next 2 weeks.

Attendee List 44kb PDF

There is also an iMix on iTunes. But the list is incomplete as it’s only the songs that Apple has available for purchase.

Theme: Let Forever Be by The Chemical Brothers

Amazon (Diplo Mix) by M.I.A.
Another Wasted Night by Bishop Allen
Around the World by Daft Punk
Autostrada by Nil Dymont
Baptized In Dirty Water by Chris Thomas King
Battle Without Honor Or Humanity by Tomoyasu Hotei
Because We Can by Moulin Rouge
The Bends by Radiohead
Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul by Charles Mingus
Beware of the Boys by Panjabi MC
Black Tambourine by Beck
Blue Bird by The Rosebuds
Body Movin’ by The Beastie Boys
Booker T. & The MG’s - Green Onions by Various Artists
Citron Presse by Lemon
Cold Cold Heart by Steve Nick
Crash by The Primitives
Crosseyed And Painless by Talking Heads
Cruel Summer by Bangles
Cut Chemist Suite by Ozomatli
Dance On Vaseline by Thievery Corporation
Dancing Queen by Abba
Days Go By by Dirty Vegas
Devil Town (Daniel Johnston cover) by Bright Eyes
Dry The Rain by The Beta Band
Earth Punk Rockers by Buffalo Daughter
El Cargo by Amon Tobin
Flowers by Cibo Matto
French Connection by Simon Stinger
Galvanize by The Chemical Brothers
The Geeks Get the Girls by American Hi-Fi
Gigantic by Pixies
Girls & Boys by Blur
Gritty Shaker by Ocean’s Eleven
Guajia (I love U 2 Much) by Yerba Buena
The Hand Of Contraband by “Up, Bustle & Out”
Hey Pretty by POE
Honky Tonk Women by Rolling Stones
Hovercraft by Space Mtn
How Many Times by Zack Hexum
I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow by Soggy Bottom Boys
I Left My Heart In San Francis by Tony Bennet
Just Like Heaven by The Cure
Killermachine by Annalie & The Anomaly Project
The Laws Have Changed by New Pornographers
Let Forever Be by The Chemical Brothers
Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb
Love On Haight Street by BT
Mexican Moon by Concrete Blonde
Mike Mills by AIR
More Shine by Si*Se
Mr Roboto by Styx
Never Coming Home (Gonna Live My Live Remix) by Sting
On The Painted Desert by Boom Boom Satellites
Paranoid Android by Brad Mehldau
Pavement Cracks (Gabriel & Dresden Mixshow Edit) by Annie Lennox
Pictures Of Matchstick Men by Camper Van Beethoven
Red Alert by Basement Jaxx
Rehab by Amy Winehouse
Ricky’s Theme by The Beastie Boys
Sabrosa by The Beastie Boys
The Shining by Badly Drawn Boy
Sirènes de la Fête by Brazilian Girls
Slow (Chemical Brothers Mix) by Kylie Minogue
Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA by DEVO
So What by Monty Alexander
Stars by Swoiza & Mirle
Stolen Car by Beth Orton
Sugar In Your Tea by 4 To The Bar
Super Bad by James Brown
Surfboard by Esquivel
Tank by Cowboy Bebop
The Third Man Theme by Anton Karas
True Grit by The Crystal Method
Walking With a Ghost by Tegan and Sara
What’s the Difference by Deadjazz
Why Don’t You Do It Right by Connie Evington
“Wild, Sweet And Cool” by The Crystal Method
You Could Make a Killing by Aimee Mann

The following presenters have asked that their slides not be posted:

• Deborah Adler
• Jan Chipchase
• Jared Spool
• Kathleen Hoski
• Rachel Hinman

Sarah B. Nelson is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. She has ten years of experience in interactive media, designing kiosks, mobile and online experiences for clients in a variety of industries. Sarah has a particular passion for practice development, conducting research into methods for improving collaboration, supporting creativity, and encouraging innovation.

Sarah brings a unique blend of creative vision and technical expertise to her work. Her research-focused approach to interaction design has produced successful results for clients such as the Federal Home Loan Bank, Home Street Bank, AOL Mobile, The Metropolitan Opera, and The Royal Victorian and Albert Museum.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Sarah managed the creative team and developed the user experience practice at POP, an interactive design firm in Seattle, Washington. A classically trained violinist, Sarah graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy and received a B.A from Oberlin College in visual arts and electronic music. While completing her Masters at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Sarah focused her studies on the definition and design of complex multi-modal systems supporting collaboration and communication.

• New Sources of Inspiration for Interaction Design with Dan Saffer
• Learning Interaction Design From Everyday Objects with Bill DeRouchey

Find out more…

• Visual Vocabulary for RIA’s - Handout
• Sketching in Code - Slides
• Making Research Effective - Slides

As experience design consultants, we love having the opportunity to tackle lots of different kinds of problems. But we don’t always get to try out all the problems that interest us the most — after all, we can only solve those problems somebody has seen fit to devote some money to solving, and then shown the good judgment to hire us to take them on. So we decided to go hunting for problems nobody’s asked us to solve yet.

Read more…

Here’s a few small reminders:

• If you haven’t already, please sign up for tonight’s dinner outing at the registration desk.
• Please visit Microsoft in the Silverlight lounge to register for your free copy of Visio and Expressions
• Rate and comment on the sessions that you attended on this site… we love seeing the feedback!
• Keep uploading those Flickr photos!

Also, some more slides have been uploaded to this site:

• Parallels in Cooking and Design with Ryan Freitas
• Communicating Ideas Throughout an Organization with Andrew Crow

• Stone Soup: Stories and Storytelling for Collaboration with Kevin Brooks, Motorola Labs
• UX Design as Communities of Practice with Andrew Hinton, Vanguard
• Collaborating with Customers with Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop, eBay

Deborah Adler is a principle designer and the inspiration behind Target’s ClearRx system. Motivated by a desire to make people’s lives easier and safer, she designed a comprehensive system for packaging prescription medicine as her Masters thesis. The result — a completely reinvented prescription bottle and label. She brought this innovation to Target, and together they developed the ClearRx system.

Currently Deborah is a senior designer at the multi-disciplinary design firm Milton Glaser Inc. in New York City, where she works directly with the legendary Milton Glaser. In her role, Adler provides solutions to clients seeking new directions in visual communications, signage programs, and brand identity. Her work includes projects ranging from identity systems, magazines and posters to product packaging, restaurant interiors, and environment design.

Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, and on NBC Nightly News, CBS Sunday Morning and National Public Radio, among others. The ClearRx bottle was also featured in The New York Times Magazine “The Year in Ideas” issue of 2005 and listed as “The Best Inventions of 2005″ in Time Magazine and Business Week.

Additionally, her work is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and it was just featured in the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006. It has been shown at the School of Visual Arts in a solo exhibition: From Masters Thesis to Medicine Cabinet.

Sometimes collaboration or team building involves everyone contributing relevant ideas, sometimes it takes asking the right questions. But collaboration always requires listening hard enough to know which to do when, and group story-creation techniques can greatly help this process.

In this session, you will:

• Review and practice the three critical elements necessary for nurturing the creativity and collaboration inherent in storytelling: listening, structuring and telling.
• Practice telling a simple story both on your own and collaboratively, with the goal of learning how to communicate effectively.
• Discover how story structures and other patterns can be used to guide creative endeavors.
• Acquire the tools you need to bring collaborative storytelling techniques into your own organization.

About Kevin Brooks

Kevin is a principle staff researcher for Motorola Labs and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola, Kevin researches new user-interface technologies and expresses these technologies as connected user-centered experiences, creating “technology stories” that incorporate elements of audio, video, graphics, written language and computer programming. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood in the 60s to his present-day role as a parent himself, and he has been a featured performer at many storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues.

Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. He has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University.

