Day 1: Full-day Workshops
We start with four full-day tutorials covering the most critical topics for your success. Between them, the world-renowned experts leading these seminars have more than 100 years of experience designing applications for practically every industry, from financial services to entertainment. They've created an information-packed day designed to get every question you have answered and deliver you the essential insights for creating great applications.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26TH: WORKSHOPS
8:30AM—5:30PM
The Essentials of Interaction Design
Kim Goodwin, Cooper
What makes a designer a designer? Is it knowing how to conduct research? Is it understanding how to create personas? Is it having a solid foundation conducting usability tests? While all of these skills are valuable, what really separates designers from the rest is the ability to visualize concrete design solutions that solve human problems. In this full-day workshop, Cooper’s Kim Goodwin will help you refine your interaction design skills.
During the day, Kim will expose you to the essential tools of interaction design and help you develop the design “muscles” to use them. You will come away from the day with a solid vocabulary of interaction design patterns. You will learn the key principles to creating a coherent interaction framework, as well as collaboration and ideation techniques to achieve novel design solutions that delight your users.
Audio Interview with Kim Goodwin
We sat down with Kim to discuss her advanced design methodologies. A great primer for Kim’s Web App Summit talk!
[ Text Transcript ] [ Original Podcast ]
Collaboration, Creativity, & Consensus in User Experience Design
Leisa Reichelt, disambiguity.com
Performing user experience design by yourself is a daunting task, but taking the process to another level by involving your project team and your client productively can present a whole new set of challenges. How exactly do you build collaboration and consensus into your project methodology?
In this hands-on workshop, Leisa Reichelt will teach you a range of practical techniques to foster collaboration, creativity, and consensus in your design team and with your stakeholders that will prove to be great additions to your user experience toolkit. You'll learn how to involve your project team and your clients throughout your project lifecycle to improve project outcomes and minimize risk.
Through a series of hands-on activities, you'll learn how to conduct powerful brainstorming sessions that don't fall completely flat or get stuck on the first good idea. You'll see how using various collaborative design techniques involve your team and project stakeholders early in the design process to bring important information to the table earlier and accelerate solution design. And you'll learn how consensus building techniques help make critical decisions concerning features, hierarchy, and prioritization smooth and painless.
Web Form Design Best Practices
Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo!
In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions.
In his full-day workshop, Luke Wroblewski, author of the upcoming book, Web Form Design Best Practices, will walk you through design considerations and best practices of form design culled from international site-tracking, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over eleven years of designing Web applications. He'll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not.
Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior. The workshop is structured to provide attendees with an understanding of the right "best" practices for their specific context, so they can quickly go from the quintessential design answer of "it depends" (on the business goals, user needs, and context of your forms) to actionable solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again.
Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Indi Young
What's a mental model? Those in the field of cognitive research have been describing and defining mental models for a few decades. The term "mental model" has come to mean "a mental representation." The mental models described in this presentation are representations of people's behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use.
In this presentation, Indi Young, author of the book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, will teach you how to better understand the user experience before making design and strategic decisions through the use of mental models. Mental models provide a clear roadmap of where your organization should invest its energies, and also where it shouldn't, allowing you to stretch your limited resources. Mental models will also allow you to derive an information architecture from users' tasks that will last 10 years, and get everyone from discordant team members to busy executives on the same page with respect to design and strategy.
After this presentation, you'll come away with an understanding of how mental models have helped organizations from a variety of industries, and be able to create your own mental models right away to improve your web sites and applications. You'll understand the pros and cons of mental models, and how they fit with other user experience design methods. And you'll be able to avoid the frustrating mistake that often get in the way while developing mental models.
Audio Interview with Indi Young
Learn a little more about the Mental Models technique Indi will be discussing in her workshop.