Midwest UX Conference ReDesign

Columbus, Ohio

Midwest UX Conference

May 31‑June 2, 2021

2021.midwestuxconference.com

WELCOME

2021 Midwest UX Conference

The Midwest UX Conference is a unique three-day event that combines inspiring talks with hands-on activities presented by a mix of regional professionals and international experts.

Join us May 31–June 2, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio .

SPEAKERS

Keynote speakers with experience, insight, brilliance, and fresh thinking in the field of design.

Keynote Speakers

Anchoring the 2021 Midwest UX conference this year, we are proud to bring you keynote speakers with experience, insight, brilliance, and fresh thinking in the field of design. Read on to learn a bit more about our keynote speakers.

RICHARD BUCHANAN

Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design, Management, and Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Before joining the Weatherhead faculty in 2008, he served as Head of the School of Design from 1992 until 2002 and from 2002 until 2008 as Director of Doctoral Studies.

Buchanan is a widely published author and speaker. He is also Co-Editor of Design Issues, the international journal of design history, theory, and criticism published by the M.I.T. Press. He served for two terms as President of the Design Research Society, the learned society of the design research community. While at Carnegie Mellon, he inaugurated Interaction Design programs at the Masters and doctoral level. He is well known for extending the application of design into new areas of theory and practice, writing and teaching as well as practicing with the concepts and methods of Interaction Design.

He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal.

NATHAN MARTIN

Coined

“Willy Wonka with a toolkit from Mythbusters” by Forbes Magazine, Nathan Martin is the CEO of Deeplocal, an internationally acclaimed innovation studio that builds compelling experiences that link the real and online worlds and provoke conversation. Deeplocal spun out of the world’s leading robotics school, Carnegie Mellon, and has been instrumental in shaping innovation in the ad industry with the development of projects like the tweet-fed, chalk-spraying Nike Chalkbot robot for the Tour de France and the Prius bicycle with mind-controlled shifting. In less than three years, the organization has received awards like AdAge Small Agency of the Year Northeast, Cannes Lions Grand Prix, and One Club Top Ten Campaign of the Decade and has built a client list that includes Nike, Toyota, Volkswagen, TBS, GAP, and others.

Prior to founding Deeplocal in 2006, Nathan was a founding member of an art group and a touring punk/metal band and spoke, toured, and exhibited internationally. Nathan has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work in art, music, and technology and has been featured in Wired, Fast Company, AdWeek, and NOTCOT, and at events like AdAge Creativity + Technology, 2600’s H.O.P.E. Conference, and Yahoo! Provoke.

PETER MORVILLE

Peter Morville is a writer, speaker, and consultant. He is best known for helping to create the discipline of information architecture. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Ambient Findability, and Search Patterns. He advises such clients as AT&T, HP, IBM, the Library of Congress, Macy’s, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel. His work on information architecture and user experience strategy has been covered by Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife, two daughters, and a dog named Knowsy. He blogs at findability.org.

PRESENTERS

“If you think presentations cannot enchant people, then you have never seen a really good one.”

—Guy Kawaski

OUR CONFERENCE PRESENTERS

From a record turnout of high-quality proposals, we are pleased to announce the Midwest UX 2021 conference presenters. Each of our selected speakers brings a unique perspective and fresh topics to share with conference attendees. Read on to learn a bit more about our conference presenters...

BINAEBI AKAH

@siriomi

Binaebi Akah is a User Experience Designer for the architecture, engineering, and retail brand agency WD Partners. Prior to WD Partners she was a usability analyst for Nationwide Insurance. She believes in the power of sketching, whiteboards, and Slinkies. She highlights awesome sketchnotes with Mike Rohde at the Sketchnote Army blog, and released the how-to book, Sketchnotes: A Field Guide for the Busy Yet Inspired Professional, with Charlene McBride in January 2021.

Binaebi dances balboa and Lindy hop at least once a week, and is on the local Swing Columbus performance team. You can find her on Twitter at @siriomi, at her website siriomi.com, and in person at any given Midwest swing dance event. You can check out her sketchnotes via her website or her Flickr collection which can be found here: bit.ly/CMwDq.

COREY ALLENBACH

Corey Allenbach is currently leading planning & strategy efforts for the User Experience team at Nationwide in Columbus, OH. His role involves consulting with clients to help them take a user-centered design approach to their efforts as well as looking after a portfolio of 30+ UX projects at any given time. With over 10 years of experience, Corey has played various roles on UX projects including interaction designer, information architect, visual designer and usability analyst for both small design shops and large corporations.

HAIG ARMEN

@haigarmen

As one of Canada’s most respected and innovative digital designers, Haig has been designing brands, advertising, and interactive projects for 15 years. As a producer of CBC Radio 3’s groundbreaking online magazine, Haig created editorial, design and marketing strategies that have earned a die-hard audience.

Haig has had the honor of winning a variety of awards throughout his career, including no less than three Webby Awards, two Prix Italia for Web Arts and Drama and a Gold Medal from the Art Director’s Club of New York to name only a few.

Haig Armen is the founder and creative director of LiFT Studios and holds a position as an Assistant Professor of Design and Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University

of Art + Design. When Haig isn’t designing or managing at LiFT or teaching design or spending time with his family in Vancouver he might be found playing jazz on his guitar or composing music.

JESSICA BAILEY

Jessica Bailey is a user experience designer at Lextant in Columbus, Ohio. After starting at Lextant as an intern from the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Jessica has since worked with a wide variety of clients creating design concepts and supporting frameworks for complex, information-rich user interfaces and experiences. While her current work has her focused on the medical imaging and precision farming industries, she is always looking forward to exciting new design challenges.

SAMUEL BOWLES

@shmuel

Samuel Bowles is a Software Craftsman at Mutually Human, a software design and development team in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has been working as a software designer and user experience professional since 1996 when he began his career as a webmaster for Burger King. Since those days he has worked with startups to Fortune 50 companies across the country and around the world including a seven year stint in Madrid and Seville, Spain.

DAVID BRAHLER

@dgbrahle

User Experience Designer at Kent State University and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management Grad Student at KSU.

BEN CALLAHAN

@bencallahan

President of Sparkbox, Ben is a thought leader on front-end development sharing his ideas about the web on the Sparkbox Foundry and industry blogs like Smashing Magazine. His leadership at Sparkbox has driven the organization to be a leading provider of mobile-first responsive web design and he continues to push for better user experiences outside the context of specific devices.

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” —Charles Kettering

LAURA CREEKMORE

@lauracreekmore

Laura Creekmore was delighted to learn 4 years ago that what she’s been doing for 15 years is properly called content strategy. Creekmore is president of Creek Content, a consultancy focused on content strategy and information architecture for organizations in highly regulated fields like health care and financial services. She speaks both tech and marketing but claims to live in the no-man’s-land between the two. Recent Creek Content projects include the development and implementation of the content strategy and information architecture for a private personal health improvement site, and the content development, information architecture and community engagement strategy for a software company’s customer support community. Creekmore is a master’s student at the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and she blogs about content strategy, IA and way more than you’d care to know about copyright law at lauracreekmore.com.

AMELIA CAMPBELL

Amelia Campbell is a graduate student at Kent State University in the Information Architecture & Knowledge Management (IAKM) program, specializing in UXD. She is currently a Contract Negotiator for Lockheed Martin and held previous positions within LM in Configuration and Document Management. Her interests and studies include design, cartography, painting, film, and travel.

BRAD COLBOW

@bradcolbow

Brad Colbow is a designer at Designing Interactive in Cleveland Ohio. Brad is an award-winning web designer, best known for his comics that are published monthly in .Net magazine and “The Brads” a weekly strip found on his personal website. His work has appeared on the New York Time’s website, CNET, Smashing Magazine and elsewhere. You can find out more about him and his work on his website: colbowdesign.com

LAUREN COLTON

@laurentgc

Lauren Colton is the Information Architect & Editor at Gravity Works Design & Development. She is a grammar nerd who loves talking about the importance of words, and a geek focused on how people interact with technology to find and use information. A graduate of James Madison College at Michigan State University, her editorial work includes the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan Reference USA) and Encyclopedia of Modern China (Charles Scribner’s Sons).

ANNA EAGLIN

@annaeaglin

Anna Eaglin joined Lextant as a User Experience Design Associate after receiving an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, and a master’s in Human Computer Interaction/design from Indiana University.

DANIEL EIZANS

@danieleizans

Daniel Eizans is director of Enablement Strategy at Team Detroit. He leads the Ford Vision Team, a multi-discipline team of strategists, user experience professionals and creatives focused on evolving digital platforms and consumer experiences for Ford Motor Company. A former journalist, programming professional and student of neuroscience, his approach to online content is rooted in creating the most contextually relevant experience for users regardless of point of access.

He writes about content strategy and user experience issues at DanielEizans.com and is a regular columnist for Contents Magazine

VERONICA ERB

@verbistheword

Veronica Erb is a User Experience Designer at EightShapes LLC, where she focuses on research and HTML prototyping.