Kevin has several published papers and has given numerous workshops on storytelling and interactive story design. In 2006 he released his first CD of stories, entitled Kiss of Summer.

The communities of practice model gives us a better language for discussing our roles, our work and the future of our respective practices and disciplines. It also gives us a useful way of thinking about how to design for particular kinds of collaboration, especially emergent, collective work in support of improving a practice.

In this session, you will:

• Explore the meaning and importance of a “community of practice.”
• Discover ways in which the community of practice model is more relevant now than ever before.
• Learn how a working understanding of a community of practice can improve the ways in which user-experience practitioners work together.

About Andrew Hinton

Andrew has been designing for digital environments of one kind or another since 1991. Currently he is a senior information architect in the User Experience Group of Vanguard, and he’s also a co-founding member of the Information Architecture Institute. In the past, he has done IA-related work for companies such as American Express, Sealy, Wachovia, Shaw and Kimberly-Clark.

Andrew regularly speaks and writes about user-experience design, and he also blogs about information architecture, design and more at Inkblurt.

Learn the true power of the sticky note — yes, stickies! — to quickly and effectively organize data, visualize themes, and identify patterns.. We’ll start with an overview of how Adaptive Path uses sticky notes (aka: Post-Its) in user experience projects. Then, we’ll jump into a set of hands-on activities to test your stickies aptitude and gain experience in multiple methods.

You’ll learn methods for rapidly visualizing and organizing data into clusters using sticky notes and how these simple, elegant, and versatile tools can help you untangle problems, set priorities, understand complex work flows, and gather feedback from others.

You’ll leave with a greater appreciation for the sticky note, a killer vocabulary for how to creatively use stickies, and an enhanced ability to sort, track, and organize information. You’ll be amazed what you can do with these simple little tools.

About Kate Rutter

Kate Rutter is a Senior Practitioner for Adaptive Path. During her ten plus years in the Web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.”

Millions of people from around the world come to eBay every day, and the eBay user experience design group applies a range of design and research methodologies to understand and address the perceptions and needs of its widely varied customer base.

Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop will co-lead this session, sharing some of their methods for collaborating with eBay’s customers and exploring the ways in which they use customer insights to inform specific design solutions.

In this session, you will gain a better understanding of how to:

• Engage customers throughout the design process.
• Apply new methods to address a wide range of customer goals and needs.
• Seamlessly blend design and customer research to contribute to your success.

About Jeff Herman

Jeff leads eBay’s UI and Visual Design group, which is responsible for the design of eBay’s sites around the world. He has over 20 years of experience as a designer at Apple, Yahoo! and the MIT Media Lab, and he has been a guest speaker at CHI, BayCHI and various university design programs.

Jeff holds a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has received 10 patents. He is also on the Advisory Board of an early-stage Silicon Valley startup.

About Ann Bishop

Ann manages the Content Strategy practice at eBay, which is responsible for the strategic direction and execution of eBay’s interface content globally. As one of the first user experience architects at eBay, Ann continues to bring a holistic design approach to her work, and she is leading efforts to define content strategy as a design practice rooted in human-centered design methodology, including user research, concept development and execution.

Ann has over 15 years experience designing interactive content for companies such as Microsoft, Travelocity and Yahoo!.  She holds a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance important principles like consistency, creative freedom and effective problem solving, all under stressful conditions. Ryan Freitas discusses these and other parallels between the worlds of the cook and the designer. Read more about Ryan’s recent article on this subject.

About Ryan Freitas

Ryan is a senior interaction designer for Adaptive Path, where he has worked with clients including Oracle, Flickr, Six Apart, BitTorrent, Socialtext and Sphere. With over ten years in the field, Ryan is an experienced and opinionated advocate for user-centered design, as well as an occasional writer, speaker and design award judge.

After graduating with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction at UC San Diego’s School of Cognitive Science, Ryan began his career designing and coding application interfaces for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. After transitioning to a role as a senior information architect at Sapient, he refined concepts and designed web applications and platforms for clients such as Janus and Nissan. In 2000 he moved to Tokyo, where he trained Sapient’s local creative team in interaction design practices.

After returning to San Francisco in 2001, Ryan freelanced as an interaction design consultant and worked with Williams’ Sonoma and the Home Depot on their retail website and kiosk designs. He joined Adaptive Path in the spring of 2005, where he now leads product strategy and design engagements. Recently, Ryan has assumed responsibility for Adaptive Path’s New Ventures program, working with startups to bring engaging and innovative offerings to market.

As a writer and conference speaker, Ryan has focused on collaboration tools, online media platforms, and community building.

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this consensus.

By greasing the tracks in the early stages of a project, designers can gain the much-needed support of business stakeholders, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence (within their teams and the company at large), and make a more meaningful difference with their work. The key is to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and break through project roadblocks. And it all starts with the right combination of tools and techniques.

In this session, you will:

• Discover how to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and eliminate roadblocks on your next project.
• Explore the ways in which your existing design skill-sets can be expanded to improve communication within your team and throughout you company.
• Learn facilitation techniques to help engage business stakeholders and manage the conflicting priorities and lack of direction that so often derail a project.

About Jess McMullin

Since 1997, Jess has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their customers. Drawing on sources ranging from social sciences and behavioral research to gaming, market analysis and future trends, Jess generates client insights that drive innovation and create better customer experiences.

Jess often speaks at conferences focusing on user experience, design thinking and innovation, topics he also writes about on a regular basis. His ideas have been featured in several user-experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed. and Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience.

In 2003, Jess founded nForm User Experience, a boutique consultancy that counts Comcast, Ancestry.com and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute as clients. Jess also organizes CanUX, the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop in Banff, Alberta, and he is the cofounder of the international Information Architecture Institute.

For Jess’s latest thoughts on business, design and innovation, visit his blog, bplusd (business + design).

Most of us who practice user experience design are generalists. We need to know enough about technology to work with engineers. We need to know enough about visual design to work with designers. Every time we start a new project, we need to learn about our client’s business problems until we can recite them in our sleep. We need to be part designer, part psychologist, part researcher, part corporate therapist. We need to be able to write cogently, sketch our ideas so that even the most distracted marketing executives can understand them, and give killer presentations.

Managing a user experience team takes these skills to a whole new level.

Whether you manage a UX team, or you’re just thinking about it, this presentation will give you practical advice grounded in real-world experience.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Find people who have potential to be as good at this work as (or even better than) you are.
• Inspire your team members to do their best work, and keep getting better.
• Handle a team member who is not performing.
• Keep yourself inspired, especially when your job is to make the rest of your team look good.

About Katrina Alcorn

Katrina leads the user experience discipline for Hot Studio, an award-winning design firm based in San Francisco. Since 1999, she has led information architecture, user research and content strategy efforts on a wide variety of projects, including online magazines, Flash demos and health care enrollment applications for clients such as InformationWeek, Sun Microsystems, Charles Schwab, Blue Shield of California, Architecture for Humanity, the United Methodist Church, Gap Inc., LeapFrog SchoolHouse and Adobe.

Before her foray onto the Internet, Katrina worked as a freelance writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines in Hawaii and California, and as an associate producer for an award-winning national PBS television series. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the University of California, Berkeley.

There has been significant interest lately from the business community in the value of design research and design thinking. This is particularly true when it comes to the very early front-end of the design process.

Generative Tools help create a shared design language that designers, researchers and other stakeholders can use to visually communicate with each other. The design language is Generative in the sense that with it, people can express an infinite number of ideas (e.g., dreams, fears, insights, opportunities) through a limited set of stimulus items.

In this session, you will:

• Obtain a map of the design research landscape as it has emerged over the last 20 years.
• Discover the newest developments in the research industry, with an emphasis on generative design research, characterized by design-led research from a participatory mindset.
• Discover the many ways in which Generative Tools can be used to inform and improve the design process.

