Featured Presentations

With UI17 OnDemand, your whole organization can hear from the brightest UX experts. Access these video or audio recordings whenever you want, as often as you want. Whether you refer to it for a quick reference or you schedule a group meeting to view one of the talks, it’s always available to you and your team.

UI17 OnDemand contains 13 hours of audio and video presentations plus you’ll get all the materials from the talks and 8
full-day workshops.

Your Toughest
Design Challenge

Kim Goodwin

Envisioning a good user experience is only part of a designer’s work. Demanding much more attention is something deeper: helping teams support and implement those designs.

We can blame failures on the organization, or we can confront the challenge more skillfully. Specifically, we have to become masters of culture and change.

Fortunately, Kim Goodwin is just the teacher to lead the way. She’ll discuss how you can analyze and benefit from your culture—instead of fighting it—using strategies she uses in her daily work.

So if you’ve ever struggled to implement effective user experiences because of organizational constraints, then don’t miss Kim’s talk. Her techniques will help you educate and influence the stakeholders whose buy-in is crucial to supporting great designs.

Kim will talk about:
- Levers you can use to influence change—and how to identify which ones to pull
- Tools to help individuals and high-level stakeholders start implementing change
- Identifying effective approaches that will work in your unique culture
- Ways to approach individual communication to more effectively change minds
You’ll leave with an example change plan to use as a starting point, and a new understanding of how to influence culture shifts in your organization. The end result? Stronger designs.

Kim Goodwin has been doing explicit organizational change work for 12 years. She helps design teams shift their cultures to be more successful by helping them frame arguments, plan and execute multi-year change strategies, and educating CEO’s on what decisions can undermine teams. Kim is a leading expert in identifying patterns
for change.
Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content

Karen McGrane

For years, we’ve been telling designers: the web is not print. You can’t have pixel-perfect layouts that look the same in every browser, on every platform, and on every device.

But even as designers were embracing web standards, content authors were stuck in the past, demanding text editors that “work like Microsoft Word”—and we were giving in.

Why do we continually create new content instead of planning for its reuse?

Karen will talk about how we have to adapt to creating more flexible content, because what worked for the desktop web simply won’t work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up—find out how to make it happen in your organization using Karen’s frank, pragmatic approach to content processes and governance.

Karen will talk about:
- Using structured or adaptive content to get all of your content on mobile
- Separating content and form (instead of repurposing designs from other platforms)
- Writing content that’s flexible, reusable, and marked up with metadata
- Evolving your CMS and editorial processes to support multi-channel publishing
She’ll describe the tools, processes, and techniques you can use to effectively plan and publish mobile content.

Karen is a long-time information architect and content strategist. She’s worked with dozens of traditional publishers to align their editorial workflow, IA, and CMS with their business goals. Plus, she published a book on content strategy this year, so get ready to hear the sneak peek in-person.
Discussing Design

Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry

Do you break into a cold sweat whenever you think about a design critique? Does your brain shut down when someone suggests a “tweak” to your work?

Well wipe your brow and free your mind, because critiques—and the language for discussing design—are an important part of our growth as designers. The key is having the tools to bridge problem with solution, and communicate context in progressive conversations.

Fortunately, you’ll learn how by the best teachers in the business: Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry.

Not only will you understand critique after this talk, but you’ll be able to incorporate them into your design process while improving how you collect, deliver, and receive
design feedback.

Adam and Aaron will talk about:
- The intent of critique, plus how it can make us
  better communicators
- Making sense of opinions and shaping them into powerful design iterations
- Use goals to keep the critique on track and avoid personal opinions
- Tools for facilitating discussions, even with
  difficult people
So if gathering design feedback has been a pain point for you, then this talk is a must-attend. Get the techniques to make critique a positive experience for everyone involved.

Adam was first exposed to critique while studying art and film, and today he uses it to his advantage as a UX designer for mad*pow. Aaron wrestled with personal opinions in response to his early music and art, and today he turns them into action as a UX designer for HP and nGenWorks. The duo now runs Discussing Design, a blog dedicated to helping designers capitalize on critique.
First-Person User Interfaces

Luke Wroblewski

Each day, new tools and digital information emerge that enable us to interact directly with the real world around us. And as we continue to remove layers of abstraction like traditional point-and-click UI’s, we create experiences that can present new business opportunities.

But how can we stay on top of these rapid changes?

Find out from Luke Wroblewski, whose vocal leadership and expertise in mobile design establishes the gold standard. In this energizing presentation, he’ll describe the evolution of Command Line, GUI, and NUI paradigms through today’s first-person interfaces (FPUIs). He’ll dig into “always-on” sensors that generate relevant output based on where they’re placed, who and where you are, and what is near you.

Luke will talk about:
- The evolution of user interfaces—from punch cards to GUIs, NUIs, and now FPUIs
- The power of navigating space and augmenting your immediate surroundings
- Apps that interact with nearby objects, locations,
  and people
- Components and structures used to create first-person apps
He’ll dig into the details of how you can help to transition first-person interfaces out of their infancy.

Luke is an accomplished author and mobile designer whose career spans eBay, Yahoo!, and Bagcheck (his startup that Twitter acquired). He’s known for actively sharing emergent trends, identifying the patterns between them, and creating a narrative we can follow to know what’s happening in mobile.
The Secret Lives of Links

Jared Spool

Take a journey to learn the secret lives that our sites’ links are living. You’ll explore the good and bad from web sites across many industries.

