“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.

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