About Liz Sanders

Liz is the President of MakeTools, a design research company that focuses on collective creativity. Liz is a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods in design, and her numerous design awards, patents, publications, presentations, along with her proven track record in the marketplace have established her as a global leader in the field of design research. She sees the emergence of a human-centered design revolution growing out of the current state of technology-driven innovation, and she frequently speaks about and teaches human-centered research and design to clients, colleagues and students around the world.

Liz was educated as a social scientist with undergraduate degrees in psychology and anthropology, followed by a PhD in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology. Previous client relationships include 3M, AT&T, Apple, Baxter, Becton Dickinson, Coca Cola, Compaq, IBM, Intel, Iomega, Johnson Controls, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Siemens Medical Systems, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, Thermos, Thomson
Consumer Electronics, Toro and Xerox. For an overview of Liz’s ideas about design, research methodology and more, visit MakeTools.

Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and actually get it right (at least most of the time), win their customers’ attention and loyalty. And the key to creating a business that addresses the entire spectrum of user experience is to build empathy with your customers. An effective way to do this is to create a mental model, one that considers all the different ways an organization interacts with its users: stores, account statements, customer service calls, product ordering websites, packaging…everything.

A few years ago, I developed a mental model for JMS Entertainment, a movie distribution company that wanted to attract a larger audience of moviegoers. The model I created depicted the entire moviegoer’s experience, from watching trailers and reading reviews to discussing the plot points with a friend after the show. I then compared that mental model to the features of the JMS website, noting the interesting gaps and matches from a strategic point of view. I also help JMS brainstorm new ideas based on combinations seen from the perspective of the mental model. From there, an effective three-year roadmap was created, one with a clear business perspective. The result? A user experience that fully addresses the entire range of JMS’s customer needs.

In this session, you will:

• Examine the mental model for opportunities to support moviegoers in attractive ways.
• Learn how to gather innovative ideas by combining or building off of related features.
• Create a strategic roadmap for your organization.

About Indi Young

After nearly a decade working with Unix, pen-based systems, and Windows, Indi began her work in web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. Her clients include Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, Bell Canada, Intuit, Qualcomm, and PeopleSoft.

Indi specializes in gathering user research data to create mental models for use in business/user gap analysis. She has completed over 30 of these projects since 1995. She is also one of the founding members of Adaptive Path, which she left in 2006 to write her book on the subject of mental models, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media in late summer 2007. Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior.

Indi graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the Cal Poly School of Engineering in San Luis Obispo, and worked on her master’s degree in Computer Science at Colorado State University Fort Collins. She is a lifetime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The purpose of the Generative Tools workshop is to learn about creating, using and analyzing generative design tools. We will begin with hands-on experience using a generative toolkit. Participants will make collective artifacts using the toolkits and then present their creations. We will then discuss the “making” experience, using participants’ latest challenges and goals as examples for ways in which Generative Tools can be used most effectively.

In this session, you will:

• Learn the stages of the design process that benefit most from the creative application of Generative Tools.
• Get a brief overview of how to make and administer generative toolkits.
• Gain a preliminary understanding of how to analyze and apply the results of the generative toolkits.

About Liz Sanders

Liz is the President of MakeTools, a design research company that focuses on collective creativity. Liz is a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods in design, and her numerous design awards, patents, publications, presentations, along with her proven track record in the marketplace have established her as a global leader in the field of design research. She sees the emergence of a human-centered design revolution growing out of the current state of technology-driven innovation, and she frequently speaks about and teaches human-centered research and design to clients, colleagues and students around the world.

Liz was educated as a social scientist with undergraduate degrees in psychology and anthropology, followed by a PhD in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology. Previous client relationships include 3M, AT&T, Apple, Baxter, Becton Dickinson, Coca Cola, Compaq, IBM, Intel, Iomega, Johnson Controls, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Siemens Medical Systems, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, Thermos, Thomson
Consumer Electronics, Toro and Xerox. For an overview of Liz’s ideas about design, research methodology and more, visit MakeTools.

Creative Project Leads and Team Managers face numerous challenges in a corporate environment. Often their working styles or problem-solving skills differ from the methods used in other departments, creating communication and collaboration issues. This can present problems when creative teams need to communicate new ideas throughout the organization.

To clear these hurdles, you need to know how to identify people’s motivations, navigate office politics, and understand your company’s structure. Utilizing these insights can help minimize the roadblocks to a project’s success.

In this session, you will:

• Explore how clear communication, compromise, and expectation management can create a successful working environment
• Learn how to customize your creative team’s approach to build a sense of trust and mutual respect with other departments
• Discover ways in which an understanding of your organization’s emotional and political landscape will help you communicate with the people who can make a difference

About Andrew Crow

Andrew Crow is a senior experience designer at Adaptive Path and has a passion for developing innovative and measureable design solutions for customers’ needs.

Initially a print and web designer, he moved into information architecture and promoting holistic user experience to corporate clients. Andrew has 11 years of design, technical and strategic experience.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Andrew managed the web and user experience team at Princess Cruises. This gave him the opportunity to lead the development of an entirely new online booking system, e-ticket solution and oversee online branding and marketing initiatives. Prior to that, he worked with element18 and Interfocus Advertising in Los Angeles.

Past clients include Cunard Line, Lee Iacocca’s eBike, ILIO Entertainment and Millimeter Magazine.

Changing working environments, complex business requirements, projects, and technologies are placing new demands on user experience designers. The site architectures, content inventories, wireframes, personas, and creative briefs that once formed the keystone of our user experience toolkit, only represent a portion of our responsibilities now.

This panel will continue the skills discussion introduced by Liz Sanders in her participatory design workshop. We will examine the skills, methods, ideas, and approaches required for future user experience practitioners. Panelists will share their experience and discuss current and future challenges in building user experience groups and preparing future practitioners for success.

Panel Members

• Liz Sanders
• Peter Merholz
• Andrew Hinton
• Kevin Brooks

About Sarah B. Nelson

Sarah B. Nelson is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. She has ten years of experience in interactive media, designing kiosks, mobile and online experiences for clients in a variety of industries. Sarah has a particular passion for practice development, conducting research into methods for improving collaboration, supporting creativity, and encouraging innovation.

Sarah brings a unique blend of creative vision and technical expertise to her work. Her research-focused approach to interaction design has produced successful results for clients such as the Federal Home Loan Bank, Home Street Bank, AOL Mobile, The Metropolitan Opera, and The Royal Victorian and Albert Museum.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Sarah managed the creative team and developed the user experience practice at POP, an interactive design firm in Seattle, Washington. A classically trained violinist, Sarah graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy and received a B.A from Oberlin College in visual arts and electronic music. While completing her Masters at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Sarah focused her studies on the definition and design of complex multi-modal systems supporting collaboration and communication.

Called ‘Sugar’, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. While traditional computer interfaces are modeled on the desktop metaphor, Sugar places the individual user at the center of the interface, which is icon-based and has four levels of view: Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how the interface design evolved
• Explore the challenges for designing in such a constrained system
• Discover the ideas behind the radical new interface

About Lisa Strausfeld

Lisa Strausfeld joined Pentagram as a principal in the firm’s New York office in January 2002. Her work lies at the intersection of physical and virtual space: where information structures and physical structures meet, and where the navigation of information and the navigation of buildings are joined in a single experience. Her team specializes in digital information design projects that range from software prototypes and websites to large-scale media installations. At Pentagram, her projects include the design of signage and media installations for several civic, cultural and corporate developments, including New York’s redeveloped Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station, the new corporate headquarters of Bloomberg L.P. and the expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as interactive exhibitions for the Detroit Institute of Arts and Wall Street Rising. Most recently, she has worked on the design of Sugar, the revolutionary user-interface developed for the organization for One Laptop Per Child whose mission is to provide laptops to children in developing countries worldwide.

