Sessions at Seattle Interactive Conference 2011 on Thursday 3rd November in Washington State Convention Center

In recent years, apps have held a central place in the Design / Cultural / Technical zeitgeist. In this talk, acclaimed App Designer Shannon Carter will share her key insights from the 50+ top-tier apps, updates, and mobile campaigns that she has overseen as Design Director of The Zumobi Network. Learn the five core characteristics that define the best-performing apps, and the important considerations that need to be addressed early in the Design process to ensure an app that is sticky, usable, reliable, profitable, and highly-rated. Shannon will also discuss key considerations for an expanding app ecosystem, including Designing for iPhone/Android/iPad and planning for a future of apps on connected TVs. Working on an app project? Got a big app idea? This is the session for you.

The interactive design industry is hooked on the screen. Big screens, flat screens, pocket-sized screens, wafer-thin flexible AMOLED screens with pico-projectors… we are both the addicts and the pushers. These technologies have become the mediators through which we create “human-centric” experiences. But technology is only a means to an end. Isn’t a children’s pop-up book just as much of a “UX” as a mobile app? This talk will explore the application of interactive design to real world environments. Technology has amazing potential to enrich these environments, but the days of bolting a plasma screen onto a wall and calling it interactive are gone. We’ll look at examples, both good and bad, analog and digital, modern and not. We’ll pull back the curtain on our own Experience Lab and show you some embarrassing moments and some unexpected successes.

A scientific investigation into promising mutations in the creative community. Creatives need to adapt and become creative technologists to thrive and survive in the new digital arena.

In 2011, web marketing can no longer be segmented into tidy buckets. The power of connecting content marketing with SEO and social media can be tranformative for any business, from startup to enterprise. In this talk, SEOmoz founder Rand Fishkin will show off the process and share actionable tactics to leverage the power of Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook and more in ways that yield more than the sum of their parts.

Take a look at current and emerging signals with Bing. Understanding what matters today, and in the future, can make the job of building a successful website much easier. Join us for a review of some of the most important signals impacting search today, and tomorrow.

If you’re looking to generate more traffic, gain more leads, and make more sales, this session is for you. You’ll learn how small marketing tweaks can lead to massive business results online. Not only will you learn what makes people tick, you’ll also see exactly how you can ensure that your company isn’t leaving money on the table by missing out on these often overlooked marketing nuances.

In the last year we’ve learned something that we suspected, but never really knew about mobile - great mobile design sells. But great mobile design doesn’t start in Photoshop, it starts by understanding the users, the goals, the intended devices and a million other tiny variables. Who better to solve these problems than the designer?

In this workshop led by Brian Fling, author of O’Reilly’s Mobile Design and Development, we will deconstruct a variety of successful mobile experiences from the old green screens to today’s hottest iPhone apps. We’ll identify what works in the mobile context and why. But more importantly we’ll learn how we can design incredible mobile experiences for educators today and for tomorrow.

In this in depth session, Mark will take a nostalgic look back at early mobile phones and provide a timeline of the evolution of cell phone features and capabilities. Mark will provide data on service penetration, showing just what people are doing on their devices. This session will tackle the way Smartphones are “eating” other devices and capabilities including the PC, Cameras and the GPS market. Finally, this session will call into question the Smartphone’s dynasty. With the rise of Tablets, will Smartphones become as novel as the car phone someday?

Building off the Metro Aesthetic designed for touch and mobile devices the new Windows 8 application model is wrapped around encouraging apps designed around the Metro Aesthetic. This session is about designing for metro, the use of touch and gesture in interaction design and implementation along with thinking around the new gesture types, and how the experience in the win8 Metro environment can be integrated into other experiences on the slate.

Technology is opening opportunities for creativity like never before. It seems the only limits to what we can accomplish are set by our imagination (or lack thereof). That said, finding simplicity in ideas and exhaustive thought before execution are still the most critical investments we can make. We’ll discuss that, and Wexley’s role in cluttering the internet.

Attention spans are going down and users are moving more quickly between their apps, their phones and the browser. To keep users engaged, designers and developers alike need to be considering the best and most innovative ways to deliver consistent access and experience whenever the user wants it. This requires a blend of skills, design and use of different modes to weave the app seamlessly into your users life. 10 examples, 5 strategies and 2 secrets that can make your app a winner!

2011 is the year of the empowered shopper. For the first time, consumers have an informational advantage over retailers, manufacturers and marketers. The advantage is information transparency: the information consumers need, simply delivered, when and where they need it. This presentation looks at how the broader trend of information transparency applies to consumers and how it’s changing the way people shop. Now that it’s here, what are you going to do about it?