Before joining EightShapes, Veronica Erb moderated user experience research in Rwanda and the United States for an international non-profit called AED. In her largest project, a USAID-funded program, she and three UX volunteers researched ways to help teachers in Rwandan teacher training schools.

Veronica’s personality probably has something to do with going to a liberal arts school in Iowa and growing up in a geodesic dome in southern Illinois. When not living in the world of user experience, Veronica dances Balboa and Lindy Hop, and hangs out with her cranky Beta fish, Jeremiah.

You can find Veronica on Twitter at @verbistheword, on the interweb at veronicaerb.com, and in person in Washington, DC.

DAVID FARKAS

@dafark8

David is a Lead Designer at Electronic Ink. He is responsible for developing best practices, creates visualizations to communicate research and business needs, and develops wire frames and aesthetics for the development of business applications.

Prior to Electronic Ink, David worked at PNC Bank NA, Pittsburgh out of the E-Business office. There, he was one of the first members of the design team within the Online Banking department and worked to establish design practices within the office. David also has experience designing third party iPhone applications, both for PNC and for independent projects.

David is an active participant in Philly CHI and is an occasional author for JohnnyHolland.org, and an active member in both IxDA and IAI supporting both annual conferences.

David is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University where he graduated with degrees in Design and Human Computer Interaction.

KARL FAST

@karlfast

Karl Fast is a professor of User Experience Design at Kent State University. His research and teaching deal with the design of interactive and information-rich digital environments. He is a founding member of the Information Architecture Institute.

DEREK FEATHERSTONE

@feather

Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known speaker and authority on accessibility and web design and development. He is the lead accessibility consultant for Simply Accessible Inc., a Canadian firm that delivers insightful and creative accessibility consulting to Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private sector clients. He is a triathlete, father, husband and lover of elegant design.

IAN FENN

@ifenn

Ian Fenn is an award-winning veteran UX specialist recognized for consistently exceeding project targets through intelligent and thoughtful interaction design. He is based in Austin, Texas and London, England. You don’t want to see his commuting bill.

LEANNA GINGRAS

@leegoesplaces

Leanna is the User Research Coordinator at ITHAKA and a problem-solver by trade. As part of her calling to create holistic and delightful experiences, she manages research studies, conducts social experiments on teammates, and juggles between quantitative and qualitative analysis.

MATTHEW GROCKI

@mgrocki

As the principal of Grass Fed Content, I make sense of technical and market driven content while overseeing its publication and curation. Schooled in the crafts of web editing, technical and web writing, I tackle the rampant ineffectiveness that plagues creating, acquiring, owning, storing and governing content. As a content strategist, I’m focused on presenting a unified brand vision, working with multiple content providers and setting the course for continued governance.

MARTI GUKEISEN

@UXmarti

Over the last ten years, Marti has been involved in user experience design, evaluation, consulting, and architecting digital experiences. Marti has shared her expertise with clients such as Adobe, Sears, Kraft, Giant Eagle, Eaton, Jergens, Johnson & Johnson, and Biore. Marti received her Master of Information Science in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan. When she’s not in front of a screen, Marti enjoys traveling, amateur gardening, and bike commuting. She currently cycles to Enlighten, a born digital agency in the log cabin district of Ann Arbor.

DERREN HERMANN

@derrenh

Derren Hermann has been leading successful UX projects for over 10 years. He is currently a Director on the User Experience team at Nationwide leading up a team of 20 interaction designers and information architects. Prior to this, Derren worked with Diamond Bullet Design in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While there he held a variety of positions including project lead, director of banking websites, director of web accessibility, usability specialist, and information architect. Derren holds an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology and a masters in library and information science from Indiana University. His graduate focus was on HCI and information architecture.

JOHN WAYNE HILL

@johnwaynehill

John Wayne is a studied interaction designer from Indiana University’s Human-Computer Interaction Design program. He has worked with technology for over 9 years at places such as IU Creative Services and Mozilla. John Wayne has designed web apps, mobile interfaces, products, robots, museum installations, and has recently lead a project to explore people’s ‘home’ on the web with Mozilla’s Firefox UX Team. He has experience leading teams of people towards elegant and compelling designs. While he has a passion for design and prototyping in all forms, John Wayne also loves photography and digital imagery.

JESSICA IVINS

@jessicaivins

Jessica Ivins is a multi-disciplinary experience designer who has developed, designed, and tested a diverse range of websites. After taking a mandatory computer programming class in college, Jessica fell in love with the digital realm and never looked back. She began her career as a front end developer and soon discovered user experience. In March of 2010, she joined the team at Happy Cog as a senior experience designer.

Jessica regularly volunteers her time to the greater user experience community. She is currently the lead organizer for Philly UX Book Club. From 2009 to 2010 she served as an officer for PhillyCHI, an organization dedicated to fostering the Philadelphia user experience community. She now speaks publicly about one of her passions: designing experiences for women. She has spoken for a variety of organizations and conferences, including the Wharton UI Conference, the IA Summit, and SXSW.

DARREN KALL

@darrenkall

Darren Kall is a UX consultant collaborating with leaders of technology and technology-enabled companies to improve the user experience of products and services. He is co-owner of Kall Consulting which is focused on end-to-end customer and user experience design and strategy. Before co-founding Kall Consulting, Darren worked at LexisNexis, Microsoft, AT&T Bell Laboratories, H.E.L.P., and IBM.

Darren holds 11 UX patents, 6 international patents and has received 104 UX patent citations. He has served as a US representative to the ITU international standards body. He worked as the Bell Labs futurist predicting the impact of technology on US education for the Department of Education.

KALEEM KHAN

@kaleemux

Kaleem Khan is a founding partner of strategy and design research consultancy True Insight in Toronto. Kaleem helps global companies, agencies, startups and governments create great experiences and solve complex problems. Over two decades, he has helped leaders in consumer electronics, mobile technology, Internet services, media, software, healthcare, finance, telecom and security. He advises Ryerson University, OCAD University sLab and the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre. Kaleem runs UX Book Club Toronto; leads Canada’s largest user experience design professionals’ group, UX Irregulars, and co-founded the InteractionCamp unconference.

“Want your users to fall in love with your designs?

Fall in love with your users.”

— Dana Chisnell

@danklyn

Dan Klyn is an information architect and co-founder of The Understanding Group. He’s currently serving as Treasurer of the IA Institute, and he teaches the information architecture course at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

ALAINA KRAUS

@AlainaRachelle

Through a winding career path including theatre, education and non-profits; Alaina was introduced to the field of User Experience in 2010 when she began working at Covenant Eyes. In the time since she has worked on a variety of projects from designing for interfaces to designing for whole new systems while expanding her knowledge of the field and how to apply that winding career path to UX. She is also actively involved in local leadership with the Lansing IxDA as their events coordinator.

LIVIA LABATE

@livlab

Livia Labate is an experience designer based in the Washington, DC area. She currently oversees the experience design practice for Marriott International’s digital products.

JIM LAING

@jhlaing

Jim Laing is an Experience Architect at ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving the academic community and best known as the creator of JSTOR. Prior to joining ITHAKA, Jim was an Experience Researcher at Adobe. Originally from Ohio (and now in exile in Michigan), Jim likes to spend his free days bicycling or sailing his handcrafted wooden sailboat.

JEN MATSON

@nstop

Jen Matson is a UX designer at Amazon.com who has been designing for web, kiosks and mobile since 1994. She has worked in a variety of industries, from entertainment to technology, with clients including Comedy Central, LEGO, Microsoft and T-Mobile. Jen specializes in user experience design for the mobile web and interactive prototyping, working hands-on to create forward-thinking and delightful user experiences that adapt to multiple devices and contexts.

CHARLENE MCBRIDE

@ursonate

Charlene McBride is a User Experience Designer currently based in Boston, MA where she dances with complexity at SapientNitro. Prior to Sapient she worked at agencies including Digitas, Razorfish and Modem Media. Previously she spent 10 years working in children’s television and animation.

Charlene grew up in University City, MO at the caramel center of urban and suburban life and where she learned that the cure for boredom is curiosity. She always travels with a minimum of 3 sketchbooks and a set of watercolors. She released the how-to book, Sketchnotes: A Field Guide for the Busy Yet Inspired Professional, with Binaebi Akah in January 2021. Her website is charlenemcbride.com

JACK

MOFFETT

@jackmoffett

With a BFA in Graphic Design from WVU and a Masters in Interaction Design from CMU, I have been designing web, desktop, and mobile applications for over a decade. I’ve worked in both academics and industry, and I teach design part-time. I’m one of those designers that must cover the gamut from initial user research through to implementation and testing. As such, my skill set includes visual design, information design, and front-end implementation. I have a history of tightly integrating with the development team to ensure optimal design through the entire project lifecycle.

@jayamorgan

Jay is an Experience Designer at Rackspace, working in Austin, TX. Currently redesigning cloud hosting web applications for individuals and enterprises, his UX experience spans user research, information architecture, iterative testing and prototyping, and team management.