Strausfeld studied art history and computer science at Brown University and earned Master’s Degrees in architecture at Harvard University and in media arts and sciences at M.I.T. In addition to broad publication of her design work over the past decade, Strausfeld holds two patents relating to user interfaces and intelligent search and retrieval. In 2006 she was named to the Senior Scientist program at the Gallup Organization. She teaches interactive and site-specific design at the Yale School of Art.

As more sites move to using these capabilities, developers are exploring the canvas — seeing what works and what doesn’t. Through this exploration, we’ve discovered patterns and principals to help guide us to make better designs going forward.

In this presentation, Jared will talk about the different approaches developers have taken with these new capabilities. He’ll present examples from Flickr, Google, Netflix, MSN Live, Brown University, YouTube, and Yahoo!, deconstructing their use of these new development capabilities to help us understand how we can apply them to our own designs.

In this session, you will:

• Discover which approach works best: large client-side applications or individual widgets tied together with traditional HTML
• Learn from game design for creating immersive experiences
• Find out how these capabilities can improve status visibility, user control, error prevention, and enhanced recognition for data manipulation and application control

About Jared Spool

Jared Spool is a Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helping clients understand how to solve their design problems, explaining to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

Borrowing examples from across the industry in addition to recent Adaptive Path work, we’ll discuss how innovators are approaching new models for evolving their existing products. We’ll also explore the sets of tools that make redefinition and simplification possible, all with an eye towards fulfilling users’ needs.

In this session, you will:

• Focus on ways in which new models can help innovators evolve existing products.
• Examine and learn from a collection of current case studies and examples.
• Gain some perspective and tools designed to help you fulfill users’ needs.

About Ryan Freitas

Ryan is a senior interaction designer for Adaptive Path, where he has worked with clients including Oracle, Flickr, Six Apart, BitTorrent, Socialtext and Sphere. With over ten years in the field, Ryan is an experienced and opinionated advocate for user-centered design, as well as an occasional writer, speaker and design award judge.

After graduating with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction at UC San Diego’s School of Cognitive Science, Ryan began his career designing and coding application interfaces for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. After transitioning to a role as a senior information architect at Sapient, he refined concepts and designed web applications and platforms for clients such as Janus and Nissan. In 2000 he moved to Tokyo, where he trained Sapient’s local creative team in interaction design practices.

After returning to San Francisco in 2001, Ryan freelanced as an interaction design consultant and worked with Williams’ Sonoma and the Home Depot on their retail website and kiosk designs. He joined Adaptive Path in the spring of 2005, where he now leads product strategy and design engagements. Recently, Ryan has assumed responsibility for Adaptive Path’s New Ventures program, working with startups to bring engaging and innovative offerings to market.

As a writer and conference speaker, Ryan has focused on collaboration tools, online media platforms, and community building. ]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/user-centered-design-for-evolving-products/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-conversation-gets-interesting-creating-the-adaptive-interface http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-conversation-gets-interesting-creating-the-adaptive-interface#comments Sat, 11 Aug 2007 06:09:10 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-conversation-gets-interesting-creating-the-adaptive-interface As the technology for supporting more personalized experiences becomes available, we’re entering a new era of “adaptive interfaces,” where functionality is revealed over time and interface elements change based on individual usage. We can create interfaces that respond, suggest or change based on actual usage data.

While much of this is still speculative, we’ll explore some concrete examples of how such ideas have already been used, and many instances where this could be implemented, resulting in applications that are truly conversational and context-aware.

In this session, you will:

• Learn about the unique advantages and challenges of working with adaptive interfaces.
• Explore concrete examples of ways in which adaptive interfaces have been implemented.
• Identify opportunities in which an adaptive interface would create a conversational, context-aware experience.

About Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen is the principal user experience architect at Sabre Travel Network, where he leads the design of travel products used by more than 50,000 travel agencies worldwide. He is passionate about elegant design and the technological innovations that make desirable experiences possible.

Prior to Sabre, Stephen helped build Bright Corner, a creative design and technology services company. There he worked with a variety of businesses to create valuable online and offline customer experiences, with a special focus on custom business applications. Stephen has worked on Web 2.0-style applications with small startups as well as larger usability and information architecture projects for enterprise clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay and Chesapeake Energy. A former high school English teacher, Stephen brings a love for language and cognitive learning theories to the design profession.

Stephen’s online home can be found at poetpainter.com.

We will also discuss some of the challenges of designing for the education market, and present the suite of tools that had to be built along the way. Finally, we’ll take a closer look at some of the guerilla techniques we used to transform a scrappy idea into a launchable product, from the interactive design sessions with an on-campus workshop of 70 teachers to the dozens of Yahoo! employees who volunteered their weekends and nights to make this real.

In this session, you will:

• Find out exactly what it takes to bring a “hack” project to market.
• Discover new ways of innovating the blend of design and technology.
• Pick up tips, tools and hacks to help you get your product out into the wild.

About Bill Scott

Bill leads engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community that allows teachers to gather, organize and share web resources and lesson plans. For the past year and a half, Bill has been the Ajax evangelist at Yahoo!, where he focuses on spreading the goodness of “rich and sane” Ajax design and development. Bill was also Yahoo!’s Design Pattern curator, which lead to the launch of the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

For 20 years, Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops, where he discusses the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. His many musings about these topics and more can be found at Looks Good Works Well.

About Karon Weber

Karon is a principal designer at Yahoo!, where she focuses on social media, hacks and mash-ups. While in residence at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, she designed and developed Yahoo! Prototypes such as A Local Event Browser, Checkmates, A Mobile Map Friend-Finder and International Remix. About a year ago, Karon began hacking the Yahoo! Trip planner to build a tool for educators to supplement their textbook curriculums. The result: Yahoo! Teachers, a new, free service that helps educators gather, organize and share materials for the classroom.

For over 20 years, Karon has been spinning stories about people and technology, and then working with teams of talented designers and developers to bring those narratives to life. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, she discovered the world of software design when she joined the research staff at Xerox PARC to understand the use of video in the workplace. She then led design teams that created feature animation production software for DreamWorks SKG, SGI/Alias|Wavefront and Pixar Animation Studios. At Pixar, Karon contributed to the development of custom artist tools for the production of Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

Read more…

To help you learn how to strike the right balance, we’ll take a look at several different user-experience documents, examining the kinds of information they contain and exploring new ways to select the right information for the situation at hand.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how much is too much, or too little, when it comes to creating web documents.
• Discover strategies for picking and choosing what information to include and how to display it.
• Explore examples of a number of different types of user-experience documents, with special attention to the potential advantages of each strategy.

About Dan Brown

Dan is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user-experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC, that has engaged with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech and other sectors. Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US Postal Service, the World Bank and the Federal Communications Commission to USAirways, FirstUSA and Fannie Mae. Before that, Dan was a Federal employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security Administration.

Dan’s portfolio includes work on public-facing websites, intranets and extranets, and it addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design. Dan has published dozens of articles for a variety of publications, and he is also the author of Communicating Design, a book about the ways in which high-quality visual documentation can be used to communicate complex ideas and abstractions. He has moderated panels and led workshops at almost every IA Summit since its inception in 2000, and he is very active in the local Washington, DC, information architecture community, organizing regular workshops and bimonthly reading groups.

To get a better handle on the prototype process, we will survey several different types of prototypes, with special focus on the appropriate audiences and uses for each. We will also consider the advantages and disadvantages of using interactive prototypes, whether you are incorporating them into your development process or using them as a self-documenting deliverable. We will then dive into specific techniques and methods for creating prototypes, providing examples and discussing the skill-sets required for each approach.

In this session, you will:

• Explore an array of prototype options, learning the ideal uses for each.
• Discover the advantages and disadvantages of interactive prototypes, as well as the different ways of putting them to use.
• Learn practical prototype-creating methods and techniques.