Increasingly, diverse voices are warning that this economic recovery must take a new form. If they’re right, and the 20th century model of growth and accelerated resource consumption is nearing its end, we will need a new kind of economy. How can designers adapt to changing market demands? What role might we play in shaping a sustainable future?

How should I set my type? How much padding do I need? How much white space should I have?

Designers tend to answer questions like these arbitrarily, but I’ve never been satisfied with this haphazard approach.

Thankfully, nature has taught us a better way, and today, we’re going to learn how to unlock the mathematical secrets of design and typography with the golden ratio.

Over the last 10 years, UX has gone from being a “delighter to a “must have” customer need. Today, creating a successful user experience means going beyond the “magic behind the curtain” to a proven, repeatable, evidence-driven process that takes the guesswork out of design. For many companies, a good user experience has become a large part of their brand and people are paying money for it. Sites, products and services that are well designed to accomplish their user’s goals are toping of the charts and changing the world.

In this talk, Karen will present a case that having a great user experience is a new business requirement and necessary to make the world a better place. She will show examples from actual usability studies and let customers tell you themselves how important UX is to a company’s brand and ultimate success.

Consumers today aren’t just sharing their opinions about businesses with their friends and family; they’re getting online and sharing it with the world. User generated content on social media sites like Yelp continues to become more important for small businesses owners. What are the best practices within this new era of transparency? What options exist for the business who has just received a negative review? Relying on real-world case studies, this session will examine who’s using Yelp, and the DOs and DON’Ts for businesses engaging with users online.

Join entertainment luminaries for an introspective look at the digital music frontier. Get true insiders’ perspectives on how interactive technology and platforms have disrupted the music industry—and how the industry has responded and adapted in an environment of apps, pirates, file sharing sites and storage in the cloud. Other discussion topics will cover what ownership and access means in the world of DRM (Digital Rights Management), varied online subscription models and where the music industry goes from here.

In the previous century, sophisticated film and moving-picture storytelling was largely the province of the feature film and television studio communities. The digital age democratized the tools to create and distribute video-based storytelling and also enabled audience interactivity not previously possible. These developments have opened a rich world for artists, designers and technologists from all walks of life to explore and experiment with and new immersive worlds for their audiences to engage with.

Dave Rosencrans serves as moderator for a group of artists and designers working on the digital frontier: Karolina Sobecka, independent designer and artist and founder of Flightphase; Issara Willenskomer, creative director at Dos Rios Films; and Tali Krakowsky founder of Apologue Studio. This group will share examples of their cutting-edge work and discuss their trials, tribulations and triumphs in experimenting with storytelling, design, and interactivity in an integrated world with fewer and fewer technology barriers.

If your company delivers products or services, chances are people who receive your offering are talking about it. Online tools, social networking sites and Q&A forums make this possible – the web is a huge open platform for greater collaboration, the exchange of ideas and sharing of opinions. Are you listening to the conversation? Do you have a handle on your brand’s reputation? How do you respond to criticism and negative reviews? In this session you will hear from Avvo, Yelp and Urbanspoon – three pioneers in the evolution of online reviews and ratings. They will discuss how to manage your online reputation – maximize positive feedback and respond to lackluster reviews. In addition, the group will explore the social responsibility ratings and reviews sites have in handling the user-generated content they publish.

If you care about what people are saying about you and your company, this session is a tremendous opportunity to hear from the experts.

Interactive technology is enabling three pioneering Seattle companies to drive transformation at every stage of the real estate ownership lifecycle. Whether you’re actively buying or selling a home, just wondering what your home is worth, or trying to lower your property taxes, online technology is fundamentally changing how things get done in the world of real estate. Learn how these Seattle-based companies are at the forefront of monetizing this change by publishing data which has long been tightly guarded, slashing transaction costs, and empowering homeowners to save money in ways that have never before been possible.

It’s not enough just to rank highly and drive keyword traffic these days (if you can even do that after Google’s Panda algorithm update). You also need to win over the customer by providing breakthrough experiences that anticipate their needs while providing real, tangible value. The new generation of SEOs understands this, which is why they’re also focused on information architecture and user experience.

In this session, you’ll see world-class examples of how you can bring these disciplines together in your companies and organizations in order to delight your users, plug holes in your conversion rate, and drive more qualified traffic. No “best practices” or baseless theories here – just real-life tactics that solved problems and drove conversion. SEOs and IA/UX pros don’t need to butt heads (or headbutt!) when they can collaborate together to improve the cross-channel experience.

Are you having trouble meeting the needs of your users while growing your traffic? This is the panel for you.

