UIE Web App Masters Tour

For the past 10 years, Jared and our research team at User Interface Engineering have study the secrets behind successful teams and the factors driving their results. Through hundreds of in-depth interviews and observations, we've discovered that successful teams share structural, cultural, and process patterns, contributing to fast, great designs. This is your chance to hear about this research first hand.

Jared will share three key factors behind successful experience design—feedback, vision, and culture—and how the best teams leverage these to streamline their process while increasing the quality of their designs. You'll learn how the best teams focus on their skills instead of their roles to reduce process bottlenecks and increase their flexibility. You'll hear how teams, moving to be more agile, are effectively integrating user experience research into their decision making process.

Helping teams operate in the collision zone has become Jared's specialty. His thirty years in the world of design gives us insights that come from such a long-term perspective. We love his presentation style and would say that even if he didn't sign our paychecks. This will be the perfect way to start the tour.

Jared says: "We've been digging deep into this research and the results have been fascinating. What we've always assumed makes great teams turns out to be quite different from reality. And the best teams already know that."

As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.

Stephen will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

We’ve followed Stephen’s work for a few years now, as he’s explored the art and science of integrating seductive interactions into applications. We know you’ll enjoy his great presentation style—one that both informs and entertains. There’s real insights in his thinking, which he’s tested out in his project work for folks like Frito-Lay, Chesapeake Energy, Sabre Travel Network, and Nokia. You’ll come away completely inspired.

Jared says: “The designers’ medium is behavior. Designing seductive interactions is the next frontier to get our users to fully engage in the applications they’re building. Stephen’s session will stir your creative juices in brand new ways.”

You’ll find Hagan’s design approach to navigation both novel and intriguing. She tackles the navigation as its own application, saving it for last. Hagan starts by separating the app’s screens into their different flavors: primary screens come first, then the secondary screens, then the appropriate selection and context-specific screens. Once that’s done, she uses those screens to describe how the navigation will flow.

Hagan’s method will help you avoid a common flaw when designing a complex navigation scheme: reflecting the underlying data scheme instead of leveraging your users’ mental models and desired workflows. She’ll show you how dividing the navigation’s visual look from its flow gives you flexibility in both style and implementation. You’ll learn how her hub-and-spoke diagramming technique helps you hone in on problem areas quickly.

Hagan has accrued years of design experience, starting in the early days of Netscape, building some of the web’s first applications. At Two Rivers Consulting with her husband David, they tackle the knurliest of application projects, helping organizations—large and small—escape their own navigation hell. Bring an empty notebook. You’ll want to capture everything.

Jared says: "I love that Hagan always delights our audiences with her fantastic delivery style, simultaneously entertaining and insightful. And her work is brilliant—one of the best designers in the business. You’ll love this session."

Once you know what to look for, it’s not difficult to start applying a core set of social design principles to your application. Christian will help you discover the appropriate models to represent both people and objects, and how they interact to build a solid social platform. You’ll identify the best ways to represent presence in your app—a key to helping your users find and relate to each other.

Christian has curated an amazing social pattern library that’s a great resource for enhancing your application with compelling social experiences. As he walks you through his collection, he’ll introduce you to the foundational set of principles that underpin each individual social interaction. His wealth of tips and strategies will show you what’s worked great and the important pitfalls to avoid.

As soon as we saw Christian’s new book, Designing Social Interfaces, which he co-wrote with Erin Malone, we knew you’d want to hear about their rich collection of social patterns and principles. An outgrowth from his work of compiling and curating the Yahoo! UI Pattern Library, Christian has compiled the perfect repository for anyone planning, designing, and building social aspects into their applications.

Jared says: “Social interaction is no longer a fringe feature, reserved only for Facebook and Twitter. It's now a regular requirement to help our users connect, share, and collaborate. Christian’s brilliant examples will kick start your imagination.”

Managing the design team for something this immense is no small endeavor. The entire world watches what you do, analyzing every move. Users, naturally resistant to changes, beg for new features but slam you for any disruption in their routine. What makes some folks happy is bound to upset others.

Yet Julie approaches her job with an amazing enthusiasm. She's surprisingly open about mistakes her design team has made as well as the lessons they’ve learned. She's quick to talk about how, with this many users, they have to design for the system, not for the individual. They've learned to think in big picture terms because optimizing small features can only take you so far. Most importantly, the team is constantly learning how to take measured risks.

Julie has helped grow Facebook from 8 million college students to today's worldwide audience. Besides being the primary designer for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, Julie also manages the product design team. You'll find her insights into Facebook's design process to be completely fascinating.

Jared says: “I’m thrilled we have this opportunity to look into Facebook’s design process. There is so much to glean from the lessons they’ve learned, serving such a wide audience with a rich functionality set. This session is going to rock!”

With each interesting moment, we either enhance a user's experience or cause confusion in their mind. With the design of each interaction, we must meet the expectations of our users—by delivering the right feedback and avoiding distraction. When we use a systematic approach, combined with solid principles, we ensure a design that'll delight users.

