Tuesday Featured Talks
Your Chance to Pick and Choose!
Tuesday, October 11th is our "sampler day," where our conference speakers give informative and entertaining 90-minute presentations in two tracks. Note that some speakers are presenting a different topic than in their full-day seminar.
There is no registration for the featured talks. Attendance at each session will be limited only by available space. Tuesday also includes lunch and an entertaining (and often times controversial) keynote address by our very own Jared M. Spool. And be sure to join us for the conference reception from 5:30-7:30 Tuesday evening.
8:30am - 10:00am
How to Use Personas to Increase Conversion Rates
Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg
In this entertaining presentation, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg will share how you can leverage personas to create a web site that persuades users to take action. When users visit web sites, they search for relevant information that will answer their pressing questions. Users click on links that address their motivations and goals. How can you identify your users' underlying motivations?
Bryan and Jeffrey will show you how to create a persona — someone your development team can imagine holding a substantive, persuasive conversation with. They will show you several examples of how to leverage personas to uncover where users lose sight of their goals online and don't convert. You will come away from this presentation learning how to deal with your users at an everyday, practical level.
Translating Data Into Design
Marc Rettig
At User Interface 10, we are able to dive diving deep into techniques that help us Make Great Stuff. In this presentation, Marc Rettig steps back a bit to tell stories about times when it all came together. These stories, illustrated with photographs and actual project documents, either span entire projects or address critical moments when the team clicked, the Right Thing was done, something good was born.
The stories focus on projects which effectively translated data about people's lives into effective product strategy and design: the re-invention
of a public library's interior design, signs, systems and procedures; the shaping of a medical software project; an investigation into laundry and
cooking in the home; and more. Throughout the talk, Marc will highlight tools and techniques that can be adapted by us all, as our teams try to make products, sites and services that fit real life.
10:15am - 11:45am
Presentation of Information in Web Applications
In this presentation, Hagan Rivers, a pioneer web application developer, will take a closer look at the visual design of web applications. Hagan will introduce the concept of a product’s emotional response. She will discuss the importance of identifying and designing for emotional response goals, and the dangers of ignoring them. She will show examples where the usability of a web application is improved just by improving its visual design – and vice versa.
Then Hagan will take a close look at the presentation of information in web applications, and examples of applications that have successfully presented complex information to their users. She will show how you can clean up tabular information and ways to present large amounts of data. And she’ll show us how Ajax, Flash, and dynamic queries are being used to change the way we present large amounts of data to users.
Getting Your Design Built
While doing great design is no easy task, sometimes the hardest part of a designer’s job isn’t figuring out how the product should behave and look—it’s persuading everyone else that the direction is right and keeping the final product true to the design intent. Every organization is different, but many people are surprised to see how many organizational tendencies and challenges are common across companies. Kim Goodwin will talk about how Cooper has used its design process to build buy-in across hundreds of projects.
- How research, personas, and scenarios work as communication tools
- What design team and larger product team structures are most successful
- What formal deliverables and informal collaboration methods are most effective
- What approaches and techniques are less likely to work
- A comparison of tactics for external consultants versus internal team members
12:00pm - 2:00pm
Lunch and Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of Experience
Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering
Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites.
However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and send them off to do the voodoo they do so well. Today’s business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements.
In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. He’ll discuss:
- The components of the experience design team and how they interact with the rest of the development process
- The new roles that are emerging, such as online content librarians, interaction designers, and experience managers
- How organizations decide if they need specialists and generalists to fill their needs
- When to hire employees, use contractors, and engage consultants
- What components can be moved to offshore facilities and what needs to be done locally
Jared’s keynotes are always a favorite of the conference and this one promises to be one of his best. You’ll want to make sure you don’t miss it.
2:15pm - 3:45pm
Design Prototyping Made Easy with CSS
Molly E. Holzschlag & Eric A. Meyer
If you're looking for a great way to streamline your prototyping and diagnostic methods during a web site design, CSS just might be the solution.
While CSS is mostly known as the language that helps designers to visually present pages, it's also an excellent tool to use during the user interface production phase. Do you want to move a navigation bar from the left side to the right? It takes just a minute with CSS. If you need help diagnosing UI problems, Eric and Molly will show you how in this upbeat and unique presentation. This is a must-see talk for anyone interested in learning great prototyping techniques.
No CSS or HTML knowledge necessary!
Have You Got What It Takes to be a Web Editor?
This is an absolutely wonderful time to be a web content professional—a web editor. The best websites were always about publishing quality content and applications—not quantity. For every 100 documents of content that an average organization creates, 95 of them are filler content and 5 of them are killer content. There is an urgent and growing need for a web editor who can identify and effectively publish the killer web content.
What does it take to be a great web editor? What are the key skills you need to develop? Gerry McGovern will answer these questions—and more—in clear, concise and compelling language. Among other things, you’ll find out about the 6 C’s of web publishing:
- Who cares? This is the most important question an editor can ask. Who really cares about this?
- Make it compelling. It’s not just enough to write something. You have to make it compelling. Otherwise, the impatient reader will ignore it
- Make it clear. Writing simply is not writing simplistically. Keep it simple if you want your message to get across
- Make it complete. Focus on task completion for your content. Of the people who started a task on your website how many successfully completed it?
- Make it concise. There are a lot of unnecessary introductions and convoluted statements on websites. It’s time to get to the point
- Make it correct. Trust is the cornerstone of website success. If the content isn’t trusted, your website will fail
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Expert Reviews
Rolf Molich, Dialog Design
Expert reviews, such as heuristic evaluations and other design inspections, are the second-most widely used usability method. Research shows that expert reviews are often conducted with a poor methodology and don't always live up to their full potential. In this presentation, Rolf Molich, an expert usability practitioner, will discuss proven methods for conducting and reporting expert reviews of a user interface design.
Rolf will give rare insights into how renowned experts conduct reviews. The talk is based on the CUE-4 study, where 17 teams including some highly esteemed usability professionals independently tested the same web site in realistic, industrial settings.
CUE-4 results show that properly conducted expert reviews yield results that are comparable to those from usability tests -- and far more cost efficient. During the session you will have the opportunity of testing your own skills in recognizing usability problems and reporting them properly.
Web Site Redesign
Kelly Goto, gotomedia
Are you currently dealing with an outdated web site and unsure of the best steps to manage the web development process? Is your development team having trouble managing all of the content on the site? Are you trying to decide when you should redesign your web site? To help deal with these issues, we've turned to Kelly Goto, a premier user experience, research and interaction design expert, and author of the best-selling book, Web ReDesign: Workflow That Works. Kelly Goto will share essential steps for creating a successful site design. She will outline the Core Process, a robust, 5-step process that can be applied to the development of any web site.