Who knew links could be so interesting? Links are the fabric of a web site, holding all the pages together. They are the molecular bonds of a great web experience.

When we design links poorly, it’s painful for our users. When we design them well, it focuses the user completing their objective in a delightful manner. Getting the link design right is critical to a great web site.

Yet we never talk about what makes great links great and what makes poor links poor. Until now.
In this talk, you’ll learn:
- Why too many of the wrong links can hurt a page
- How the Scent of Information and Trigger Words play a critical roll in successful site design
- What your users are trying to tell you about your design every time your users hit the back button
Join Jared M. Spool as he shares his research with a ton of funny, interesting, and thoughtful examples and rules that reveal the secret lives that our sites’ links are living. You’ll learn the good and the bad from university web sites, news providers, e-commerce sites, and many more.
Building Adaptive
Designs Now

Aaron Gustafson

It seems like new browsers and devices are invented every day. This reality leaves us with a couple paths: ignore them but fall behind, or face ‘em head- on.

The problem is, trying to stay on top of these innovations can feel a bit like battling Sauron’s army. (And for those who don’t get the movie quip: very, very daunting.)

Fortunately, progressive enhancement is the way forward for web design—especially on mobile devices. By starting simple and building up, we can craft amazing experiences that work regardless of the capabilities or deficiencies of a given device.

And Aaron Gustafson is just the man to describe how proven techniques like mobile first, responsive design, and adaptive UI can fit into your process while expanding your skill set.

Aaron will talk about:
- Shifting your thinking to architect adaptive experiences right away
- Designing to take advantage of what’s possible on today’s mobile platforms
- Considering alternative ways to interact with UI components you design
- Using JavaScript smartly to avoid creating a
  “house of cards”
Aaron is the tech lead responsible for all the front- and back-end development and UX design for his agency, Easy Designs. Aaron’s expertise in the full lifecycle of a project is evidenced by his process- driven teachings in Adaptive Web Design, a book he authored and published on his own label, Easy Readers.
Designing Stellar Meetings

Kevin Hoffman

There are two kinds of work in the world: work we do alone, and work we do with others. The problem is, collaboration often takes the form of meetings, which suffer an undeserved terrible reputation as being a voracious time and resource waste.

Difficult personalities, a feeling that projects are veering off-course, and the perception that meetings prevent “real work” from getting done can all hamper our participation.

But what if we apply the design thinking that UX design pros already know and love—except in a way that
benefits meetings?

By doing just that, we can run meetings that result in better insights faster, more cohesive teams, and access to new ideas from everyone involved.

Kevin will talk about:
- Good meeting design fundamentals, tools, and exercises
- How to minimize pain points and maximize feelings
  of empowerment
- The importance of role neutrality in meetings versus the overall design process
- Facilitating movement, ideation, and
  healthy conversations
Plus, by learning to incorporate lean UX concepts like MVP’s into your meetings, you’ll be collectively solving problems more harmoniously and powerfully than
ever before.

And Kevin’s just the guy to teach you. After 15 years in the web and directing UX at Happy Cog—redesigning multi-stakeholder sites like Harvard University and Nintendo—he’s become the leading expert in making meetings infinitely better. He consistently wow’s crowds at conferences from IA Summit to An Event Apart and UI16 (among our highest-rated talks ever).
Fearless Prototyping
for Skeptics

Nathan Curtis

You don’t need extensive HTML experience to prototype your ideas, and you don’t have to be a programmer either. And even if it takes you five minutes to wireframe an idea, it may take you hours of seemingly endless iterations to properly communicate what can’t be captured in flat annotations.

Any other excuses? No? Great, then jump into prototyping with Nathan Curtis. Because he’s heard it all before and knows first-hand that prototypes can drive positive conversations and effective designs.

See the toolkits you can use for building prototypes fast, learn the techniques for sketching remotely with teammates, and establish a higher level of understanding when communicating with your teams and clients.

Nathan will talk about:
- How sketching and prototyping change processes for the better
- Which design components are perfect to prototype (hint: all of them, but not each of them all the time)
- Developing re-usable patterns, components,
  and shortcuts
- Using kits to prototype for specific platforms and multi-channel experiences
Nathan is founder of EightShapes, a user-experience design studio that operates with a distributed team. Given this, Nathan and his team have become adept at communicating ideas visually—and early—while evolving their own design thinking and processes. His frameworks help designers create and communicate prototypes with clients worldwide.
The Three Levels of
Happy Design

Dana Chisnell

What’s an effective design today? Maybe it’s one that eliminates frustration, increases engagement, adapts across platforms, or compels us to wonder: “How’d they do that?”

But beyond the nuts and bolts of interaction design and usability testing is another element: user delight. Some stumble upon this accidentally with design changes while others intentionally implement design decisions that
drive delight.

Flip your approach with help from Dana Chisnell. She’ll outline her three levels of happy design - based on behavioral economics, hedonics, and positive psychology - to help you shift your design thinking. You’ll leave talking about designing for delight that goes beyond the ephemeral treat.

Dana will talk about:
- Designing for the overall feeling rather than
  single interactions
- Which actions to take when designing for pleasure, flow, or meaning
- Creating design principles based on the properties of the framework
- Measuring users’ emotional reactions to designs
Dana is a leading UX researcher whose studies span topics like persuasive design, user engagement, and behavioral economics. She works with teams to create delightful experiences—and learning from interactions that fail to achieve them.