About David Verba

David is director of technology for Adaptive Path. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies. He has over 15 years of development experience, and has worked with technologies ranging from Sun, Java and Oracle to open-source favorites such as Linux, Perl, Apache, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Ruby and Ruby On Rails.

David helped launch the Wholefoods.com initiative as part of Whole Foods, Inc., and was a core developer for CodeZoo.com, an O’Reilly and Associates web product. He also provided necessary technical leadership to create Adaptive Path’s Measure Map (recently acquired by Google).

In this session, you will:

• Gain a deeper appreciation of the power and flexibility of Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary.
• Discover how to utilize an augmented Visual Vocabulary to describe the dynamic nature of rich or conditional interfaces.
• Learn tips and tricks to improving your flow diagrams through the addition of key information.
• Find new ways to bring unrealized clarity to your specifications, illustrated via a series of specific examples.

About Anthony Colfelt

Anthony applies his strong human-centered approach to the design of social software applications, online communities and digital identity systems. Currently, he is the creative director at myfamily.com, where he leads a team of user-experience practitioners and oversees design processes, methods and tools. Before joining myfamily.com in 2006, Anthony led UX teams as an interaction design manager and senior practitioner for Classmates.com and the BBC in London. Anthony also graduated with a Bachelor of Graphic Design from the University of Canberra, Australia in 1996.

To learn more about Anthony and his work, visit Cofelt.com, or read his blog, The Vanity Experiment.

Increasingly, UX practitioners are being exposed to agile working environments and it is important that they are proactive in integrating UX methods into what can be a developer centric methodology. However, all UX practitioners can benefit from understanding and integrating some of the philosophies and practices from agile methodologies in their own workflows.

In this session, you will:

• Learn the principles and practices of Agile methodologies.
• Explore the opportunities for UCD in an Agile environment.
• Discover how designers can learn from Agile, and shape it to better support their work.

About Leisa Reicheit

Leisa is a Principal Consultant at Flow Interactive in London, where she practices contextual research and user-centered design for clients including Transport for London, the BBC and Moo Print.

Leisa has spent the last decade designing interactive experiences under a number of different guises, including project manager, web producer, information architect, user experience designer, interaction designer and general evangelizer of both the internet and networked technology as a whole.

For Leisa’s latest ideas and opinions, visit her blog, Disambiguity.

At Cooper, a pattern language is used to structure documents and describe interactive behaviors. Patterns help designers express the design itself, break down the structure of the document into core elements (e.g., the table of contents, section headings, etc.) and lay out the page. Using Cooper projects as an example — including the company’s team structure, methodology and project scoping — along with an actual case study, this session will explore the many ways and means of documenting the wily interactive behavior.

In this session, you will:

• Get an overview of Cooper methodology, including team structure and project scoping.
• Discover methods of documenting interactive behaviors.
• Explore the use of pattern language as a tool for structuring a document and describing interactive behaviors.

About Doug LeMoine

Doug is the director of design communication at Cooper, an interaction design consultancy based in San Francisco. Since joining Cooper in early 2000, Doug has tackled design problems in neurosurgical planning, financial portfolio analysis, database marketing, telecommunication network construction and computer-assisted surgery.

Before making the move to Cooper, Doug coordinated inner-city literacy and job-skill programs, developed exhibits at a science museum, and taught city kids about where food comes from on a fully operating educational farm. For more information about Doug and his work, visit http://douglemoine.com.

While many of the techniques currently in use in RIAs deliver on their promise of interface enhancement, they leave certain segments of our population behind. In some cases these techniques actually make the situation worse: we provide groups of users with an inaccessible and unusable application or site.

In this session, you will:

• Discover typical problems with RIAs and assistive technology
• Learn how to identify accessibility issues in prototypes
• Specify interface details that will help ensure that your applications provide an accessible user experience to your audience

About Derek Featherstone

Engaging, surprising, and inspiring, Derek Featherstone has a gift for taking a fresh look at virtually every aspect of web development and teaching it in a way that renews our passion for making the web better for everyone. Featherstone is an international authority on accessibility and web development, a respected technical trainer, and author.

Creator of in-depth courses on Accessibility, DOM Scripting, and Web 2.0 applications, his approach never fails to champion the cause of web standards and universal accessibility. As founder of Further Ahead, he has been an in-demand consultant to government agencies, educational institutions and private sector companies since 1999. His wealth of experience and insight enables him to provide audiences with immediately applicable, brilliantly simple approaches to everyday challenges in website design.

Panelists will explore the variety of challenges facing us as we try to document user experiences, sharing work from their own portfolios to illustrate techniques for overcoming these challenges. Attendees will also be encouraged to offer their own examples and suggestions.

This panel will:

• Explore the challenges of documenting user experiences.
• Take a closer look at panelists’ portfolios, with an eye on how the techniques they employed might be applied to other projects.
• Give attendees the opportunity to offer suggestions and learn from each other’s experiences.

About Dan Brown

Dan is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user-experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC, that has engaged with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech and other sectors. Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US Postal Service, the World Bank and the Federal Communications Commission to USAirways, FirstUSA and Fannie Mae. Before that, Dan was a Federal employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security Administration.

Dan’s portfolio includes work on public-facing websites, intranets and extranets, and it addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design. Dan has published dozens of articles for a variety of publications, and he is also the author of Communicating Design, a book about the ways in which high-quality visual documentation can be used to communicate complex ideas and abstractions. He has moderated panels and led workshops at almost every IA Summit since its inception in 2000, and he is very active in the local Washington, DC, information architecture community, organizing regular workshops and bimonthly reading groups.

And related research is listed here:
http://www.janchipchase.com/publications

About Jan Chipchase

Jan Chipchase is one of a team of researchers and anthropologists working at Nokia. Based within the design organization at Nokia, his job is to study people around the world — how they behave, communicate and interact with each other and the things around them.

He shares his observations and insights with Nokia designers, who often accompany him on field trips, helping them to create new ideas for how mobile devices will look, work and will be used in the future. Most of his time is spent in the field conducting research projects. This takes him out onto the streets, into people’s homes and public spaces to observe, document and analyze the rich tapestry of everyday life. Recent projects include visiting Uganda to look at shared phone use, several trips to India to look at how design can make mobile devices more accessible to people with low or non-existent levels of literacy, and a study in South Korea looking at how early adopters were reacting to the then recently launched mobile TV.

Jan has a Masters in User Interface Design, and a degree in Development Economics. He is based in Nokia’s Insight and Innovation Studio in Tokyo, his home since 2000. He has had three patents with a further 25 pending on topics that range from interaction methods, ubiquitously connected societies and seamless communication.

For more information about Jan’s work and research, visit his blog at janchipchase.com.

As experience designers, we have an obligation to understand how search works so we can craft an experience that enhances the lives of our users. For too long we have lived at the mercy of vendors and IT departments and their directives of how search should work. We need to understand what goes on under the search covers so we can put the focus back where it belongs—on the person using the tool, not the tool itself.

About Chiara Fox

Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has developed successful information architectures for intranets, informational websites, and e-commerce sites. She’s worked with Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as PeopleSoft, AT&T, Square D, L.L. Bean, and Hewlett-Packard.

Note that while case studies shared in this session will refer to work that primarily informs decision-making in the tangible realm, the methods refined by researchers at the furniture manufacturer Steelcase can also be (and often are) effectively applied to the design of digital media experiences.

In this session, you will:

• Discover ways to both engage a multi-disciplinary audience in the design process and build shared ownership of stories and insights.
• Explore how this shared development of a research platform can be used to inform business, marketing and design decisions.

About Emily Ulrich

Emily is a design researcher in the EXP Brand Experience group at Steelcase, a global designer and manufacturer of products that are used to create high-performance work environments. Steelcase research explores the notion of work as a social activity, and speculates about the role office design plays in evolving organizational culture and enabling organizational change.

