Introduction
with Sarah B. Nelson, Adaptive Path. Monday, August 13, 8:00-9:00 AM
About Sara 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 […]
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(2) Loading ...ClearRx: From Masters Thesis to Medicine Cabinet (Keynote)
with Deborah Adler, Milton Glaser, Inc.. Monday, August 13, 9:15-10:15 AM
About Deborah Adler
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, […]
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(43) Loading ...Stone Soup: Stories and Storytelling for Collaboration
with Kevin Brooks, Motorola Labs. Monday, August 13, 10:30-11:15 AM
We listen to stories for enlightenment and tell stories for education and entertainment. Everyday people are convinced, impressed, enlightened, discouraged, encouraged and swayed by the stories others tell in the workplace. In business time may be money, but the power of a good story, well told at the right time, has changed the course of […]
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(22) Loading ...UX Design as Communities of Practice
with Andrew Hinton, Vanguard. Monday, August 13, 10:30-11:15 AM
The cluster of practices and professions we’ve come to think of as supporting User-Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person’s discipline define that person’s work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues […]
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(11) Loading ...The Problem Solving Power of Stickies: Simple Tools that Deliver Great Results
with Kate Rutter, Adaptive Path. Monday, August 13, 11:30-12:15 PM
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 […]
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(26) Loading ...Collaborating with Customers: Leveraging Design and Research Methods for Customer Success
with Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop, eBay. Monday, August 13, 11:30-12:15 PM
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 […]
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(13) Loading ...Parallels in Cooking and Design
with Ryan Freitas, Adaptive Path. Monday, August 13, 1:15-1:45 PM
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 […]
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(28) Loading ...Smoothing the Way: The Designer as Facilitator
with Jess McMullin, nForm. Monday, August 13, 2:00-2:45 PM
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 […]
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(14) Loading ...How to Manage a User Experience Team (Without Losing Your Mind)
with Katrina Alcorn, Hot. Monday, August 13, 2:00-2:45 PM
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 […]
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(19) Loading ...Designing With Your Users: Generative Tools for Collective Creativity,
Part 1: Overview
with Liz Sanders, MakeTools.com. Monday, August 13, 3:00-3:45 PM
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 […]
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(13) Loading ...Capturing the Whole User Experience
with Indi Young, AP Emeritus. Monday, August 13, 3:00-3:45 PM
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 […]
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(19) Loading ...Designing With Your Users: Generative Tools for Collective Creativity,
Part 2: Workshop
with Liz Sanders, MakeTools.com. Monday, August 13, 4:00-4:45 PM
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 […]
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(15) Loading ...Communicating Ideas Throughout an Organization
with Andrew Crow, Adaptive Path. Monday, August 13, 4:00-4:45 PM
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 […]
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(23) Loading ...Discussion Panel: Skills for Current and Future User Experience Practitioners
with Sarah B. Nelson, Adaptive Path. Monday, August 13, 5:00-5:45 PM
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 […]
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(16) Loading ...One Laptop Per Child (Keynote)
with Lisa Strausfeld, Pentagram. Tuesday, August 14, 9:15-10:15 AM
Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada discuss the design behind the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. The project is led by Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of MIT Media Lab.
Called ‘Sugar’, the interface uses a highly […]
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(35) Loading ...Making Smart Clients Usable: Designing for Ajax, RIAs, and Client-side Intelligence
with Jared Spool, UIE. Tuesday, August 14,10:30-11:15 AM
Browser-side development capabilities, such as Javascript, Ajax, and Rich-Internet Applications (RIAs) (along with the latest additions: Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight,) present developers with tremendous power. We can create more fluid interactions — moving away from the dreaded page refresh — giving users an experience more like the desktop applications they are used to.
As more […]
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(22) Loading ...User-Centered Design for Evolving Products
with Ryan Freitas, Adaptive Path. Wednesay, August 15, 10:30-11:15 AM
What happens when your web product tries too hard to be liked? The gradual accretion of flawed interfaces and non-essential features can push applications, services and sites farther and farther away from the audiences they would most like to attract. The core vision behind these products can become occluded, with dire results for business goals […]
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(12) Loading ...The Conversation Gets Interesting: Creating the Adaptive Interface
with Stephen P. Anderson, Sabre. Tuesday, August 14, 11:30-12:15 PM
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 […]
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(20) Loading ...Design by Hacking
with Bill Scott and Karen Webber, Yahoo. Tuesday, Aug. 14, 11:30-12:15 PM
Yahoo! Teachers and the Yahoo! Gobbler™ are tools that create an environment for teachers to gather, organize and share materials to supplement their curriculum. This talk will explore the birth of both these products, including the integral role the teaching community played in shaping them.
We will also discuss some of the challenges of designing for […]
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(15) Loading ...Adaptive Path Charmr Presentation
with Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path. Tuesday, August 14, 1:15-1:45 PM
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 […]
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(22) Loading ...Documentation: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
with Dan Brown, EightShapes. Tuesday, August 14, 2:00-2:45 PM
Every document created by web designers contains many layers of information. Too few layers, and the ideas within lose context and meaning. Too many, and the important ideas become obscured. Choosing the right ideas to include can make or break a document, or even the entire project.
To help you learn how to strike the right […]
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(16) Loading ...Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions
with David Verba, Adaptive Path. Tuesday, August 14, 2:00-2:45 PM
As Ajax, RIA’s and Agile methods become ever more common, we increasingly hear about the value of prototypes for design and development. Unfortunately, choosing the right prototype can be an exercise in uncertainty.