Prior to being independent, Jay worked as UX Director at an Interactive Marketing agency, Senior IA at Target, and Interface Manager at JCP.com. He developed the UX practice in retail ecommerce companies, seizing every opportunity to advance the practice of UX. While also advancing the quality of UX work delivered. Jay considers his work championing and building Target’s Design Pattern Library to be his most significant accomplishment. It’s not because design patterns are the answer, but because discord amongst Design teams is a problem worth solving.

Jay studied applied cognitive science, focusing on mental models, problem solving, and judgment and decision-making. He is fascinated by our field’s potential to earn a seat at the table by solving cultural, organizational, and communication problems.

RACHEL NABORS

@CrowChick

Rachel Nabors is an award-winning cartoonist turned front-end developer and UX enthusiast. She draws from her experience as a visual storyteller to create better experiences for people online. Rachel still makes comics on the weekends, and you can read them at rachelthegreat.com. She rambles about new HTML5 tags and IE bugs at rachelnabors.com.

MATT NISH-LAPIDUS

@emenel

Matt Nish-Lapidus is a design director at Normative Design in Toronto. Having worked as an artist, programmer, teacher, consultant, and designer in a number of industries, Matt is skilled at creating solutions that cross disciplines. He has worked for large clients such as Coca-Cola, as well as helped start-ups design and launch new products. Matt is currently serving on the board of directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and was a founder of IxDA Toronto.

M GILES PHILLIPS

@gilesphillips

Giles is an accomplished Product Designer, he has been exploring the horizons of interface design and development for more than a decade. He is currently Director of User Experience at Brightcove, where he is responsible for global product design, information architecture, and user research for Brightcove’s market-leading Online Video and Content Application Platforms. Prior to joining Brightcove, he was Director of Innovation at Monster.com. Giles is an alum of MIT; he performed his research in the Media Lab, where he developed a new form of interactive search to help facilitate participative design.

Giles is cofounder of subforum.org, a multidisciplinary research group exploring the foundations of design. His research focuses on metaphor and representation in design, generative grammars, vigilance in user interaction, and the educational qualities of interaction. His work has been published in Environment and Planning B, Wired, and the MIT SA+ P Press.

@moerafi

Moe Rafiuddin is a User Experience Designer with expertise in the areas of design and evaluation of innovative tools and services with the emphasis on user-centered design. His professional experience includes projects in higher education, non-profits, and finance.

Moe is eternally searching for the answer to what it is to be human. Moe stays connected to the web of life by spending time helping organizations advocate for the underrepresented people in the community.

Moe is currently learning to create digital comics for the web and mobile platforms.

GRETCHEN CALDWELL RINNERT

Gretchen Caldwell Rinnert is an assistant professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. She primarily teaches interactive media and motion design. She is a graduate of North Carolina State University’s College of Design. As a researcher, her work focuses on the intersection of design and education, classroom participation, and tools that aid in understanding and comprehension. She continues to research participatory culture by investigating learning spaces, digital tools, online video, and time-based media. Her most recent research has been geared toward designing tools for health communication. Some of her clients include The LHT Group, Exceptional Innovation, and America Online. Most recently, as a consultant for The LHT Group she worked on a variety of projects, designing websites, e-learning courses and customizable interactions for fortune 500 companies.

CHRIS RISDON @chrisrisdon

Chris Risdon is a lead experience designer at Adaptive Path. He started a journeyman career in information architecture and product strategy in 1997 and over the past 14 years has applied a combination of IA, graphic and interaction design to successful products and services for both large enterprises and start-ups.

Chris holds an MFA in design from the Savannah College of Art & Design and spends any extra time as an educator, teaching Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshops and as an adjunct professor at Austin Community College, teaching interface design.

“A consistent experience is a better experience.”

—Mark Eberman

SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER

@sara_ann_marie

BOON SHERIDAN

@boonerang

Boon Sheridan is a designer, thinker and shenaniganist. He has been working in, on and around UX for the last 15 years or so. He’s worked for Fortune 50’s and 5-person shops. He was part of a panel for the first Midwest UX and hungers for more. He’s spoken at EuroIA, the MIMA Summit and guest lectured at UCLA. He can be found on twitter as @boonerang and he’d love to swap stories over a beverage.

JOE SOKOHL

@mojoguzzi

For 20 years, Joe Sokohl has concentrated on crafting excellent user experiences, using information architecture, interaction design, content strategy, and user research. He helps teams effectively integrate appropriate user experience into product development.

Currently the principal of Regular Joe Consulting, LLC, Mr. Sokohl has previously held UX-oriented positions based in Boston, MA; Hamburg, Germany; Richmond, VA; Chicago, IL; and Durham, NC.

He is a cofounder of RUX ( RichmondUX.com). He served on the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association as well.

Oh, and he’s been a soldier, cook, radio DJ, blues road manager, and reporter once upon a time.

COLETTE VARDEMAN

@colettev

Colette Vardeman heads-up Lextant’s User Experience Design practice. Colette designs products that align with people’s desired experiences - built on a deep understanding of the emotional drivers, aspirations, and mental models that trigger their ideal experience. As UX architect she simplifies complex systems and information to reflect people’s natural behaviors for medical, financial, mobile, education, consumer, and enterprise applications. Prior to Lextant Colette led the interaction design teams at Fitch Worldwide and CollegeView. Colette holds interactive design awards from Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/ IDEA Awards, Communication Arts, CCAD, and special recognition from the White House. Colette holds a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a content strategist and writer based in Tempe, Arizona, where she where she helps clients stop creating endless content and start building strategies that are sustainable, meaningful, and future-ready. She recently left agency-land for independent life and is currently working on her first book, Content Everywhere, with Rosenfeld Media. You can find her slightly off-color commentary on content strategy and related topics at sarawb.com.

LYDIA WHITEHEAD

@lydiology

Lydia Whitehead is the design director at SmallBox where she spends much of her time plotting world domination on behalf of usability and thoughtful user experiences. Thanks to a previous life in journalism design, she loves infographics and likes to work with a grid. Nowadays she’s working on finishing her Master’s in HCI at IUPUI and figuring out how to get more hours in the day.

BRIAN YEUNG

@stimulant

For the last decade, Brian has been focused on bringing delightful user experiences to life and shepherding them to fruition. He’s led interface designs as a game designer, as a producer for the system interface and accessories for the Xbox 360, and as a strategist for the Kinect. Most recently he was part of team that created LoopLoop, a music toy for Sifteo cubes that won Best in Show at the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) inaugural Interaction Design Awards at the Interaction 12 conference. At Stimulant he’s excited to be exploring new interaction paradigms for technology to facilitate human to human interaction.

ALLA ZOLLERS

@azollers

Alla is a passionate and innovative experience consultant. Over the last six years, she has worked as a user experience lead for agencies, startups, and software companies. Alla is also personal coach, and she strives to help individuals create a fulfilling and exceptional life.

SCHEDULE

“Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.”

—IBM

SCHEDULE

As promised, our exciting program combines inspiring talks with hands-on pre-conference workshops presented by a mix of regional professionals and international experts.

May 31: FRIDAY

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS & KICKOFF EVENT

7:30 Registration

Let’s Sketchnote!

Binaebi Akah, Veronica

9:00

Erb, Charlene McBride

Zen and the Art of Planning

Derren Hermann Corey Allenbach

12:00 Lunch break, on your own. 120 minutes to find food.

2:00

6:00

Design Mobile Apps for Behavior Change

Haig Armen

Experience Design Practice Development Livia Labate

Content Strategy 101

Laura Creekmore

Hands-On Responsive Web Design

Ben Callahan

Kickoff Mixer at Barley’s Brewing Company; Join us for pub crawls immediately after.

7:30 Registration

9:00 Welcome and Introduction

9:30 Keynote: Ubiquitous Information Architecture: A Framework for Cross-Channel Strategy

Peter Morville

10:30 15 Minute Break. Time for coffee.

Gallery One Galaxy Theatre

Mezzanine

10:45

Building a Design Culture

Brad Colbow

Designing The Election Process

Lauren Colton

Your English Teacher Was Wrong: Plain Language for Digital Environments

Kaleem Khan

11:15 15 Minute Break. Perhaps a snack, if you’re feeling a bit peckish.

11:30

Designing Better: Thinking Beyond The Device

Derek Featherstone

12:20 Lunch

On ‘Shrink It and Pink It’: Designing Experiences for Women

Matt Nish-Lapidus

12:40 Special Lunchtime Session: Women in UX

Rachel Nabors

1:45 Digital Hoarding: How Information Is Suffocating Your Audience

Jen Matson

Bridging the Mobile Design Gap

Marti Gukeison

2:15 You’ve got 15 minutes to socialize.

2:30 Information Overload is an Opportunity

Karl Fast

3:20 10 minute break

3:30 Interaction Design Through Mixology

David Farkas

4:00 30 minute break.