Since 2002, Emily has participated as both a team researcher and project lead in Steelcase’s “deep dive” explorations, where she has focused on the work behaviors of people in higher education, professional services and health care settings. The goal of this work is to contribute to internal product development and inspire client and design colleagues to think differently about the integration of architecture, furniture and technology.

Emily leverages techniques learned during her graduate studies at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she received an M.Des. in Design Planning. Today Emily explores distance collaboration with her Michigan-based colleagues from various locations around her home in San Francisco.

But in reality, machine-readable concept structures – and the rules underlying those concepts – can be used to support any aspect of context-reliant user experience. In fact, because semantic web technologies provide such a powerful way of discovering not just new data, but new types of information, semantic technology could play a key role in managing uncertainty across the entire user experience. Fortunately, new and developing semantic applications are exploring just such an approach.

In this session, you will:

• Gain a brief overview of key technologies, applications and frameworks surrounding semantic technology, and explore their positive and negative impact on user experience.
• Explore specific examples of how semantic technology can support context-appropriate information displays and user work flow.
• See demonstrations of existing semantic implementations that support context-appropriate visualization and interaction.

About Cameron Hunt

Cameron has been working with user-driven information systems since the mid-1990s, and he has designed, built and supported applications for military and law enforcement intelligence, analysis and operational customers. He is currently a semantic knowledge management analyst for the EmergINT team at CommIT Enterprises.

Research is only effective if it integrates well with the larger design process. When done poorly, research does nothing but keep research staff busy. When done well, research can transform the understanding of users for your organization as a whole and empower your teams to create compelling experiences.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how to make research actionable and durable within an organization.
• Discover strategies for integrating other departments and key players into the research process, and vice versa.
• Examine and learn from case studies of successful research activities within design projects.

About Todd Wilkens

Todd Wilkens is the design researcher for Adaptive Path. Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design he holds a passionate belief that focusing on and truly understanding people allows us to create products and services that provide compelling experiences and real value.

About Bryan Mason

Bryan Mason is the COO of Adaptive Path and is responsible for managing Adaptive Path’s business operations. He oversees Adaptive Path’s events and training business development and helps to ensure coordination of all affiliates and partners.

Bryan has over ten years of organizational management experience, including work in special event production, political campaign management and not-for-profit arts administration. His special events clients include the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, The White House (Office of Scheduling and Advance), CMP Media Inc. (WEB2000, WEB2001, etc), and Lincoln Center Theater. His political work includes the campaigns of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), New York Attorney General candidate Evan Davis, the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign and many county and city elections. Bryan spent several years in New York City, working on-, off-, and no-where-near-Broadway. He managed Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, was the Company Manager for six productions at Playwrights Horizons, and produced sold-out premiere productions at the Edinburgh and New York Fringe Festivals.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how to identify and tackle issues concerning data freshness, application responsiveness, data availability, target device types and browser technologies.
• Create a distribution strategy that incorporates and addresses data gleaned from business models, market segmentation and user needs.
• Gain a working understanding of the benefits and challenges of different platforms, including Java ME, Flash Lite and SVG, BREW, WAP, XHTML, AJAX and SMS.

About Barbara Ballard

Barbara is the President and founder of Little Springs Design, a user experience consulting firm that specializes in serving the mobile industry. She has been working on mobile services, devices, websites and applications since 1998, helping Sprint launch such sites as MapQuest, Yahoo! and AOL.

Barbara contends that mobile user experience goes beyond simply designing for the small screen, and she regularly talks at Mobile Monday events to help industry developers and marketers improve their usability. She is also the author of Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written specifically to help user-experience professionals make the transition to mobile.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/going-mobile-how-to-choose-target-platforms-and-devices/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-psychology-of-social-design http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-psychology-of-social-design#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:31:41 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-psychology-of-social-design With the rise of YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace, there is a clear trend toward social design, or designing for the social lives of users. What isn’t so clear is how to design for different social situations that may not have appeared on the web before.

To help you attack this problem, we’ll look not only at current good and poor examples of social design, but also mine social psychology to get a larger view of how to design for the social lives of users. After all, humans are social animals. Software should be social, too.

In this session, you will:

• Learn the advantages of investing in social features.
• Discover how to expand current user-research strategies and apply social psychology to enhance the social design aspects of your next project.
• Explore new ways to get people to participate in your social-design-enhanced application.

About Josh Porter

Joshua is a leading member of UIE’s research team and has written extensively on such topics as Web 2.0, Ajax, web standards, and on-site search systems. Josh shares many of his design thoughts and commentaries on his personal blog: Bokardo.com.

Josh is responsible for overseeing the development of the User Interface Engineering’s web sites, managing UIE’s top notch team of web developers.

Josh received his Master’s degree in Information Technology and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-psychology-of-social-design/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-usability-testing http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-usability-testing#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:13:38 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/mobile-usability-testing User and usability testing of mobile applications requires an understanding of when to use devices, emulators, laboratories and field testing. This session targets user-experience professionals, teaching them how to expand and adjust their current testing procedures to address mobile applications and websites. UX practitioners will also discover how and when to use each tool, with a specific focus on market-acceptance testing and ways in which it can be radically improved using SMS.

In this session, you will:

• Discover ways in which current usability testing strategies can be modified to tackle the mobile sphere.
• Learn about the specific applications, advantages and limitations of various testing tools, including emulators, laboratories, field testing and key devices.
• Gain a working familiarity with market-acceptance testing, with a specific focus on how SMS can be used to improve its effectiveness.

About Barbara Ballard

Barbara is the President and founder of Little Springs Design, a user experience consulting firm that specializes in serving the mobile industry. She has been working on mobile services, devices, websites and applications since 1998, helping Sprint launch such sites as MapQuest, Yahoo! and AOL.

Barbara contends that mobile user experience goes beyond simply designing for the small screen, and she regularly talks at Mobile Monday events to help industry developers and marketers improve their usability. She is also the author of Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written specifically to help user-experience professionals make the transition to mobile.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-usability-testing/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/stores-web-and-beyond-serving-multi-channel-customers-with-meaningful-user-experiences http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/stores-web-and-beyond-serving-multi-channel-customers-with-meaningful-user-experiences#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:07:02 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/stores-web-and-beyond-serving-multi-channel-customers-with-meaningful-user-experiences Customers increasingly use retailers’ websites as one data point in a larger ecosystem of “information influencers.” Exploratory research to optimize a website’s role as part of this process must increasingly seek to understand needs and behaviors beyond the desktop experience.

In this presentation, Kathleen Hoski from Best Buy and Paris Patton from Sachs Insights explore the ways in which leading consumer electronics retailer Best Buy evolved its user experience research methodologies from observations of single site visits to longitudinal ethnography in order to understand the “intensely multi-channel” experience of researching and purchasing consumer electronics products. The presentation also includes compelling video examples of real-world web utilization and shopping behaviors, taken from across methodologies, including: ethnographic interviews, website design and optimization focus groups, store shop-alongs, as well as video and written journaling.

In this session, you will:

• Discover the benefits of studying multi-channel behavior to optimize the web experience.
• Obtain a methodological overview of highly web-oriented ethnographic interviews, focus groups, store shop-alongs, as well as video and written journaling.

About Kathleen Hoski

Kathleen leads usability research at BestBuy.com, where she has helped evolve research methodologies from traditional usability to longitudinal ethnography in order to meaningfully address the question, “How do consumers research and shop in a multi-channel environment?” She believes the insights from this type of research suggest a significant shift in how we think about the design of e-commerce sites.

Prior to joining Best Buy, Kathleen worked as a user experience consultant for Hewlett-Packard and Sachs Insights. She has studied everyone from teleworkers at a large, Canadian telecommunications firm (as part of her work on a research team at the University of Toronto) to North American consumers who decorate the interiors of their homes in “ethnic” themes (as part of her work as a graduate student). She currently resides in Minnesota, where she enjoys gardening in the region’s much-too-short summers.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/stores-web-and-beyond-serving-multi-channel-customers-with-meaningful-user-experiences/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-research-techniques http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-research-techniques#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:38:30 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-research-techniques People love their mobile phones and they love the Internet. Based on user affinity for each, accessing Internet content on a mobile device should be a beloved and integral part of people’s lives.

