Sessions at Big Design Conference 2011 on Saturday 16th July

Fingers and thumbs turn design conventions on their head. Touchscreen interfaces create ergonomic, contextual, and even emotional demands that are unfamiliar to desktop designers. Find out why our beloved desktop windows, buttons, and widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. Along the way, discover why buttons are a hack, how to develop your gesture vocabulary, and why toys and toddlers provide eye-opening lessons in this new style of design.

Also: cats in tanks, and Hasseloff with puppies.

As adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 soar, much has been written about advances in stylesheet and design techniques. Even as we innovate on the content of our stylesheets, our design and development practices still lag those of other fields. This talk will introduce Sass, Compass, and other tools that streamline the creation of CSS, eliminate tedious repetition, and let designers focus on design.

In this talk, we'll show practical ways to speed up your web design and front end development. Attendees will walk away with practical ways to streamline their front-end design and development workflow.

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world's greatest problems - gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With "Game On" Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends - which includes everyone's favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How's that for a extra helping of games? Let's top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch - who's game?

Interfaces from SciFi films offer examples to realworld issues that are humorous, prophetic, inspiring, and practical to interaction designers.

SciFi interfaces are both fun, inspiring examples and reflections of current interface understanding. Production designers are allowed to develop “blue-sky” examples that, while lacking rigorous development with users, coalesce influential examples for practicing designers that are humorous, prophetic, inspiring, and useful. Interaction Designers can learn can learn from these examples. This presentation will describe some of the insights found by the presenter and design lessons all designers can take back to their practices.

How confident are you in asking for a raise, or getting $100+/hour contracts? Your success and choice of portfolio building gigs, greatly depends on how well you can tell your story. Stories about how you've helped a company or customer achieve business goals. Storytelling is simple, but it's not easy. In Lee's session, you'll learn the recipe that gets design talent top pay, great gigs, and makes hiring managers heroes. You'll have practical experience crafting your story, and you may even have a chance to share it!

Designing a great user experience, having a clear product roadmap, and developing iteratively are key elements to a successful software product. But what happens when the designers, developers, and product owners are at odds, or worse, have frequent unresolved arguments about the product? If these key players are not fully engaged in the process, or if they’re engaged but not agreeing on how to proceed, even the best designs can go unused or end up badly implemented. In Agile development shops, the speed with which development moves can create a division between these groups that leaves everyone feeling isolated and disenfranchised, and cause good projects to end badly.

This presentation addresses all three groups as equal partners. Regardless of your role, it will give you a context for understanding how to communicate effectively across the boundaries of product strategy, user experience design, and software development. It also covers specific techniques you can apply at different times in the development cycle to improve your chances of success by ensuring that the key players are speaking the same language. The content is not theoretical or idealized – it is based on years of experience with real-world product design and development, and up-close observation of what works and what doesn’t when real people are creating real products.

If thinking is destiny, then checking email every 60 seconds doesn't speak well on our behalf.

Thinking with our hands, real-time problem solving with ink, paper, and our cranium, it's our biggest asset...that were too overbooked to use. And it's affecting our output. Together we'll discover the games, collaboration and design research to get back what the daily grind takes away, to make great things together.

Some moments in your life (like your first kiss, your first love) play out like a game. The ebb and flow of relationships, your ability to influence them, and your ability to react to the ever changing environment of life are the basic components of game mechanics (and life). If you adopt some game mechanics, you can change your....self! In this sessions, we will discuss how game rules inform behavior, and how this principle applies to life, and how you can use these principles in networking.

What does design leadership look like? And how does it fundamentally change the way designers organize and operate. Leadership is not the same thing as management. It requires vision and execution.

Description Coming Soon

Innovation is a word that is commonly used and seldom defined. Ideas occur all the time but do they all deserve the time and effort necessary to realize them?

There is a startlingly simple definition for innovation because innovation, by itself, is simple. It’s also a form of the creative process and can’t be obtained on demand. But when you do come upon something innovative, the real work begins: You have to examine and justify a new idea. You have to convince others that your idea is worthwhile.

Adam Polansky will give you that simple definition and show you how to gauge the merit of an idea along with a short case study about a grass-roots idea that didn’t turn out as planned – it turned out better! He’ll also show you how to frame the discussions you’ll need to have in order to get your ideas off the ground and suggest some other avenues available to move from concept to concrete.

Description Coming Soon

We love playing games. Yet, when it comes to work, most of us view work and play as polar opposites. Internationally recognized speaker and author Stephen P. Anderson will show you how to find the joy in whatever task is thrown your way-- and how to find your own way in the process.

Whether you're a freelancer or full-time employee, Stephen has something to offer anyone who's looking for more from their career. Following a gameplay analogy, Stephen will help you:

• Discover what motivates you as we discuss "player types"
• Find out what skills you need to play the "career game"
• Learn how to craft well-formed goals and quests
• Pick up a few new tools to help you along the way

Tips, anecdotes and examples, plus a healthy dose of interactivity can of course be expected!

It is a balancing act! Game User Research (GUR) can greatly enhance a player's experience and piss off game designers at the same time. In this talk, you will learn about the history of Game User Research, how research helps games become more fun, an analtyical breakdown of why games are fun, and the latest game research methods available. You will also learn how game user researchers and game developers/designers can collaborate more effectively. A rollicking good time for everyone!