Extreme Design—The Secrets to Successful Design Pairing

Samuel Bowles

Building a Responsive Design Process

Lydia Whitehead

Head out to the Columbus Arts Fest and get a funnel cake.

4:30 What UX Can Learn from the Alt-Country Movement

Derren Hermann

What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a UX Designer

Jessica Bailey

Wabi-sabi: the Beauty of Imperfection

Rachel Nabors

Apprenticeship Now

Alla Zollers

Living with Wearable Tech

John Wayne Hi Which Way?

Alaina Kraus

Call to Action

Moe Rauddin

When Good Design is Used for Evil

Anna Eaglin

6:00

Saturday Night Conference Party at Huntington Park

A Brief History of New Media Art

Jessica Ivins

Resize Your UX

Matthew Grocki

Building Bendable Content: Why the web needs contentfocused IA

Sara Wachter

Boettche

Bring the Future to Life

Colette Vardeman

9:00 Welcome and Introduction

9:30 Keynote: Design and Development of Post-Digital Experiences

Nathan Martin

10:30 15 Minute Break. Time for coffee.

Gallery One Galaxy Theatre

Mezzanine

10:45

Negotiating Your UX Career

Jay Morgan

Upselling UX: Moving from Pixels to Strategy

James Laing

11:15 15 Minute Break. High-five someone in the hallway.

11:30 Mapping the Experience

Chris Risdon

12:20 Lunch

Working with Developers for Fun and Profit

Jack Moffett

Evolving Mental Models

Daniel Eizans

The Digital Place You Love is Gone: Mitigating Loss in the Ethersphere

Joe Sokoh

12:40 Special Lunchtime Session: Designing for Multi Screen Interactions

Brian Yeung

1:45 How to Rapidly Prototype Multi-Touch Applications

Amelia Campbell

A Lifetime of User Engagement: Evolutionary Conceptual Models

M. Giles Phillips

2:15 You’ve got 15 minutes to socialize.

2:30

Customer Journeys: Designing for Disagreement

Boon Sheridan

3:20 10 minute break

3:30 What Natural User Interfaces Are and Why They Matter to UX Designers

David Brahler

People, Not Process from bakers’ guilds

Ian Fenn

Establishing What “Good” Means with Performance Continuums

Dan Klyn

Usable Security: It Isn’t Secure If People Can’t Use It

Darren Kall

The Craft of UX: What we can learn

Leanna Gingras

Educating Future Designers by Designing Mobile Interfaces: Case Studies with Actionable Lessons

Gretchen Caldwell Rinnert

4:00 30 minute break. Time for a Lemon Shake Up.

4:30 Keynote: Experience, Human Interaction, and Service Design

Richard Buchanan

6:00 Thanks for another great conference!

KEYNOTES

The team at Midwest UX is proud to announce our keynote speakers for the 2021 conference. We are confident that the keynote presentations find just the right balance between reflective thinking and practical application - and offer the opportunity to inspire our attendees to apply these thought models to their own everyday design challenges.

UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE: A FRAMEWORK FOR CROSS-CHANNEL STRATEGY

Peter Morville

At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, information blurs the boundaries between products and services to enable cross-channel, trans-media, physico-digital user experiences. This “intertwingularity” offers an unprecedented opportunity to re-imagine information architecture. Never before have we been able to employ such a powerful combination of networks, devices, and sensors to capture and share knowledge and to create meaningful user journeys. In this session, we’ll connect the dots between classic and cross-channel information architecture. We’ll pay special attention to the integration of mobile and social into a “web strategy” that’s responsive and future-friendly, while also highlighting key relationships with content strategy, findability, analytics, and governance. And, we’ll explore how experience maps and “IA thinking” can improve the process and product of information architecture and user experience design.

Three Questions To Be Answered: Why is information architecture even more important in an era of mobile, social, and cross-channel user experience? How can we apply “systems thinking” and “IA thinking” to improve our products and services? How do we design for customer journeys that encompass a growing array of physical and digital touchpoints?

Twitter ID: @morville

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF POST-DIGITAL EXPERIENCES

Nathan Martin

Nathan Martin, CEO of Pittsburgh-based post-digital shop Deeplocal, will discuss the process behind several of the company’s well-known projects, including the tweet-printing Nike Chalkbot robot that debuted at the 2009 Tour de France. Deeplocal, which works both in marketing and product consulting, has strong opinions on speed and innovation. Nathan will present several examples of post-digital projects that bridge the online and offline worlds and the challenges that each campaign faced. Nathan will also discuss Deeplocal’s culture, which reflects his background as a fine artist and punk rocker, and talk about his company’s mission to support and sustain artists in Pittsburgh.

EXPERIENCE, HUMAN INTERACTION, AND SERVICE DESIGN

Richard Buchanan

Though interaction design and user experience are often identified with digital products and web-based experience, human interaction encompasses more than the experience of the flatland of the screen. In this address I will discuss the foundations of human interaction design and how they have shaped our goals in designing experiences. To add perspective to this discussion, I will focus on ideas about the emerging area of service design. Service design is another of the fascinating applications of ideas about human interaction and experience. The products of service design illustrate the integration of digital and whole-body experience. In fact, they effectively illustrate the interrelationships of what I have called the “four orders of design.” Whether designing for digital products, artifacts or any of the other types of products that designers create, a reflection on the intent and expectations surrounding service design can add value to our work.

Nobel

“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good I am satisfied.”

—Alfred

WORKSHOPS

Go on, get your hands dirty this time. We at Midwest UX value the growth of design practitioners through practical knowledge as well as inspirational discussions. We’ve picked a variety of workshops to enable our attendees to roll up their sleeves and learn new and applicable concepts. Go forth, get dirty, and learn.

LET’S SKETCHNOTE!

Binaebi Akah, Veronica Erb, Charlene McBride

Before we begin a design, we must listen—to stakeholders, clients, coworkers, and most of all, our users. Listening and successfully recording what we’ve heard directly effects whether we ultimately succeed with our design.

Sketchnotes use a visual language that expands on traditional note taking. Because of the time it takes to enhance notes with arrows and stick figures and fancy lettering, we encourage ourselves to practice the art of listening. As an active sketchnoter, you will better understand, remember, and communicate the information you consume.

The sketchnotes themselves are more than a happy byproduct—they can communicate ideas, record user experience research, and enhance our visual language. Participants in this studio workshop will learn sketchnoting techniques and take time to experiment with sketchnoting components. As we practice together, we will share what we’ve learned in both small and full group discussions and exercises. At the end of the session, we will practice with a sketchnoting dry run.

What you’ll learn:

•Basic elements and practices of sketchnoting (typography, lines, people, color)

• How to hear important points of the discussion or event you are recording

• How to shape your sketchnote to enhance its message

• How sketchnoting can help your UX practice

• How to practice and develop your innate ability to draw

All beginners and active sketchnoters are welcome to attend. Whether you’re starting from scratch (“I can’t even draw a straight line”) or you’re comfortable with sketchnoting components (“I love drawing, but haven’t figured out how to put it in notes”), this studio workshop will provide you with dedicated practice time and a group of folks to exchange questions and ideas.

We are here to help you adopt a method that will improve the way you understand concepts and solve problems. Come begin the journey to find your sketchnote style!

“If you find an element of your interface requires instructions, then you need to redesign it.”

— Dan Rubin

ZEN AND THE ART UX PLANNING

Derren Hermann, Corey Allenbach

Crafting a solid user experience plan is not an easy task. Perhaps you have found this out the hard way. Regardless, you need a few things to be really successful.

• A solid framework and set of tools to guide you

• The ability tell a story that sells your plan

Our workshop is for anyone that’s ever been asked to plan a UX effort. It will be led by Corey Allenbach and Derren Hermann who have over 20 years of combined experience in crafting user experience plans. We’ll provide you with a framework and tools that you can take with you and use to improve both your planning and selling your intentions.

In the workshop we’ll cover four areas:

• The initial client meeting

• Brainstorming sessions for planning

•Developing an approach summary

• Creating a detailed project plan

We’ll provide you with tips and tricks. Tools like checklists, brainstorming cards, planning templates, and structuring guides will drive our process. In the workshop, you’ll break into groups and craft your own plans. You’ll get real time feedback and critique that will help strengthen your skills.

Your ultimate test will be seeing whether or not you have what it takes for your plan to be accepted.

Only then will you have mastered Zen and the Art of UX Planning.

DESIGNING MOBILE APPS FOR BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Haig Armen

The evolution of mobile devices and broadband connectivity give us an incredible opportunity to design for real-time and sometimes long-term behavioral change. Leveraging the mobile platform as an advanced interconnected social ecosystem provides us with the direct contact that’s often needed for making a lasting impact.

This workshop focuses on social responsibility and includes an intense lineup of participatory design exercises that touch on a series of methods for designing compelling user experiences. Participants are introduced to psychological and business model concepts to help teams craft unique mobile engagement and experiences. Working through user motivations, perceived abilities and discovering opportune moments for triggering habit changing actions, teams will explore applying behavioral psychology to empathize and connect with intended mobile users.