However, despite development and investment by carriers, handset manufacturers, and content providers, mobile web usage has not enjoyed the success that was predicted and hoped for. While many speculate the release of the iPhone will create a tipping point for internet access via a mobile device, the future of how people want to interact with internet content on the mobile phone is still relatively nascent and undefined — and rich with opportunity.

In this session, you will:

• Receive an overview of the current mobile web landscape
• Discover research insights from mobile web field research
• Learn mobile user experience design principles

About Rachel Hinman

Rachel Hinman is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. Her focus is on developing insights about people and using those insights to create valuable user experiences that support business goals.

Rachel’s passion for people, design and business has been the driving force of her 10-year career in user experience design. Before receiving a Masters Degree in Design Planning from at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Rachel spent the first seven years of her career working as an interaction designer and user experience lead.

Prior to joining Adaptive Path, she worked within Yahoo’s mobile group, employing user-centered methods to inform the design and strategy of Yahoo’s mobile products. Her clients and previous employers have included IDEO, Microsoft, Yahoo, General Motors, Clorox, and Kaiser Permanente.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/mobile-research-techniques/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/participate-to-innovate http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/participate-to-innovate#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:24:04 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/participate-to-innovate Designing for a desired user experience requires an actionable understanding of the emotions associated with that desired experience. This requires user experience research. While user experience research typically focuses on analyzing “clicks” and usability, the emotional aspects of how it feels to use a website or how people wish an experience felt have great potential to inspire design teams and align entire companies. An understanding of the dreamlike experience and the interactive components that can make the dream a reality is an invaluable resource for creating meaningful websites.

Everyone is always asking, “How can we connect with our user?” Well, connections are usually emotional experiences. If you can answer the question “what is the desired user experience,” then all functions within an organization can begin to work together with common goals and inspiration. Bringing the desired user experience into reality, however, requires that all functions in an organization agree upon the desired experience.

In this presentation you will be introduced to a simple participatory design research approach that will not only uncover the desired user experience (aka the “connection”), it is also supported by quantitative and qualitative data. When all functions within an organization participate in the process, they “buy into” the approach and goals of the user.

In this session, you will:

• Learn a participatory design technique that uncovers the desired user experience
• Understand how this technique can map interactive design components to emotional experiences
• Realize the importance of involving all functions within an organization to participate in the research process
• See how to effectively communicate this research to the organization in order to achieve “buy in”

About Marty Gage

For two decades, Marty has pioneered participatory design techniques that liberate the unspoken desires of user populations. Marty’s body of work crosses industrial and consumer product categories, encompassing subject matter as diverse as weapons systems and baby diapers; using multi-sensory toolkits and state-of-the-art ethnography, he has provided creative fuel for a collection of international design firms, engineering companies and corporate design teams.

Marty currently heads the Design Research Practice group at lextant, a user-experience consultancy. Before lextant, Marty ran his own research firms: Rocket Surgery, which he founded in 2002; and SonicRim, co-founded in 1999. Before that, he spent ten years at Fitch, Inc., which he helped to establish as a leader in design research.

Marty has won numerous design awards and has published widely on the topic of design research, including a chapter on participatory design research methods in the book, Human Factors Testing and Evaluation Methods. He has served on the jury for the Business Week-sponsored Industrial Design Excellence Awards, and is frequently asked to speak at design conferences and schools. Marty holds a BA in Psychology from Hendrix College, and he earned his MS in Human Factors Psychology from Wright State University.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/participate-to-innovate/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/cnncom-relaunch-case-study http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/cnncom-relaunch-case-study#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:10:31 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/cnncom-relaunch-case-study CNN.com recently unveiled the latest evolution in online news: an intuitive, integrated Web site that gives users the global, national, and local news they find most relevant to them. The goal of this undertaking was to enhance and simplify online news for consumers to allow them to interact with news in more ways than ever before. With the site’s enhancements and redesign, users can access the news of the day through an integrated storytelling experience that provides text, images, video, commenting, and other interactive elements all within one cohesive package.

The site also incorporates the latest technologies, such as AJAX, a recommendation engine, and a “From the Blogs” feature to enhance the user experience. Another core offering — live, streaming video previously available by subscription only — became free and integrated into the fabric of CNN.com. All CNN.com video including on-demand clips, live breaking news and an archive with access to over 50,000 news videos is now available to users for free.

In this session, we will walk through the user-centered process undertaken in this project, including the early user research and analysis all the way through implementation and post-launch feedback mechanisms. We’ll also discuss the challenges involved in a project like this in a company of CNN’s size. We’ll explore how the early research evolved and was refined throughout the process, leading to the site that was recently launched.

In this session, you will:

• Discover the steps of the process required to bring such a huge project to market, including some tips and tricks on how to get stakeholders and participants fully invested
• Find out how the user was involved in shaping the requirements and end product
• Learn why CNN.com plans to never “relaunch” again

About Dermot Waters

Dermot Waters is the Director of Technology and Business Strategy for CNN.com, most recently working on the relaunch of CNN.com where he co-led the effort from the beginning research phases through launch. Since joining CNN.com in 1999, Dermot has developed and managed a wide range of products across many of the CNN and Turner brands, including search, social media, mobile, registration, e-mail services, weather, and syndication.

In his tenure, Dermot has lead CNN.com’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and been the product manager for Turner’s Digital Media Technologies managing the search platform across Turner brands; working closely with Google, Yahoo!, Verity/Autonomy and other 3rd parties in this area. He is a point person for management of vendors across a variety of technical areas, most recently working on partnerships around blogs and social media.

Dermot holds an MBA in E-Commerce/CIS from Georgia State University, an MS in CIS from Georgia State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Georgia.

About Lori Adams

Lori Adams is the Director of User Experience and Site Integration at CNN.com. Along with Dermot Waters, she led the CNN.com relaunch project, steering the effort from the beginning phase of user discovery through implementation. Since joining CNN in 2004, Lori has managed hundreds of site changes and brought with her a focus on user-centered practices, overseeing the implementation of several user feedback mechanisms and qualitative research methods such as personas.

Lori’s background includes work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she served as Lead Information Architect and Usability Specialist for websites dealing with topics such as flu, anthrax, and smallpox emergencies. Her experience also includes several years as a senior information architect at an agency and freelance work for a variety of companies in Atlanta. Past clients have included BellSouth, Coca-cola, Ritz-Carlton, TravelSmith, Ballard Designs, and WebMD.

Lori holds a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Ohio University.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/cnncom-relaunch-case-study/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/new-sources-of-inspiration-for-interaction-design-keynote http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/new-sources-of-inspiration-for-interaction-design-keynote#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:02:14 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/new-sources-of-inspiration-for-interaction-design-keynote Too often in the field of interaction design, designers only look at other digital products for inspiration. But this narrow stance soon leaves designers devoid of any fresh ideas. If we were to look at the physical world around us, there are sources of inspiration that interaction designers have barely tapped. We should examine mechanical objects and observe their workings. We should look to nature, with its variety of forms and its intricate ecologies. And we should incorporate lessons from other applied arts such as architecture and film into our designs, drawing from their rich histories and products. Let’s turn our eyes to the vast and varied world we inhabit and discover what we can use.

About Dan Saffer

Dan Saffer is a senior interaction designer for Adaptive Path. Dan has developed successful designs for transactional and e-commerce sites, as well as for applications and devices. He’s worked with a wide variety of organizations, from startups to Fortune 100 companies.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/new-sources-of-inspiration-for-interaction-design-keynote/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/learning-interaction-design-from-everyday-objects http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/learning-interaction-design-from-everyday-objects#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:43:59 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/learning-interaction-design-from-everyday-objects Like every other design discipline, an important component of self-education is learning to critically examine what others have produced. And when it comes to interaction design, there are plenty of good and bad examples to guide us.

