Dissecting Design
Ben Callahan
Many teams follow a linear design process with a big reveal—ta-da!—once the aesthetics, layout, and flow are “ready” for client feedback.
Weeks later, the front-end developer enters to turn an approved design into a responsive site that functions perfectly across devices.
Now imagine showing clients your work in Week 1. How would everyone respond to unpolished designs?
Find out from Ben Callahan. In this talk, he’ll describe how to:
- Improvise solutions—and make it a habit—right out of the gate
- Focus on the people involved, rather than the process itself
- Solve problems in whatever medium you’re most comfortable using
- Make refinements at the very end using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Ben learned all of this when he and his company, Sparkbox, stopped designing deliverables and, instead, focused on the end-product.
And after years of trying to discover The Perfect Process that optimizes budgets and skills, he’s finally learned a secret: there is no such thing.
Doing “Pocket Research” to Learn About Your Users’ Lives
Cyd Harrell
Mobile phones are like research platforms in our pockets. With the right strategy, we can quickly understand our users’ behavior, wherever they are.
And given the ubiquity of mobile usage — even among hard-to-reach populations — we as UX designers are especially poised to make our lives easier while designing better products.
That is, if we actually do the research.
Fortunately, Cyd Harrell knows how to gather data without breaking budgets or extending timelines.
In this talk, you’ll hear how to:
Choose the right mobile methods to answer deeper UX questions
Set up a diary study, experience sample, and SMS and voice-based survey
Identify physical space triggers, and use them to gather more user data
Build research into your process without breaking the bank
Cyd’s been doing remote research since 2007 while at Bolt | Peters. She even developed methods to broadcast remote research sessions to observation teams. Today, as the UX lead for Code for America, Cyd regularly performs research on mobile phones from low-income residents through smartphone-happy elite populations.
In short, she’s The Expert. So don’t miss her.
Building Design Systems from Atomic Elements
Brad Frost
Have you seen style tiles, element collages, or pattern libraries? These are just a few examples of how designers are reacting to the explosion of devices and interface sizes.
After all, thinking about the parts of a “page”—not just the sum of those parts—helps us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs for all those newfangled technologies.
And a leading voice behind this elemental thinking is Brad Frost.
In this talk, he’ll introduce Atomic Design, a methodology you can use to create a design system in your organization. You’ll learn how to:
- Deconstruct your organizations’ interfaces
- Create systems that includes templates, and pages
- Create designs that are future-friendly and extensible
- Establish a repeatable workflow tailored to your team and product
Whenever you read TechCrunch or Entertainment Weekly online, you’re looking at Brad’s Atomic Design work. He follows the methodology so regularly that he created a free tool called Pattern Lab that helps you create your own design systems.
So if words like “future-friendly” and “flexibility” are requirements in your work, then don’t miss this talk.
Choosing Which Mobile Experience to Build
Nate Schutta
By now, companies know they need to be “on mobile.” But should that experience be a native app, a mobile web app, or something in between?
The answer rarely is such a simple choice. And if you’ve ever entered into mobile discussions with a series of stakeholders, it may seem impossible to reach consensus.
Fortunately, Nate knows the business questions to ask, device constraints to consider, and UX trends for mobile that will help your company find its way.
In this talk, you’ll:
- Find out why mobile is something your company can’t afford to ignore
- Hear the pros and cons of various approaches, including the implications of each
- Get key mobile stats that will give your team fuel to make better, faster UX choices
- Learn which questions to ask stakeholders — ones they’ll actually be able to answer
Nate is an architect who specializes in coaching teams as they build mobile user experiences. He’s among our industry’s foremost thinkers and communicators, and he knows how to help people make decisions about mobile UX. (In fact, he’s become so skilled at it that he’s part of a working group tasked with answering mobile-UX questions for his entire organization.) Don’t miss out on this one.
Adapting to Different Forms of Input
Jason Grigsby
For years, we treated the web as if it was a fixed canvas. It took the iPhone and Ethan Marcotte’s article on Responsive Web Design for us to realize how dynamic the UI could be.
But in addition to keyboards, we now have touch screens, cameras, voice control, and sensors as different kinds of inputs. Plus, we can’t know which inputs the user prefers to use until after we’ve tried designing with—and for—those inputs.
So how do we design for all of the explosion of these dynamic inputs?
Jason Grigsby has some ideas you’ll want to hear. Find out why:
- There is no connection between form factor and input
- We can’t detect input until someone uses it
- Aiming for “touch” as the input is a good starting point
- Designing for user needs and usage works across form factors
And you couldn’t be learning from a more passionate, experienced teacher.
Jason has a unique background in researching TV interface design and working in JavaScript frameworks for responsive apps. As a result, he realized there was a fundamental problem in designing for a multi-input world—one that he’s at the forefront of talking about.
So if you’re ready for some Thanksgiving-sized brain food, then don’t miss his talk.
Defining Your Mobile Content Strategy
Karen McGrane
In 2015, more people worldwide will use a mobile device to access the internet than a traditional computer. Today, 33 percent of people in the United States only use a mobile device to browse online.
Clearly, mobile isn’t just a new technology with a small screen size — it’s the way the world is getting online.
So why are companies approaching mobile content from a desktop perspective?
It’s time to define a mobile content strategy that will make your customers very happy. And Karen McGrane is your guide.
In this talk, you’ll hear how to:
- Identify what content you want to publish on mobile versus desktop
- Create an editorial workflow that’s realistic for your team and CMS
- Edit content to make it easier to read on all devices
- Add structure to your content to make it more flexible
Companies including AT&T, Aquent, Hearst, Lexmark, Marriott, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and T Rowe Price all called Karen to help them through this exact conundrum. After all, she wrote the book on Content Strategy for Mobile.
Keynote Presentations
Mobile Behavior and Design Trends
Luke Wroblewski
What’s going to make your whole company focus on mobile? How do people interact with their mobiles device? How can you design for this new reality and even create experiences that translate from mobile to laptop to TV?
Find out from Luke Wroblewski. He’s got the facts, tips, and case studies to help you talk confidently with your team about designing intuitive, cross-device experiences. You’ll think about how people are using your designs on mobile, whether browsing a content-heavy site or interacting with an e-commerce application.
Luke’s talks are chock full of the tools and talking points to help design teams make great mobile UX decisions. In fact, you’ll see examples from his new product, Polar, a mobile product he created after Twitter acquired his prior startup, Bagcheck, just nine months after being launched publicly.
How Do We Design Designers?
Jared Spool
Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation?
It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable.
Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth.
Doing just that takes a combination of practical education, soft-skill development, and a commitment to lifelong learning. And in this talk, Jared Spool will dig into all three so you can be a part of developing the next generation of designers.
This vital topic was the focus of a multi-year research program Jared conducted with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman to identify how orgs educate, hire, train, and develop designers. Armed with huge amounts of data, the duo then designed and launched Center Centre, a bricks-and-mortar school that cultivates industry-ready UX designers.
So if you’ve ever wished there was a better system to support design thinkers like you, then this is your talk. After all, you could be part of defining the ideal solution.