Everybody’s got an idea for an app but this workshop teaches participants how to craft viable innovative mobile applications. Within two hours, teams produce design brief, user flows and wire frames that result in far-reaching, beneficial effects.

HANDS-ON RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

Ben Callahan

This workshop will be a chance for you to dig into responsive web design. We’ll build a site from start to finish and talk about how mobile first responsive web design turns the web design and development process on it’s head. If you have a team, bring them all and work together. If you’re on your own, come and join a few others. You’ll leave with the ability to take this skill back to your organization.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

— Hans Hofmann

CONTENT STRATEGY 101

Laura

Creekmore

In the UX world, we spend most of our time worrying about the structure and design of our websites. The content…well, we’ve already got that. Or, we can certainly whip it up. Marketing will take care of it! And heck, we all have Microsoft Word and email. That’s content!

Right? Not quite.

What happens in many organizations—maybe you’ve seen it yourself—is that web projects get way down the road before anyone talks content. You already know the problem; as a UX person, this makes your job very hard. It’s more than a minor pain when everyone figures out right before launch that you don’t have content to fit the design, or there’s no one to manage the content you actually have.

Content has to work in concert with technology and design: content cannot be an afterthought. It has to be as carefully designed as the rest of your site.

This workshop will take you through the nuts and bolts of content strategy—both the mindset and the toolbox. You’ll learn:

• How to advocate for content in the design process

• How to identify the right people to do it [And what to do if that person is you!]

• The tools you need to analyze your content

• How to get rid of ROT [Redundant, outdated, trivial content]

• How to develop a navigation and a back-end system that are easy to use

• The importance of developing long-term governance processes

The result?

You’ll come out of this workshop with tools to be an advocate for your content. You’ll understand how to manage your content strategically. You’ll also have resources to get support and continue learning about the emerging discipline of content strategy.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN PRACTICE DEVELOPMENT

Livia

Labate

In my experience building teams and introducing experience design praxis in different organizations, I have observed patterns and approaches that both support and hinder practice development.

How do you define what kind of Experience Design practice your organization needs? How do you go about establishing it? Who do you need? What will they do? How do you gain support? The answer lies in appreciating what type of problems and opportunities are and will be available, along with an understanding of the organization’s level of design maturity.

In this workshop I will share a few tools to help UX practitioners frame their challenges and some perspectives for how to pursue a long-term practice development goals.

This workshop will be most valuable for people who are in organizations where an internal experience design practice is needed or exists; this focus is not intended to address practice development in the context of design firms as external experts (focused on providing consulting services to organizations).

SESSIONS

LUNCH SESSIONS

Learn while you munch with our lunchtime sessions.

WOMEN IN UX

Rachel Nabors

UX is blessed with many female practitioners, and many of them are right here at Midwest UX! Rachel Nabors will lead a group of women speakers and professionals in a conversation with attendees at this lunch session. In this discussion, we’ll cover issues pertinent to women in the UX workforce such as balancing career and family goals, gender differences and balance in the workplace, and how UX stacks up against other fields in terms of gender equality and comfort levels.

DESIGNING FOR MULTI SCREEN INTERACTIONS

Brian Yeung

Background: We live in a world of screens, and in a post-PC world we’re increasingly surrounded by a larger number of smaller screens. Thus far user experience design has been primarily focused on interactions within a single screen, sometimes talking to the cloud. But as devices and objects become smarter and learn to talk to each other directly, how do we think beyond the individual screen and design interactions for multiple screens at once?

Description: This talk is about the process of designing user experiences for multiple input and output devices. It will draw from real world experiences on award-winning applications, and will cover existing examples such as the Nintendo DS, Sifteo cubes, and the iOS ecosystem.

Takeaway: Attendees will leave with concrete techniques to discuss the possibility space of multiple screens, to manage user attention and feedback, to prototype and playtest quickly and cheaply, and create interactions that leverage the unique frontier that exists beyond the single screen.

“Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.”

—C.W. Ceram

40 MINUTE SESSIONS

The best sort of lectures are the ones you get lost in, never realizing the time passing. We at Midwest UX feel that each one of the following talks embodies that exact quality. Immersive, reflective, and innovative: each presentation brimming with fresh ideas and concepts designed to inspire.

MAPPING THE EXPERIENCE

Chris Risdon

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your service.

Experience maps offer a framework for mapping human experiences across multiple situations and interactions, helping to ensure that every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.

In this presentation I’ll talk about orchestrating touchpoints and their channels through experience maps. I’ll review an experience mapping framework that includes key dimensions and how they’re used for designing for a multi-touchpoint experience. The presentation will discuss the activities that feed the map so that it tells a tangible story, the key elements make up a useful and actionable map, and how to then define the characteristics of your mapped touchpoints. Experience maps are intended to be catalysts, not final conclusions.

(This will include a detailed case study with actionable lessons, and also discussions touches on ‘design beyond the screen’)

BUILDING BENDABLE CONTENT: WHY THE FUTURE WEB NEEDS CONTENT-FOCUSED IA

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a future that’s flexible, fluid, and unfixed from the desktop, right?

Great. Then it’s time to get to the core of the matter: the content.

Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is too often stuck in meaningless blobs—blobs that break under the weight of responsive designs, mobile sites, and cross-channel distribution.

Which elements are most important? What’s primary and what’s corollary? What’s related or interdependent? What stays, what goes, and what gets truncated on small screens?

When we can answer these questions—and structure our content accordingly—we’ll replace those messy blobs with content that bends, shifting and reshaping to fit varied displays and devices.

To accomplish this, we need to bring our skills in organizing and architecting information to a micro level, breaking content down and lending it the structure it needs to maintain its meaning in an increasingly unfixed web.

After all, we can’t keep creating more content for every new device and channel—our writers and content wranglers will never keep up. But with IA skills applied to this new challenge, we can stop asking for more content and start asking our content to do more.

This session will help UXers advocate for and architect content that goes further by discussing:

• Why adding structure actually makes content more flexible

• What we can learn about structure from technical and CMS folks

• How to analyze content and understand its meaningful elements

• How IA skills apply to this new challenge—and also how they’ll need to change

“Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper,

WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Jack

Moffett

There has been a lot of discussion recently within the UX community about what is required to be an Interaction Designer. Do you have to be good at visual design? Do you have to know how to code? These are the wrong questions. The question we need to ask is, “What skills and methods will make us better Interaction Designers?” The answers will vary greatly depending on the context of your work: the type of company you work for, the makeup of your team, the types of projects you work on, and so forth.

I strongly believe that a closer working relationship with developers and participation in more of the development process will improve your ability to deliver outstanding products and will increase your job satisfaction as a designer. I will outline a collaboration lifecycle in relation to project schedules and the design process and show designers how they can extend their influence, insuring design integrity and improving the quality of the final product, through greater participation in the entire development process. The presentation will address use of developer tools, documentation, the designer’s ability to code, and designer–developer relationships.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD IS AN OPPORTUNITY

KARL FAST

Everyone experiences information overload. This is the reality of the digital now. How can we transform this reality from a negative to a positive—from information overload to information opportunity? The standard approaches are to use massive computation (think Google) or coordinated group action (think Wikipedia and Facebook). There is another and less-appreciated approach: meaningful interaction.

This talk explores three themes for designing a deeply interactive world in which information is an opportunity, not a burden. The first theme is filtering and how people winnow and sift through information. The second theme is the human body and how people use micro-level interactions to construct meaning from the information they encounter. The third theme is touch and how large multitouch surfaces can support messy information problems and spaces. By incorporating these themes into current design practice, information can be an eternal opportunity instead of a pervasive threat.

CUSTOMER JOURNEYS: DESIGNING FOR DISAGREEMENT

Boon

Sheridan

Sometimes there’s nothing better than being wrong.  Customer Journeys, maps, stories, flows. Whatever you want to call them they’re a powerful tool for understanding touchpoints, interactions and moments of engagement between a company and an individual. Given the level of detail they contain they often require long cycles, multiple lanes of research and many rounds of review to complete. What if you took a different approach and created a set “on the fly” with a little information, some inspiration and a few hunches?

I’ll take you through the idea of Designing for Disagreement—deliberate and willful acts of creativity with the goal of sparking discussion, identifying unspoken biases and uncovering insights and feedback. Then we’ll walk through a project and show how going into a rapid-fire design exercise of customer journeys yielded some surprising results. We’ll take apart the challenge put down by the client and project teams, the framework used to build the experiments and take a look at the final product and the workshop it created.

You’ll walk away armed with a set of reasons why you should try it on your next project, a framework to build your own and a few tricks and tips on how to present them for maximum effect.

EXTREME DESIGN — THE SECRETS TO SUCCESSFUL DESIGN PAIRING

Samuel Bowles

Become a better designer, see the designers and developers you work with improve, and make working together more enjoyable. A set of simple practices stolen from some of our favorite programmers can help you get to better ideas faster and instill greater empathy for design throughout your company.