Inspiration for interaction design is all around us; all we have to do is stop and really look at the objects inside our homes, our cars, our workplaces or our pockets. Microwaves. Remote controls. Alarm clocks. Cell phones. Digital cameras. Game controllers. Music players. Washing machines. What icons, labels and colors do you find on these objects? How many buttons do you see? Too many? Too few? Is there enough uniformity? Variation? Most importantly, how easy is it for a new user to comprehend and actually use this interface?

Every one of these details is a direct result of someone’s design decision, whether intentional or subconscious. The key is to learn how to divine these intentions (or lack thereof) so that when we design, we leave nothing to chance.

In this session, you will:

• Discover new methods and tools for learning interaction design lessons from everyday objects.
• Explore the ever-changing culture and language of interface design.
• Pinpoint areas and strategies for improving on the interface design strategies of today.

About Bill DeRouchey

As a writer, web producer, product manager, information architect and now senior interaction designer for Ziba Design in Portland, OR, Bill has been simplifying how people interact with technology — including handheld devices, websites and environmental spaces — for over fifteen years.

Bill also writes about the evolution of technology on his blog, History of the Button, where he poses esoteric questions such as: What was the first button? Who invented the pause icon? And why does “pushbutton” translate to “easy”? From these explorations, Bill hopes to understand how people think about technology — the cognitive foundation of interaction design — and apply that perspective to the design of the ubiquitous, content-dense, touch-sensitive future.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/learning-interaction-design-from-everyday-objects/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-national-building-museum-from-the-inside-out http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-national-building-museum-from-the-inside-out#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:36:33 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/the-national-building-museum-from-the-inside-out Many museums present exhibitions about architecture and design. In doing so, they typically treat buildings and other designed objects much as they do paintings, drawings, or sculptures — as individual creative works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or craftsmanship.

The National Building Museum approaches this subject matter quite differently. Its mission is to examine the broader cultural implications of the “built environment,” and to reveal the profound impact of architecture, engineering, and urban planning on people’s lives. Rather than simply displaying countless discrete artifacts of our built heritage, the National Building Museum instead seeks to present coherent stories—stories that not only inform visitors’ understanding of the past and present, but also suggest possibilities for a better world in the future.

To achieve these goals, the Museum has developed a unique approach to the organization of exhibitions and education programs, with an unusually strong emphasis on the visitor’s experience. The Museum’s approach to exhibition and program development will be the subject of this presentation.

In this session, you will:

• Learn about the National Building Museum’s unique mission and identity
• Discover how the Museum engages diverse audiences through innovative exhibition content and design
• Learn to the Museum’s renowned, hands-on educational programming

About Martin Moeller

Martin Moeller is Senior Vice President and Curator at the National Building Museum. He has been the lead curator for various exhibitions including “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete” and “Reinventing the Globe: A Shakespearean Theater for the 21st Century.” In addition to his curatorial duties, Moeller edits the Museum’s quarterly magazine, “Blueprints”, and frequently represents the Museum on television and radio programs. He also coordinated the Museum’s recent symposium series, “Building in the Aftermath”, examining the implications of Hurricane Katrina for the built environment.

He previously served as the Museum’s Executive Vice President, overseeing all exhibitions, education programs, development, and administrative operations. He stepped down from this role in 2001 in order to have more time to pursue independent writing and consulting projects.

Before joining the Museum in 1998, Moeller served as Executive Director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Moeller holds a Master of Architecture degree from Tulane University. He is the author of the fourth edition of the “AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C.”, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2006. He was co-editor of “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete”, which was published in English by Princeton Architectural Press in June 2006, and in French under the title “Architectures du béton: Nouvelles vagues, nouvelles recherches”, by Le Moniteur Press.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/the-national-building-museum-from-the-inside-out/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/international-spy-museum-orchestrating-the-user-experience http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/international-spy-museum-orchestrating-the-user-experience#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:13:34 +0000 john http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/international-spy-museum-orchestrating-the-user-experience In recent years, museums around the world have been redefining interactive experiences. Museum interactives are environmental and experiential – offering visitors opportunities to experience history, technology, culture and science in custom-designed, dedicated spaces that include artifacts, lighting, audiovisual elements, electro-mechanical technologies, graphics and scenic treatments. The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC has earned industry-wide acclaim for its interactive visitor experiences.

This session, presented by the Museum’s lead exhibition designer and lead interactive developer, will explore both the overall exhibition design process and the development of specific interactives created for the Museum.

In this session, you will:

• Gain an understanding of museum exhibition design approaches
• Learn about the process of determining what content is best conveyed through interactive exhibits
• Look at interactive experiences from a different perspective
• Explore the intersection of education and entertainment
• Hear anecdotes describing how brainstormed ideas evolved into successful interactive visitor experiences

About the International Spy Museum

Learn about the authentic tradecraft that has been used throughout time and around the world. Hear spies, in their own words, describe the challenges and the “game” of spying.

A spy must live a life of lies. Adopt a cover identity and learn why an operative needs one. See the credentials an agent must have to get in-or out, as in the case of six Americans exfiltrated from revolutionary Iran in 1979, courtesy of the Canadian Ambassador-and the CIA. Proceed directly to the Briefing Film where you’ll come face to face with the real world of spying.

Examine over 200 spy gadgets, weapons, bugs, cameras, vehicles, and technologies. Learn about microdots and invisible ink, buttonhole cameras and submarine recording systems, bugs of all sizes and kinds, and ingenious disguise techniques developed by Hollywood for the CIA. Uncover the stories behind the spycraft, why and how these artifacts were developed, and by which side. Survey over 50 years of spy technology, developed by agencies from the OSS to the KGB, and still in use today.

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/sessions/international-spy-museum-orchestrating-the-user-experience/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/evening_events http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/evening_events#comments Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:58:46 +0000 Dan Harrelson http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/test/ Monday, August 13th 6:15PM-8:00PM
Center Café in Union Station

This two-story café in located in the center of the historic Union Station. The atmosphere is filled with excitement and grandeur that typifies Union Station.

This is the perfect opportunity to not only see a Washington landmark, but a great chance to share a drink and some thoughts with your colleagues. Join us for cocktails and snacks.

Wednesday Aug 15 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Billy Goat Tavern & Grill 500 New Jersey Ave, NW

Ever hear of the “Curse of the Billy Goat”, also known as the Cubs Curse? Do you recall the Saturday Night Live sketch in which a short order cook (John Belushi) would yell at customers “Cheezborger! Cheezborger! No fries, cheeps! No Pepsi, Coke!”?

All of the above have one thing in common: the world famous Billy Goat Tavern.

Although this isn’t the original Billy Goat Tavern it promises to be as amusing and Fletch the manager promises to do his best Beloshi imitation. Join your friends and colleagues for an evening of cheezborgers, cheeps and Coke (and beer!)

]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/evening_events/feed http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/hello-world http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/hello-world#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:29:21 +0000 Dan Harrelson Birds of a Feather sessions will be held during lunch on Monday. The topics at the tables will be along the lines of the following, but may change depending on what you all want to discuss:
• Usability Test Methods
• Documentation Tools
• IA Tools
• Research Tools
• Interaction Design Tools
• Using Personas
• Remote Collaboration
• Rich Internet Applications
• Mobile and Devices
• Freelancers and Contractors
• Research Methods
• iPhone
• Government
• Not Profit
• Higher Education
• Localization/Globalization
• Participatory Design
• Governance
• Multichannel
• Managing UX
• Agile Methodology and UX
• Social Media
• Usability
• Design Process
• Design Strategy
]]> http://uxweek2007.adaptivepath.com/announcements/hello-world/feed