Monday, April 20
Featured Presentations 1
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Both sessions will occur concurrently. All you have to do is take a seat in the one you're most interested in.
Difficult Conversations in Creative Environments
Dan Brown
Let's compare two aspects of your job: challenge and fun. As designers, we relish creating a new product or improving upon a feature. Such opportunities sit at the intersection of challenging and fun. Still challenging, but not nearly as fun, is dealing with the personal interactions that come with working on a design team. Whether you work inside an organization, operate as a freelancer, or come in as a consultant, we designers are confronted with a variety of situations that force us to think about how we work with other people.
You don't have to be a manager or in client services to encounter these challenges. Every designer faces difficult conversations - defending design decisions, explaining project mishaps, managing conflicting requirements from different stakeholders. Good designers must recognize their strengths and weaknesses not only in creative skill, but also in their ability to interact with others day-to-day.
In this session, we'll establish a framework for looking at difficult situations typically faced by designers. The framework helps us understand the dynamics of common scenarios on creative projects and accounts for different forms of communications between people. By evaluating our own situations within this framework, we can make appropriate choices for how we deal with them, and how to communicate effectively. With the theory as a backdrop, the second half of the session will focus on skills and techniques for making conversations easier.
Parti and the Design Sandwich
Luke Wroblewski
In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling?
Design principles are the guiding light for any parti. They articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough.
Every design consideration has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the parti. Designers who want to bring coherent visions to life need to learn the detailed ins and outs of design considerations so they can select the best solutions from the options available.
This combination of design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom allows designers to fill in the middle with meaningful structures that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done.
In this talk, Luke Wroblewski will illustrate how the World’s most accessed Web page, yahoo.com, was redesigned with a parti and the design sandwich.
Featured Presentations 2
10:30 AM—12:00 PM
Both sessions will occur concurrently. All you have to do is take a seat in the one you're most interested in.
Web Anatomy: Usable Design with Frameworks
Robert Hoekman
You’ve done the research, interviewed the users, written a specification, created the wireframes, approved the comps, written the code, and iterated your little head off. Alas, your design still suffers from enough usability problems to drive your whole company into obscurity. Design patterns help, but they stifle creativity. Design principles help, but concepts don't produce screens. You need a solid set of building blocks, and you need them right now. The solution? Interaction design frameworks!
In this illuminating session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment, introduces interaction design frameworks as the perfect starting point for a usable design and reveals how to extrapolate design criteria from them to go beyond the standards without sacrificing usability and understandability.
Rich Interface Design: Everything Changes
Riccardo La Rosa and Steve Mulder
If technologies such as AJAX and Flash are powerful flames heating up the Web, then we designers are the glassblowers. It's up to us to create intuitive, engaging interfaces on top of the new possibilities that AJAX and Flash bring. But old skills aren't enough in this age of animated transitions, asynchronous interactivity, and application-like behavior.
What does every designer need to know in order to move from static HTML sites to dynamic rich interfaces? This presentation covers strategies for when to dial up rich interactions, effective ways to incorporate user feedback into a dynamic interface, and advice on how timing can make the difference between an interface that works and one that doesn't. We'll also discuss how traditional usability ideals such as discoverability and simplicity take on new meaning when we design rich interfaces. The session will include many examples of successful and failed rich interfaces.
Peer-to-Peer Roundtable Lunch
12:00 PM—1:00 PM
The roundtable topics are back by popular demand! Sign up for a topic near the registration desk then join your peers at the table to discuss the challenges and opportunities you're facing in that topic.
Keynote Presentation
1:15 PM—2:15 PM
Building a Brand that Matters
Tony Hsieh
In under ten years, Zappos.com has grown from an upstart into a business that generated $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008. We'll discuss the ingredients to build a brand, culture, and company that matters. We'll also discuss some of the lessons learned while building the business over the last ten years. We hope to keep the discussions informal and interactive.
New Perspectives Talks
2:30 PM—3:45 PM
Designing Humanity into Your Products
Bill DeRouchey
Relationships are formed in the smallest moments and intimate details within each and every interaction, even between people and products. Paying attention to these details can make or break a product, or a company. And when the economy is bad, every edge counts. Interaction design can make the difference in survival times like now.
Interaction with a product is far more than how it's used or how it behaves. It's about connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So what is the essence of your product?
Is your product human or a machine? When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. Just another company, rigid, mechanical, cold. Yet when your products display a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.
In this session, we'll see examples of how humanity has been designed into products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. We'll discover how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.
4:15 PM—5:30 PM
Baking a Corporate Culture into the Online Experience
Brian Kalma
Zappos.com has an interesting challenge. The amazing success of their e-commerce company has come about because of the amazing culture they've instilled in their employees. Everyone who works for Zappos contributes to this culture, which in turn, contributes to the business's success.
Yet, most customers, if things go well, won't deal directly with a Zappos employee. Instead, they'll deal with Zappos.com's web site (or one of their other online properties). A web site is just words and images. Crafting the tone and brand is a start, but it does little to truly communicate those core elements that the organization is living every day. Baking the culture into the design means embedding the site with the organizations DNA.
How does the User Experience Team at Zappos permeate the web site with the key elements of the culture that are part of who they are? That's exactly the question we've posed to Brian Kalma, who is responsible for Zappos.com's User Experience and Web Strategy. He'll share with us his experience, both what has worked and what hasn't, in baking their culture into the essense of their designs.