Samuel Bowles will explore how he has adopted the principles of design pairing in a number of contexts and teams. His observations are based on the contrast between his work in traditional design firms and more recently as a member of various Agile development teams.

it’s really how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

BAKERS’ GUILDS

Leanna Gringas

What do bakers, metalsmiths and user experience professionals have in common? They’re all crafts, but unlike other crafts, UX doesn’t have a mentality of apprenticeship and practice. I argue that because UX requires broad knowledge across a number of disciplines, we need to better train incoming UX professionals. We should look to other fields for inspiration, especially craft guilds.

DESIGNING BETTER: THINKING BEYOND THE DEVICE

Derek Featherstone

Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we’ll explore what “better” design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.

In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they’re using them, and how they’re using them. When we’re thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device’s form factor, capabilities and features.

After this session, you’ll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world’s leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work. Salivating. They were practically salivating.

PEOPLE, NOT PROCESS

Ian Fenn

Another day, another UX conference, and yet another designer telling you that you’re doing things wrong and how you should adopt their methodology and nothing else.

Ian Fenn has had enough.

In this forthright but entertaining talk, he reveals the real truth about UX design—what works for you may not work for somebody else. It may not even work for you if you subsequently change employer or even project.

Ian will argue that the secret of successful UX design can be encompassed in a few simple rules—the foremost being that people, not process, are paramount.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW MEDIA ART

Matt Nish-Lapidus

In many media, techniques in design are foreshadowed in the art world. Graphic design has roots in early 20th century print making and poster art, big budget movies repurpose many techniques from art films, and now interactive products are starting to borrow techniques and styles from new media art. Historically there have been direct ties between the art and design worlds in specific fields, however the interaction design community has been very disconnected from our new media art counterparts.  In this presentation you will learn about the history of new media and interactive art highlighting seminal works and important artists and innovators including David Rokeby, Stelarc, and Steve Mann. We will also

discuss new media art criticism and education as inspiration for growing interaction design in those areas.  Learn some practical ideas for interactive environments, physical computing, gestural interfaces, and ambient interactions which have been part of new media art for the last 20 years.

ON “SHRINK IT AND PINK IT”: DESIGNING EXPERIENCES FOR WOMEN

Jessica Ivins

Women have become the digital mainstream. In the US market, women make up just under half of the online population, but they spend almost 60 percent of e-commerce dollars. Women are online gamers, shoppers, bloggers, and social media consumers. They share content, influence purchasing, and engage in more social interactions online than their male counterparts. And yet, we still don’t know how to design for them. The immediate impulse when designing for women is to “shrink it and pink it,” meaning products are splashed with the color pink, and content and messaging are dumbed down. But women want what’s relevant to them. They want products and online experiences that are intuitive, not insulting to their intelligence. They want function, not frills.

This session reviews the historical and contemporary landscape of designing for women. We’ll review misguided, yet well-intentioned designs based on assumptions and stereotypes that have flopped. Likewise, we’ll review success stories of well-designed products and experiences that truly meet women’s needs. We’ll also look at when gender should factor into your design and when it shouldn’t. By understanding how user behavior varies among the genders, we can understand how to design for a gendered audience. Ultimately, when designing for women (or men, or both), you’ll want to get it right.

THE DIGITAL PLACE YOU LOVE IS GONE: MITIGATING LOSS IN THE ETHERSPHERE

Joe Sokohl

So many times we design for new users, with only a passing nod at existing ones. But what happens when we redesign a familiar experience, especially one that people have “grown up with”? What happens when digital destinations disappear? A strong dissonance affects people who become used to a certain digital place, a certain set of patterns, images, and interactions. When this place changes, especially dramatically, people experience loss, frustration, anger, blame, and confusion.

They don’t have to. That’s where UX comes in. We’ll use Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s “The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home ” as a starting point, with strong nods to work by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, Jim Kalbach, Peter Morville, and other experts in placemaking, wayfinding, and other digital geographies. We’ll look at physical analogies as well as digital examples such as Facebook’s Timeline and AOL’s transformation. Ultimately, we’ll ponder key approaches to easing the sense of loss people might experience when progress destroys their digital homes.

A lot can happen in 20 minutes. We at Midwest UX are happy to showcase an amazing variety of 20 minute presentations, which also happened to be the core of our successful event in 2011. Impactful, insightful, unforgettable. We hope you find these talks as exciting as we do.

RESIZE YOUR UX

Marti Gukeisen

This project has a $50,000 budget. This project has a $350,000 budget. This project is for your Mom’s book club, to be paid in tea cakes and Sunday dinners. How do you resize your user experience research, efforts, and deliverables to match the scope of the project and the size of your (client’s) wallet? And how do you keep user experience top of mind when there isn’t room for it in the top of the budget? Hear our tips and tricks for loving your users at any price point.

HOW TO RAPID PROTOTYPE MULTI-TOUCH APPLICATIONS

Amelia Campbell

Prototyping is used to quickly and inexpensively simulate the design and functionality of user interfaces. UX designers accomplish this across a range of fidelities—from sketches and paper prototypes to a digital prototyping tools—to iteratively explore and evaluate different design possibilities.

Prototyping techniques for traditional GUI interfaces are widely used and well understood. But how effective are these techniques as we shift from desktop and laptops to touchscreen devices, which detect and resolve one or more touch events using styli or fingers? It is expected the more discrete touch points that can be processed simultaneously, the more prototyping for interfaces on these devices becomes complex and challenging.

This session will report on a series of interviews with working UX designers about how they prototype applications for multi-touch surfaces. Do prototyping methods as practiced for web sites and traditional applications work for multi-touch surfaces? What do designers know and how do they prototype multitouch applications? What are best practices for prototyping emerging interactive technologies?

EVOLVING MENTAL MODELS

Daniel Eizans

We’re all familiar with the concept of mental modeling, but why do we typically only use this practice in the design of a system? We obviously think about content when we’re starting to brainstorm a design and we think about content when we interview our users, but why don’t we leverage the mental models we’ve created when we take on a new digital project when we plan the content and materials that eventually populate that system?

I believe mental models can work harder and can be a key driver for creating a content strategy that can evolve with our users.

This talk will present an alternative (or extension) to the traditional mental model by focusing on the

material that populates our digital experiences. We’ll cover how to add content specific inquiries to the information gathering process used to inform traditional mental models; and how to modify them to inform everything from story mapping, content planning and long term governance of digital systems over time.

This type of mental modeling will be illustrated via case study.

BUILDING A RESPONSIVE DESIGN PROCESS

Lydia

Whitehead

You’ve heard the buzz about responsive design. You might even have read a few posts and had some discussions about it, but enough with the thinking —how can you actually implement a responsive design process that works for you and your team?

It might be easy for a designer/developer to hash out a responsive design, in, say, an afternoon, but what happens when you need to work with multiple stakeholders, designers, developers and the rest of your team? With insights from real life case studies (including the fine folks at Angie’s List), this talk offers up a few ideas of how responsive design can fit within a typical website design and development process.

You’ll learn:

• when to go responsive (hint: not always)

• what tools to use

• where to start with content and design

• ways to get the rest of the team involved

• ways to set expectations with the client

Vignelli

A LIFETIME OF USER ENGAGEMENT: EVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTUAL MODELS

M

Giles Phillilps

It could be said that the foundation of an effective design is the creation of a conceptual model that maps flawlessly to a user’s mental model. However, this statement glosses over an important consideration: that your user’s understanding of your product—and more importantly, the problem that your product solves —will change over time, throughout their lifespan as a customer. Some of this change is informed by things you can’t control, like technological trends and innovations, or your customer’s own independent education and experience. But some of your user’s evolving mental model is actually informed by their usage of your product. The key to effectively growing and sustaining a customer base is in supporting users throughout the discrete phases of their lifespan as a return user: their goals, their knowledge gaps, and their workflows. In UX, we often think of this too simplistically—e.g. the first-time user versus the returning user. Categorically and across different touchpoints, these groups are not always descriptive enough. And as design practitioners, we must constantly challenge ourselves to draw finer, more nuanced distinctions in our user’s evolving needs. So, how can we develop a conceptual model that is both granular and robust enough to describe each discrete phase in our user’s mental model?

The phases of a user’s mental model can be effectively represented in an evolutionary conceptual model. In an evolutionary conceptual model, each phase of the mental model—novice, expert, and anything in between—is correlated with a discrete layer in your conceptual model. Like rings on a tree, these layers describe the evolution of a user’s understanding of your product and the problems it solves, and help ensure that your product is positioned sufficiently for each phase. Furthermore, heuristics can be applied at each layer, to help inform the specific design and prioritization of features and affordances in your UX.