Bill can't wait to show you his incredible library of rich-interaction design patterns. Watch Bill slow down time, putting dozens of interactions under the microscope to illustrate what to emulate and what to avoid. You'll see proven design patterns and best-practice tips, along with several important anti-patterns to stay away from.

Bill's a leader in the world of interaction design. He just released their pattern library in a fabulous book he co-authored with Theresa Neil, Designing Web Interfaces. He launched & curated the public pattern library project at Yahoo!, where he was the Ajax evangelist, spreading the goodness of "sane" design and development practices. His current work, driving UI Engineering at Netflix, puts him directly on the front lines of interaction design thinking. You're going to love Bill's no-nonsense, easy-going approach to application design.

Jared says: "I wanted Bill on the Masters Tour because he knows more about web-app design patterns than anyone else I know. He's dazzled our previous Web App Summit audiences, and I'm sure you'll find him inspirational and delightful."

The day Ken arrived at Marriott, he was told the First Law: Do No Harm—a rule he’s lived by ever since. Yet how do you keep that promise when you’re also given the challenge of overhauling the cash cow: the site’s epic reservation system? You need to do a lot of research on everything you do, creating a big safety net for your designers and developers, who want to play with the newest stuff.

You’ll be mesmerized as Ken shares the obstacles he’s faced during this massive redesign, and how he’s overcome them. You’ll learn his strategies for working with each of Marriott’s many business lines, ensuring that everyone got what they needed from the redesign effort. And you’ll learn how he’s kept the trust of his customer base, while sliding major new changes into place.

Ken’s previous position, as AOL’s Senior Manager of Market Research, made him responsible for five multi-regional usability labs. He earned his stripes contributing to the launches of AIM, Moviephone, and MapQuest, as well as working with AOL’s partners such as Amazon, Netflix, and CNN. When you hear Ken, you’ll have no trouble believing that he knows his stuff, and you’ll see why we wanted him to give you the inside scoop.

Jared says: "Enterprise application design is all about working inside constraints. It’s one thing to hear about the theory, but Ken brings the realities of big design center stage. You won’t want to miss this session."

Today's interaction techniques, powered by technologies like Ajax, move us beyond the static submit-and-refresh page model, delivering users real-time feedback and providing lightweight interactions. With these tools, we increase the quality and accuracy of user inputs, encourage further contributions, and reduce the users' pain. What was a static form now becomes an engaging conversation.

Luke will explore several novel ways web applications can collect user input, through both mobile devices and desktop software, without forcing users to complete a lengthy sequential forms. He’ll provide detailed research-based solutions that articulate not only the “how” but the “why” as well. You'll walk away with practical web form design solutions you'll immediately put to use.

Luke's pioneering approach to web design has always made us think about how to create great user experiences. His best-selling book, Web Form Design, is a treasure we reference frequently. We easily understand why Yahoo! appointed him as their Chief Design Architect, where he's contributed to major design improvements across the entire company. We know you'll be blown away by his session.

Jared Says: "Meaningful design can mean the difference between indifferent consumers and passionately engaged users of your application. Luke's incredible insights will show you how to get the input your application needs."

This is the challenge Twitter is facing. Over the past year, media attention and celebrity promotion have driven huge crowds toward the real-time information network, getting lots of people curious about the service. Many of these people sign up, find personal value, and engage immediately. Yet a concerning number of users sign up, try it once, and never return.

Since arriving as Twitter's Creative Director, Doug has focused his attention on helping the one-time users become loyal repeaters. Doug's team studies the motivations and behaviors of Twitter's users. You'll hear about the project's successes and failures, and the simple ladder they're building to better understand and promote user engagement.

Doug's approach to responsible, forward-thinking design has made him one of the Web's most influential designers. He joined Twitter last year, after spending three years working as Google's Visual Design Lead. If you follow his career back, from the early days with his work with Wired and Blogger, you'll see he's been a driving force in web design. We're excited that he's on our program.

Jared says: "There are lots of people who have opinions about how to get users to return, but Doug will tell us what actually works and what is bunk. Hearing Doug's insights will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Creating a successful vision starts with in-depth user research. The teams start by understanding the design's current experience—what are users going through today? Assembling both the frustrating moments and the delightful aspects of the current design delivers solid insights to the team about what they should aspire to. This aspirational experience underlies their future vision.

Jared has been working with teams around the world on researching and creating their experience visions. He'll share the techniques that have been most effective, showing you how teams utilize their visions to drive their design processes. You'll learn how effective research takes advantage of persona development, which, in turn, helps the team learn more about who their users are and what they need.

Jared will reach into his rich example repository to show you different ways of visualizing a vision, from high-end video to simple story telling. He'll show you how organizations, such as Apple and Nokia, have successfully integrated visions into their process. A perfect ending to our tour. You'll want to rush back to your office to start building your own experience vision.

Jared says: "Probably the best tool in the user experience toolkit, the Experience Vision gives teams the long-term view they need, to stop reacting to changing requirements and to start thinking about where they need to go."