Where is your social marketing taking you? This panel will discuss ideas related with true social media ROI and the process of tracking an individual’s social influence throughout the purchasing cycle—from initial awareness, to shopping, to buying, to recommending, and much more.

You could walk around town with a hot iron stamping everyone you think is your customer. But that will not do your business a lot of good, nor will it gain you more customers. Winning your brand takes hard work, patience, clarity and skill. The panelists here know how to do it, and they are going to share their knowledge with you. Hosted by the king of deep thinking, Warren Etheredge of The Warren Report.

Creating a passionate, vocal, viral community centered on your brand is arguably the most essential ingredient for success in today’s hyper consumer-driven marketplace. Word of mouth is the powerful form of advertising – how do you empower and engage your fans to create positive content and communications centered on your products? This session will outline why building community is essential for every company; showcase brands who are leading the way with innovative approaches to fostering community; and review best practices, tools set and ingredients needed to successfully build, manage and measure community.

Hear from local entrepreneurs and leaders in Seattle’s healthcare community on how data is being leveraged – from big pharma companies to you – to play a relevant and powerful role in improving the quality of care provided across the industry.

The online health landscape is littered with websites and toolsets that provide information, but don’t personalize it to a specific condition or experience. Learn from Derek Streat, CEO of Medify, on how he’s making relevant and important medical research available and digestible to consumers to improve patient outcomes.

Over the last few years, technology providers have begun to offer solutions to improve the way drug companies market and communicate with healthcare providers and encourage transparency down to consumers. Hear from Kabir Shahani, CEO of Appature, on how his company is improving the way pharma companies communicate with healthcare providers to improve the quality of care offered.

Mobile makes a lot of things in life effortless—we thought flying should be, too. Alaska Airlines and Übermind collaborated to create a comprehensive mobile solution to help on-the-go travelers bypass airport lines and stay connected through every step of the travel experience. Stow your tray tables and put your seat backs in an upright position as Curtis Kopf of Alaska Airlines and Übermind’s Shehryar Khan take you to a new frontier where mobile innovation solves business challenges.

The idea was simple: create a travel app that’s so intuitive it can be used with one hand while running through a crowded airport. Delivering it was complex: recreating a best-in-class travel experience on a mobile device, contextualizing each step of the travel process, incorporating the complex rules of the airline industry with simplicity, and collaborating with Alaska Airlines’ IT department to architect and troubleshoot the necessary web services. Every step of the way, Alaska Airlines and Übermind focused on creating an innovative mobile experience that put the user first, enabling air travel like never before.

In the 50 days leading up to her 50th birthday, Colleen Wainwright set a goal to raise $50,000 for a local nonprofit using nothing but the Internet, word-of-mouth, and suspension of disbelief. Learn how she successfully reached her goal with 10 days to spare, then more than doubled it, and how to apply those lessons to gaining attention for your own small business or cause.

Back when Google was just a big number (pre 1998), it was relatively easy to optimize a website to get to the top of popular search engines like Alta Vista, Excite and Inktomi. Then Larry & Sergey came along and turned the world of search upside down with BackRub and AdWords. Search has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry since then, and with the growth comes increasing complexity and change. Search results now incorporate maps, pictures, videos, maps, reviews and other social signals. Yet the transformation of search has come full circle. The elements of good website design still apply now as much as they did back in 1998. In this session, you will learn both what is new in the world of search (think mobile) as well as what has never changed (think relevant content).

In recent decades, there has been a rapid globalization of markets and skilled labor. In the past, the primary factor driving US companies overseas was off shoring for cheaper labor. Today, the focus is on acquiring skilled talent and accessing in fast growing markets. Businesses of every size must bolster their knowledge of other languages and cultures in order to compete effectively. It goes almost without saying that English has become the language of commerce, science, and academia. The proliferation of English certainly helps make it easier to get started in a multinational effort, but English is not enough. In this session, Livemocha CEO Michael Schutzler will present a case for language training as an essential workplace tool along with examples of organizations creating a more productive and dynamic workforce with language education.

Like a potentially deadly riptide, search advertising fraud has always existed under the surface of search engine marketing. Creating headlines in 2006 when Yahoo and Google settled large class action lawsuits, click fraud today is alive and well – just not well understood.

Topics that will be covered include:

• The three main types of search advertising fraud
• The latest statistics on click fraud prevalence
• Specific examples of how malware drives fraud
• The role of organized crime in search fraud
• How search engines protect advertisers
• A case study based on a civil lawsuit filed by Microsoft
• Tips on how marketers can watch for potential fraud
• A ‘bill of traffic quality rights’ for advertisers