In this presentation, I provide a brief overview of mental models and conceptual models in UX design, as well as tactics for creating a mapping between the two. Building upon this framework, I will then introduce

evolutionary conceptual models, and provide a discussion of their components, a review of examples, and will present some processes and tactics for creating them. The final portion of the talk will be an interactive session where I’ll collaborate with the audience in developing the beginnings of an evolutionary conceptual model, in a domain that is of particular interest to the group.

WHAT NATURAL USER INTERFACES ARE AND WHY THEY MATTER TO UX DESIGNERS

David Brahler

As a professional community, we have rallied behind the “Design for Mobile First” mantra. We use gesture, or multi-touch, every day and is just 1 of the 3 Natural User Interface (NUI) input modalities that we know how to design for. But, how would you design a calendaring system for the Kinect? Where would you begin and what would you need to consider? We still have another 66% to realize before we have fully maximize the NUI potential.

NUI products (such as the iPhone, iPad, Surface, and Kinect) do not confine interaction design to the screen but rather extend it to the surrounding environment through 3 distinct input modalities: voice, multi-touch, and in-air gesturing. As UX designers, we need to harness the potential of new technologies in order to better mirror human capabilities and shape the entire experience.

In this talk, I will explain what NUIs are and why they are important. Secondly, I will identify design scenarios for each of the 3 major NUI input modalities. Third, I will identify NUI applications that exemplify successful use NUI principles and patterns.

DIGITAL HOARDING: HOW INFORMATION IS SUFFOCATING YOUR AUDIENCE

Matthew Grocki

We promote content in the interest of providing our audience information. But lately too much information is getting in the way of what our users need.

Let’s explore how much information is too much, and when to spot the warning signs of digital hoarding. We’ll define what digital hoarding is, and how to minimize it. We will identify redundant content types within your designs and map the easiest ways to get users the information they need and on with their day.

“Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.”

—Massimo

This session explores how to balance the cavalcade of information your audience requires without turning your website into a dumping ground of PDF links, PowerPoint decks or pages of scrolling paragraphs.

We will navigate the politics behind content providers and how to prioritize whose information really is the most important. And finally, we will learn how to govern content and when to archive it (Spoiler: it’s not about masking your website as an online repository).

NEGOTIATING YOUR UX CAREER

Jay

Morgan

Based on the Principled Negotiation technique, as described by Thomson in “The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator ” (2011), where they outline a technique for planning and executing negotiation.

I will introduce the Principled Negotiating technique; then, present how to negotiate a job, a contract, and project scope. I will be teaching how to prepare for, and knowing what questions to ask during negotiation.

You will understand and be able to visualize the Principled Negotiating technique. The goal is that you become comfortable and confident standing up for yourself in getting what you need to practice your Art.

USABLE SECURITY: IT ISN’T SECURE IF PEOPLE CAN’T USE IT

Darren Kall

The weakest link in online security is not technology but people. But it is not their fault. The developer, IT implementer, administrator, and end-user each create vulnerabilities if the system wasn’t designed to be usable for each of them. By taking a user-centric approach UX professionals are improving security products. But to improve the whole system security UX professionals need to go beyond the product and apply those same techniques to security processes, implementation policies, security management activities, metrics monitoring and visualization, etc. Security UX may not be glamorous but it really tests your UX research and design chops.

YOUR ENGLISH TEACHER WAS WRONG: PLAIN LANGUAGE FOR DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS

Lauren Colton

Learn linguistic tips and web copy tricks to get findable, stay optimized, and say what you mean. Plain language is the practice of replacing fancy words, seven commas deep, with the language of your audience. Straightforward words express ideas more clearly than verbose marketese or industry jargon: trousers might seem great to the marketing team, but the 2 AM shopper is browsing for pants. Study linguistic concepts and technical implementations for the keys to precise, usable, and elegant communication.

BRING THE FUTURE TO LIFE

Colette Vardeman

Great design is not based on what you make but how you make people feel.

No matter where people are, or what people are doing, they are using technology to connect, to work, to live better, more satisfying lives. The sheer variety of these day-to-day experiences has raised the bar for consumer and business products alike. People have grown beyond ‘easy to use’ to demand experiences that anticipate their needs (compelling), support their workflow (natural), behave in an expected way (intuitive), and are delightful to use (emotionally engaging).

In the end, we need to make a product or service that delivers the functions people want in a form they love. Historically designers have used an understanding of intent, interaction, behavior, and expectation to deliver both function and form. While we use this type of information to design for function, we also translate people’s emotions into the form to create experiences that delight them.

This presentation will focus on why function + emotion drives design of form to deliver experiences that are compelling, natural, intuitive, and emotionally engaging.

BRIDGING THE MOBILE DESIGN GAP

Jen Matson

Small screens, varying contexts, varying form factors —challenging, inspiring, or both? Our perspective on how we view these many aspects of designing for mobile can usually be traced back to how and when we came to be working on the web.

For those of us who have been pushing pixels since the medium’s infancy, mobile is just the latest, though most profound shift. Web standards and even, yes, the much maligned <table>, have served important roles in helping to push the web forward by highlighting its weaknesses, whether in the area of emotionally engaging design or findability of information.

In this session, we’ll examine the history of design disruption on the web as a foreshadowing of the mobile web revolution. And we’ll discuss the effects of those disruptions on those of us trying to trying to craft great experiences when we often have such different ideas about what the web is, or should be. Because it’s only by understanding our shared history, and examining our assumptions and expectations dragged along from print, software or Flash-based design, that we can ultimately move the mobile web forward by simply creating a single, universally-accessible web.

David

Farkas

Most Interaction Designers like to drink. Let’s face it, it’s a part of our professional culture—the happy hours, the conferences, the karaoke. While cocktails come in a variety of forms, mixing drinks is actually an art form—a special classification of alcohol. Mixology is the process of combining flavors and layering alcohol for complex and often savory experiences.

Sound familiar?

Mixology and Interaction Design in many ways are one and the same. Over the last year, I have adopted mixology as a hobby and in doing so found more similarities to my professional work than I initially wanted to admit. As in Interaction Design, mixology is about iterations, trial and error. There is no such thing as a design that comes out perfect in the first pass, regardless of how much research is performed. Similarly: There is no perfect cocktail the first time around, whether you are dealing with something as complex as ginger and lemon infused vodka with iced tea or something as basic as cucumber gin and tonic. User testing is key—my tastes are not like everyone else’s—and mixologists must elicit feedback from others in everything they do. As with designer’s process and methodology, no two mixologists are the same.

My talk is intended for practitioners of all levels. Young practitioners may see a new way to approach Interaction Design as the learning curve is reduced from an esoteric field to something we address every day. More seasoned veterans will enjoy an opportunity to connect their social hour to work in a manner providing both personal satisfaction and client understanding (they drink too, right?). Together we will address the shift around process, training and methodology as some bartenders are classically trained and others self taught; some use traditional methods and others use more modern technology. Attendees will leave with an appreciation for the complexity of Interaction Design in a more analog and tangible form and, timing permitting, with a homemade infusion in hand.

BUILDING A DESIGN CULTURE

Brad Colobow

Design is the flavor of the month. Startups see design as a key differentiating factor in their products and services. Large organizations look at the success of companies like Apple and try to emulate the look and feel of their products. But is that all design is? How can design rise above being just a pretty coat of paint and become an integral part of an organization. What separates a design centered culture from the rest? And how can we incorporate the zest for user experience into ever decision that we make?

UPSELLING

UX: MOVING FROM PIXELS TO STRATEGY

Jim Laing

When it comes to user experience, organizations often begin with just a toe in the water: a designer is brought on board to cleanup a few features and answer developer questions, or a researcher is hired to run usability studies. However, in many organizations these well-meaning attempts to improve user experience end up being largely ineffective: band-aids on fundamentally flawed products. This is because unclear product strategy and a lack of user advocacy in early-stage planning often lead to unfocused solutions and unresolvable design issues later in product development. If such organizations are ever going to create great user experiences, it is necessary that the UX team begin to provide strategic leadership.

But how does a fledgling UX team transform its self from playing tactical support to helping define strategy? In this session, we’ll look at just what is strategic UX and what skills are necessary to operate at the strategic level. We will also discuss how you can explain the UX team’s role in strategy to your stakeholders, and how can you demonstrate the need for involving your team in product discovery. By upselling UX, you can increase the contribution of your team and tackle user experience problems where they begin.

“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”

—Jony Ive

EDUCATING FUTURE DESIGNERS BY DESIGNING MOBILE INTERFACES: CASE STUDIES WITH ACTIONABLE LESSONS

Gretchen Caldwell Rinnerta

As a design educator I am always looking for ways to motivate and inspire my students to innovate, push boundaries and develop ideas. When much of the interaction we see online is superficial and consists of light social exchange or less than meaningful gaming, its up to the next generation of UX designers to question the status quo and develop applications that help people live better, longer and healthier lives. Recently I worked with several design students to develop applications that change behavior, inspire healthy living and push learning outside of the classroom. We will present the following case studies, and the process used to develop and create interactive prototypes in a reflective and informed manner.