To get a better handle on the prototype process, we will survey several different types of prototypes, with special focus on the appropriate […]
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(17) Loading ...Visual Vocabulary for Rich Internet Applications
with Anthony Colfelt, myFamily.com. Tuesday, August 14, 3:00-3:45 PM
Flow diagrams are a key component of an interaction design specification. Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary uses a set of simple shapes to diagram user flow and illustrate basic relationships between webpages. However, using Visual Vocabulary to describe more sophisticated behaviors of “rich” interfaces — enabled by technologies such as AJAX, Flash and Ruby on […]
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(28) Loading ...Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good
with Leisa Reicheit, disambiguity.com. Tuesday, August 14, 3:00-3:45 PM
There is a commonly held belief that Agile methods and User-Centered Design do not play nicely together. On the contrary, Agile and UCD can be combined to the mutual benefit of either side. Both can learn from and help each other, and work in synchronicity as a robust design and development methodology.
Increasingly, UX practitioners are […]
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(18) Loading ...Pattern-Based Design Communication Techniques
with Doug LeMoine, Cooper. Tuesday, August 14, 4:00-4:45 PM
Interactive behaviors are plastic, flexible things, always subtly shifting in response to the actions of the user. As such, they can be hard to pin down on the printed page. Demos can help express the vision of the design, but the nitty-gritty details must be committed to paper if the design is to survive the […]
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(28) Loading ...The Accessibility of Rich Internet Applications
with Derek Featherstone, FurtherAhead. Tuesday, August 14, 4:00-4:45 PM
What’s the opposite of a Rich Internet Application? Exactly. A Poor Internet Application. The real question is, for whom is it rich and for whom is it poor?
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 […]
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(11) Loading ...Discussion Panel: Beyond Wireframes
with Dan Brown, Eightshapes, et al. Tuesday, August 14, 5:00-5:45 PM
Modern web design trends, technologies and practices create new challenges for documenting user experiences. Rich internet applications, for example, have placed an added strain on “traditional” documents like wireframes and flows to capture the depth and detail of these complex interactions. Meanwhile, practices like “perpetual beta” call into question the value of formal deliverables.
Panelists will […]
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(20) Loading ...A Path, Adapted
with Jan Chipchase, Nokia. Wednesday, August 15, 9:15-10:15AM
Notes that support the presentation can be found here:
http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2007/08/a_path_adapted.html
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 […]
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(27) Loading ...Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
with Chiara Fox, Adaptive Path. Wednesday, August 15, 10:30-11:15 AM
Search on the web is ubiquitous. Everyone knows and uses Google. Most websites include a way to search the content within their pages and web users are often classified as either searchers or browsers. For many companies, search is considered a solved problem—you get an engine, point it at your content, add an entry box […]
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(23) Loading ...Inclusive Iterations: How a Design Team Builds Shared Insights
with Emily Ulrich, Steelcase. Wednesday, August 15, 10:30-11:15 AM
This session will focus on the ways in which human-centered researchers team with colleagues across disciplines to transform a mass of data — field observations, contextual interviews, secondary research and anecdotal stories — into actionable design principles.
Note that while case studies shared in this session will refer to work that primarily informs decision-making in the […]
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(22) Loading ...Semantic Technologies
with Cameron Hunt, CommIT Enterprises. Wednesday, August 15, 11:30-12:15 PM
The Semantic Web – as popularized by Tim-Berners Lee – is developing so rapidly that references to “semantic” and “Web 3.0″ are commonly treated as synonyms. Apart from information discovery and aggregation, not much has been written about how semantic technology can be leveraged to improve user experience as a whole. This is unfortunate for […]
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(21) Loading ...Making Research Effective
with Todd Wilkens, Adaptive Path. Wednesday, August 15, 11:30-12:15 PM
Creating engaging and enjoyable user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people your product or service is meant to serve. Unfortunately, many companies don’t really understand their customers — even companies with large research groups. But understanding people takes more than simply hiring researchers armed with PhDs and the latest methodologies. Understanding customers isn’t […]
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(8) Loading ...Learning from Adaptive Path’s Mistakes
with Bryan Mason, Adaptive Path. Wednesday, August 15, 1:15-1:45 PM
Every now and again, a project just jumps the rails — all the best intentions and planning just don’t stack up to the unanticipated challenges. After the dust settles, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on. We can also tell you all about them. (Names will be changed to protect […]
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(20) Loading ...Going Mobile: How to Choose Target Platforms and Devices?
with Barbara Ballard, Little Springs Design. Wednesday, August 15, 2:00-2:45 PM
There are dozens of development platforms in the mobile sphere. And 1,700 different devices on the market, each with its own rendering idiosyncrasies. Of course you also have to contend with carrier influence and distribution. How do you choose which devices to target and which platforms to use for your application? Mobile phone and applications […]
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(18) Loading ...The Psychology of Social Design
with Josh Porter, UIE. Wednesday, August 15, 2:00-2:45 PM
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 […]
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(15) Loading ...Mobile Usability Testing
with Barbara Ballard, Little Springs Design. Wednesday, August 15, 3:00-3:45 PM
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 […]
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(12) Loading ...Stores, Web and Beyond: Serving Multi-channel Customers With Meaningful User Experiences
with Kathleen Hoski, BestBuy. Wednesday, August 15, 3:00-3:45 PM
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 […]
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(17) Loading ...Mobile Research Techniques
with Rachel Hinman, Adaptive Path. Wednesday, August 15, 4:00-4:45 PM
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 […]
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(11) Loading ...Participate to Innovate
with Marty Gage, Lextant. Wednesday, August 15, 4:00-4:45 PM
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 […]
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(18) Loading ...CNN.com Relaunch Case Study
with Lori Adams and Dermot Waters, CNN. Wednesday, August 15, 5:00-5:45 pm
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 […]
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(17) Loading ...New Sources of Inspiration for Interaction Design (Keynote)
with Dan Saffer, Adaptive Path. Thursday, August 16, 9:15-10:15 AM
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 […]
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