You already use Keynote to create dazzling presentations, polished wireframes, and scrappy prototypes. But now it's time to earn your Keynote black belt. Travis Isaacs and Dustin Askins will roundhouse kick their way through advanced Keynote usage:

• Creating motion graphics and animation
• Advanced animation controls and timing
• Creating your own per-project themes
• Creating your own default shape styles
• Creating wireframes on the iPad
• Porting your prototype to be used in a browser
• Testing a prototype on the iPhone
• And many other hidden gems and uses of Keynote that you didn't know about

Negotiation is an experience that can be designed by languaging you choose to use and rapport building with a client. Come to this talk to learn how you can design better experiences when you communicate with clients or really anyone.

Does the legacy code beast stifle your creativity? Is your ode inflexible because of the legacy code beast? Learn some practical lessons on how you can slay the legacy code beast and deliver value to your customer.

Working as a creative designer in the corporate world can be frustrating. You get assigned to a project for your expertise but come critique time, everyone's opinion is equal to or greater than yours – and the most opinionated clients usually have the worst taste.

In this session you'll learn how to defend good work and turn painful, subjective conversations about taste into more helpful, objective conversations about design goals.

Do you feel like you are being pulled in 10 different directions? You need check-in to Gowalla or Four Square, check your emails, check your voice mail, update you Facebook status, take a picture, post the picture to Flickr, tweet about the picture, and more. Does your online life affect your real one? You are not alone!

Today’s uber-connected online environment creates an Attention Economy (where everything competes for your attention), so designers and developers need to design for awareness. in this talk, Brian Sullivan will explain the various facets of attention, then Taylor Cowan will provide strategies on how you can design for awareness in the Attention Economy.

Come see how Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 helps you to maximize the impact of communications by creating, delivering, and optimizing eye-catching content for print, web, tablets, e-readers, and smartphones. Patti Sokol, Adobe Solutions Consultant, will demonstrate the exciting new features of CS5.5.

With over 425,000 apps currently on the iTunes app store, unless your name is Zynga, EA or Gameloft or you have a million dollar marketing budget, your odds of success in mobile gaming is dicey at best. This presentation will cover game changers like:

• What are the fundamental under pinnings of a great mobile game
• How to leverage the power of brand to move up the charts fast
• Put the odds in your favor and radically change the potential success curve

Matt Johnson, Executive Producer for Thruster (a division of Bottle Rocket Apps - www.bottlerocketapps.com), will discuss the two most important stages of any game development cycle and present a case study comparison of two of their most popular games and lessons learned from two different marketing strategies.

Thruster has designed and developed games with their Propulsion platform that have been downloaded over 2,000,000 times since the inception of the iTunes App Store. This success has attracted a host of emerging social brands that want to bring a new level of engagement to their millions of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter fans. Thruster continues to fuel this demand by moving brands like Annoying Orange, Freddie Wong, Fred, iJustine and Counting Crows to a new level of social entertainment on a multitude of gaming platforms.

“Gamificiation” is the process of applying game design maxims to non-game systems in order to drive user engagement, influence behavior and improve the user experience of digital products and services. The buzz surrounding gamification is currently reaching critical mass in our industry with the bulk of attention directed to points & badges but there’s more to unlock. Much more. By examining the tools game designers use to incentivize and motivate players and mapping these tools to their psychological underpinnings we can arm ourselves with a model for architecting user engagement, directing behavior and satisfying business goals.

This timely lecture is appropriate for anyone looking to level up their understanding of gamification and game design thinking. Attendees will learn about game design fundamentals, engagement models, metrics and measurements, feedback loops, player personas, flow states, motivation drivers, high level mechanics/dynamics and techniques for incorporating game design thinking into your design processes.

What's a girl to do? She created a great blog, where thousands of people come each day. Her audience spends 10 minutes or more. She has over 20 bloggers writing different articles each day. She publishes several videos each week. How do you manage all of the day-to-day activities of a content-rich site? In short, you kick some assets (content assets). Learn the secrets of managing content, handling people, determining what your audience wants, and more.

Author and designer Todd Zaki Warfel will show how prototyping with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery is easier than you think. Whether you're an HTML novice or presentation-layer pro, you'll walk away with a number of practical tips and techniques for prototyping with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. You'll learn how to:

• Structure your prototype designs faster with HTML5
• Take advantage of new input types to make mobile-ready forms instantly
• Use CSS3 to sexy buttons without the need for background images or sliding doors
• Use CSS3 selectors
• Make effective use of jQuery transitions with only a few lines of code

You'll walk away with a number of techniques that will help you craft flexible, bulletproof, effective and adaptable interfaces that make up an elegant user experience.

A clear Vision can drive a person, a company, and even a nation to success. A fuzzy vision, a mirage, can drive us to insanity. It’s a key difference between doing something crazy, and doing something crazy great. But clear Vision is not only available to the special few geniuses and dreamers. And in the absence of clarity, fuzziness will emerge. A team or organization can discover or create a clear Vision that will successfully inspire, bond, and guide them for years, then use it to draw the map and make decisions. Find out what Vision can do for you and how Design is actually the key role in creating it clearly.

The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of mobile applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.

Why is all this happening now? Where is it all going? UIE’s own Jared Spool will show you how four driving forces—market maturity, the emergence of experience, Kano’s model, and Sturgeon’s Law—are increasing the visibility and value of design in organizations everywhere. He’ll show you what the next generation of design teams will look like and how you’ll get there.