Case study #1: OhSnap!

More and more, children are spending time indoors in front of a television, computer or electronic gaming device and not going outside to play and interact with the world around them. This research offers a way to combine digital media and unstructured, outdoor play through a mobile application called OhSnap! It provides children with a way to meet up with their neighborhood friends and play games that combine the use of their iPods outdoors, as well as a tool for their parents to oversee their daily activities and participate in their child’s outdoor play adventures with their own mobile phone.

Case study #2: Nutribots

There is an obesity epidemic among our nations children. This topic had been the focus and interest of many in the past few years, but most solutions include forcing kids to eat differently or making parents change behavior. This research and design explores how children can be encouraged to eat healthier as they grow robots through the food they eat. This innovative and fun twist on healthy eating makes mealtime a playful competition.

Case study #3: LearnOut

LearnOut is an iPad application that responds to the need for students to learn outside of the classroom and to further their education in preparation for the real world. By using simple challenges where students can earn rewards and compete against classmates. This application integrates photography and game play into lecture based learning.

ESTABLISHING WHAT “GOOD” MEANS WITH PERFORMANCE CONTINUUMS

Dan Klyn

In our information architecture work at TUG we typically conclude the discovery phase of a project with an “alignment session.” The objective of this meeting is to develop understanding and consensus within the core client team on key matters of business and experience strategy. Early in our formation we took on a client with profound alignment challenges, and as we scrambled to adapt our nascent process to the situation at hand, we borrowed the idea of “performance continuums” from RSW’s work in the 1970s and ended up with a repeatable methodology that’s now a formal part of TUG’s discovery process. In 20 minutes I’ll share the case study from whence this tool emerged, the historical context Mr. Wurman birthed it in, and guidelines for using it in UX work.

DESIGNING THE ELECTION EXPERIENCE

Kaleem Khan

Designing the Election Experience

Holistic, cross-channel experience design is a dream role for any UX designer. We are moving beyond our traditional domain of electronic information into the physical world. We blend the physical, digital and ambient to design for a holistic experience and millions of people.

I will discuss the lessons learned from leading design strategy on a cross-channel election experience design that bridges the Web, mobile, physical and ambient elements. Considerations and requirements included design research and strategy, complex stakeholder interactions and communications, accessibility, information architecture, interaction design, a highly regulated and constrained legal environment, and immovable delivery dates — and that’s before it became challenging.

The citizen experience across all channels is often confusing, inhumane and demoralizing. The good news is that our governments are beginning to understand the importance of a positive experience to a healthy, engaged citizenry. The cross-channel citizen experience is critical to any functioning democracy. Learn from a real-world case study in an election year.

MINUTE “IGNITE” SESSIONS

300 seconds. 20 Slides. Big ideas, and fast talking. The team at Midwest UX is excited to bring a new twist to a “traditional” plenary with the not-plenary: A lively Ignite series of talks. With a lot of rapid-fire information and a bit of fun, this will be a presentation event you won’t want to miss.

APPRENTICESHIP NOW!

Alla Zollers

If you talk to senior designers about how they got into the field, you will probably hear a lot of fascinating stories about their transition to UX from development, print design, marketing, library science or countless other roles.

The same senior designers probably never held a “junior design” position because they both pioneered and defined the role within their company.

Now that our field has matured, and there are programs across the country that are offering degrees in design, it is much more difficult for recent graduates and people who want to transition into the field to get their foot in the door.

Not only are job listings for junior designers far and few between, but our profession has no apprenticeship model to help junior designers grow into senior designers. So what is the result? Junior designers are forced to lie about their experience just to get a job.

UX design is a craft and we are doing our entire profession a disservice by not taking the time to hire, mentor, and bring up the next generation of designers.

The UX profession needs apprenticeship now!

CALL TO ACTION

Moe Rafiuddin

There are many problems in the world. Poverty, war, and disease to name a few. The people trying to solve these problems by helping those in need in our communities often struggle with advocacy, awareness, and prevention. Fortunately for us there are great for-profit and not-for-profit organizations big and small who have come to the rescue. These organizations tackle unique challenges that require unique and passionate people. I feel that the UX community is the perfect place to find the problem-solving passionate folks that these organizations need.

There are many types of projects that our community can be a part of. By working with these organizations, you can help make their voices louder, and their efforts to bring joy to your neighbors easier. The ways that you can contribute are varied: anything from raising awareness by helping to build websites, to building solar-powered water wells in Africa, or even finding unique ways to bring education online to the villages of a South Asian country.

In this 5 minute talk I will show examples of various projects to inspire our community to find ways to contribute. I will also provide simple steps you can take to get started today. We have a great opportunity to give back to our communities, to refine our skills, follow our passions, and get into uncharted and exciting projects.

LIVING WITH WEARABLE TECH

John Wayne Hill

Wearable computing has come a long way. Devices of yesteryear were clunky, hard to use, and fashion backward. As computers continue to miniaturize, the world will see more and more wearable devices. Manufacturers and product makers will continue to try and figure out how to put technology into wearable products and into our lives. As devices make leaps and bounds towards usefulness, utility, and connectedness we will see more and more technology integrated into our lives. How that technology fits into our lives, depends on designers advocating for the best possible experience. Wearable computing takes on a broad range of topics, but most important is the relationship between the person and the technology. Because wearable technology is with us, and on us, throughout most of the day, it’s important to remember how the technology fits into the lives of individual people and the context in which they interact with the technology. This quick presentation describes my relationship with wearable technology and puts forth insights gained from living with the technology through a user experience viewpoint.

Rachel Nabors

In our industry, attention to detail and perfectionism are championed. But they can also hold us back. On our Quests for Perfection, we can lose track of the big picture, miss the forest for the trees.

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese concept of evanescent beauty. During this delightful photographic essay you will learn how accepting imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence into your life can increase your productivity and happiness.

WHAT I WISH I KNEW BEFORE BECOMING A UX DESIGNER

Jessica Baily

What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you know that you would be a designer from the beginning? Or did you take some other path of discovery to UX? For me, dreams of being a marine biologist morphed into dreams of being an artist, then a computer scientist. Somehow that love of art and technology converged, and I found this wonderful world of design. My guess is that a lot of us didn’t have any idea what we were getting in to. Maybe that’s the way it should be, but just for fun what would you go back and tell your younger self?

I’m sure that I could guide my younger self in many different directions. I could tell her to start learning Fireworks so she doesn’t have to struggle through that hectic learning phase when working on a big project. I could tell her to sit up straight (just as my current mother would do) so all those late nights hunching over a MacBook don’t kill her back. And maybe go find the perfect pair of horn-rimmed glasses to get ahead of the curve.

But what is that younger designer really struggling with, and what would be the biggest surprise for her to hear? In this talk I’ll discuss the things I would tell her.

And since we have invented this time traveling world, what would the designer that I become in the future travel back in time to tell me? I’m sure that I will look back on my current self as blissfully unaware of so many things, but what are the things that I hope to discover in the future?

WHAT UX CAN LEARN FROM THE ALT-COUNTRY MOVEMENT

Derren

Hermann

The alt-country movement of the 1990s injected a breath of fresh air into traditional forms of music that so many people loved. It combined a wide range of influences and created something new while maintaining a respect for tradition. The movement has lived on and has continued to evolve over time. It was not just a fad.

UX is on the verge of a very similar movement. We need a blast of excitement that will shape our future. We are quickly adopting new and exciting influences. Just take a look at the rising interest in content strategy, ethnography, and mobile first design as examples. But we must be thoughtful in shaping our future by respecting our past. Our opportunity here is to create a movement that evolves into a culture that grows our field.

WHEN GOOD DESIGN IS USED FOR EVIL

Anna Eaglin

While listening to coverage regarding the uprising in Libya, a woman was interviewed about her first-hand perspective. She told them about the conflict, what was happening to her and her family and friends, and then she talked about how there were rapists walking around with Viagra in their pockets.

I was shocked! Viagra? The same drug that allows older men with salt-and-pepper hair to have campfires on the beach with their wives? That Viagra? The little blue pill was being used as a vehicle for mass sexual violence?

From Viagra to the Craigslist killer, there are implications to everything we bring into the world. As designers, we create with the intention to make things better than they were. We generally learn as much as we can about our users in hopes of improving their lives in some small way. What happens when something we create inspires horror? Is it the fault of the designer? Of the user? Do we just assume that the Craigslist killer could have just as easily been the Match.com killer?

It is impossible for us to know every facet of the complex ecosystems in which our designs live. We cannot possibly conceive of every way our designs could be used - but how do we live with these potential consequences? As we consider the greater good, must we too consider the greater evil?

The goal of this talk is not to answer this, instead to offer it as a topic of consideration—hopefully it won’t keep you up at night too.

“People ignore design that ignores people.”

—Frank Chimero

LOCATION

The venue for this year’s Midwest UX 2021 in the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), situated just west of downtown Columbus, Ohio.

Thank you to our sponsors: