Add an eventBig Design Conference 2012 schedule
Thursday 31st May 2012
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From Film Concept to Release
by Keith Alcorn
Find out how to unlock your concepts to a final film or animated release from Keith Alcorn, who was nominated for an Oscar for Jimmy Nuetron: Boy Genius. Learn how to negotiate the business side of film and animation, while balancing the creative side of a production. Keith will share stories from his experience on projects, such as The Ant Bully, Jimmy Nuetron, and Santa versus the Snowman.
Friday 1st June 2012
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2012 Opening Keynote
by Sharron Rush
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CSS3 Web Typography Changes Everything
Web typography has been changing dramatically thanks to browser support for @font-face and server-based fonts. Web designers now have thousands of font choices where they once had just a dozen. But beyond @font-face, CSS 3 introduces myriad new OpenType typographic controls, being supported by the latest browsers. These OpenType features bring to web design the level of typographic refinement that print designers have enjoyed for the past decade. Beyond that, OpenType can do things you’ve never imagined fonts could do, from translating text to self-censorship, from building charts to predicting the future!
What You Will Learn:
- How @font-face server-based web fonts work, and what options they replace
- Your choices for enabling @font-face, from self-hosting to web font services
- Learn about the state and near future of advanced typography support in browsers
- See how OpenType can make text more sophisticated
- Examine the “correct” typographic use of all these new features
- Review OpenType features in action on web pages, from workhorse everyday typography to the surprising and bizarre, via fonts created by Phinney and friends
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Lessons from DELL's Design Library: Getting 7 Million Pages on the Same Page
by Jonathan Atkins, Jim Machajewski, bill harrison and Ashley Eaton
The Dell Design Library is run by Global Site Design (GSD), Dell’s internal interactive design group. GSD is responsible for the complete transformation of Dell.com’s user experience and design across the site’s roughly 7,000,000 pages globally. Rebuilding a site on such a massive scale requires that you start with a firm foundation, so GSD created a modular design system consisting of a relatively small number of parts and templates that can be rearranged almost infinitely to build any desired webpage. These parts and templates, along with the instructions for using them, are housed in Dell’s custom built, publicly available, design library.
Join members of Dell’s Global Site Design team in a frank discussion about the highs and lows of building out a design library. The team will detail out how and why they built the library and give real world examples about what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t.
What You Will Learn:
- How to build a design library.
- How to scale a design system across a HUGE enterprise.
- What makes a good design library.
- How a library saves time and resources.
- How a design library supports a global team.
- Questions and Answers with the people who created and maintain the library.
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Managing UX Design(ers)
by Jim Carlsen-Landy
If you lead UX activities and designers, you already know that it ain’t your usual management job. If you’re a designer or a developer or a non-UX manager, and are considering making the switch to UX management, then you need to know up front that this ain’t your usual management job. Prospects, newbies, and experienced leaders alike will find valuable guidance in this presentation, and we’ll make time to hear from each other about our victories and mistakes, and what alternately excites and terrifies us about leading UX teams.
In this presentation I’ll start with tips to help you decide whether you should – or should not – consider a UX management path, and share some general leadership observations. Then we’ll get into the good stuff, digging into what makes leading UX and UX designers such a unique and fascinating way to spend your days and nights.
You’ve probably already had (or will soon get) general management and leadership training, so this session will not include a personality type assessment, manager-employee role playing games, or trust exercises. We’ll focus on the things that make UX leadership different from other leadership roles, and prepare you to be successful as a leader in the field you learned to love as a practitioner.
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UX Principles of Jim Henson
by Russ Unger
Jim Henson started working as a puppeteer in 1954, a fair 40-50 years before many of us even considered User Experience as a career. He did, however, take it upon himself to apply many of the core principals that UX Designers are falling love with today (or are at least using as part of our everyday lives). Hang out for a quick dive into the life of Jim Henson, with a view into his work from the perspective of how it pertains to what it is we’re doing today, that promises to even leave Waldorf and Statler happy.
And yes, there will be muppets.
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Axis & Allies: The Impact of Design Thinking on World War II
by Ben Judy
The Axis and Allies had vastly different approaches to design during the second World War. The German war machine operated with equipment built around such values as precision, technical accuracy, and complex innovation. By contrast, Allied equipment was often simpler, more durable, and "scrappier."
The trade-offs are fascinating: Durability vs. accuracy. Reliability vs. uniqueness. Speed of delivery vs. quality control. Usability vs. power. There is much a modern-day designer (in any field) can learn from armies of the past and the industries and cultures behind them.
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Beyond Gamification: Designing Behavior Change Games
Playing games is the prototypical example for an intrinsically motivating activity and motivation in healthcare is a pivotal issue. Each year, billions of dollars are spent to move our behaviors in a healthier direction to avert crisis such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other costly and painful afflictions. Leveraging the motivational dynamics of gameplay to energize and sustain people through behavior change is a challenging yet profound solution.
In this talk, we'll double-tap into the techniques game designers use to motivate, engage and reward players through a game’s lifecycle combining a playful approach with structured behavior change conventions.
What You Will Learn:
You will learn how to craft a delicate balance of challenge & reward, competition & social support, goal setting & scaffolding, rule definition, interaction patterns, persuasive arguments, meaningful feedback, fun and positive outcomes. -
Create Happiness as an In-House Designer
In-house designers, or ”creatives”, regularly work for companies and organizations that are not in the design field. In-house design is a two-sided coin. In many cases these designers work alone without other creative staff for support. Regularly they are relied upon to develop and maintain brand identity, websites, and other web and print promotional material. This can be difficult when bosses “don’t get design”, or have a limited understanding of what it means to have a consistent message. However these jobs can have less stress and better benefits than agency or freelance positions.
This talk will explore my personal experience working as an in-house designer in multiple organizations and will provide practical methods for keeping work interesting, and resources available to allow in-house designers to continue being passionate about design.
What You Will Learn:
- Problems facing in-house designers
- Ways to keep your job interesting
- Techniques to make improvements
- Rules to improve your work
- Resources for design inspiration
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Surviving CSS by Thriving with SASS
by Ken Tabor
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a core technology of the Internet. All web sites rely on this presentation language for displaying its pages. CSS is incredibly tricky. It’s seemingly built well for no single audience confounding artists and frustrating programmers alike. Without planning a project’s CSS can turn into a proverbial mess of spaghetti code because it has no formal structure as traditional programming languages.
Lovely additions to CSS3 such as drop-shadows and gradient-backgrounds turn ugly given a myriad of browser-specific tags. There are ways to survive and thrive developing CSS. In this talk we introduce SASS, a freely available open-source tool that sits on top of CSS. SASS adds key features to CSS such as reuse, logical structure, inheritance, and functions.
SASS is detailed during this presentation showing how it can help solve significant shortcomings of CSS easily and completely. Best practices earned from real-world use cases are summarized for the audience in illustrative slides and copious demos.
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Achieving Failure: Alienating Stakeholders from Great User Experience Research
by Tomer Sharon
UX researchers love spending a lot of time working on research projects nobody needs. This talk features tried and tested techniques for alienating stakeholders of UX research in a way that ensures they refuse supporting it. The primary motto of the talk is that stakeholder alienation for UX research is attained by making any research activity yours, not theirs. Excluding stakeholders throughout the process of planning, execution, analysis, and reporting UX research dramatically increases the chances that they will ignore its results. The talk suggests 14 tips and tricks for fostering truly bad relationships with UX research stakeholders.
What You Will Learn:
- Improve client skills
- Learn communication techniques that have been proven to work with stakeholders
- Learn how to encourage stakeholders to act upon research results
- Learn techniques that can be used tomorrow morning to improve buy-in for UX and usability research
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Keynote Kung-fu: Master Class
by Travis Isaacs and Dustin Askins
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
What You Will Learn:
- 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
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Scaling Scrum with UX
Scrum is the most popular Agile framework in the world for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovations. Scrum is optimized for teams for teams of 5 to 9 people. Making Scrum work with larger teams or in large enterprise environments brings its own set of challenges.This talk presents 3 patterns used on enterprise teams and the lessons learned in practice at a global software company to scale Scrum effectively and integrate User Experience teams effectively with the product life cycle.
What You Will Learn
- Learn the key elements of the Scrum Framework and how it drives success in building software
- Discover Scrum’s limitations in large organizations and how they can be over overcome
- Explore 3 non-exclusive and inter-working organizational patterns that your teams can adopt to gain the benefits of scrum while scaling to larger development and product groups
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UX Army Field Guide
In your career, you'll need to employ some survival tactics. In this talk, we'll review some of the fundamental principles for employing design power. We will look at special tactics for UX insurgency, neutralization of common foes, and how-tos for procedures important to designers serving in the field.
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UX Army Field Guide
In your career, you'll need to employ some survival tactics. In this talk, we'll review some of the fundamental principles for employing design power. We will look at special tactics for UX insurgency, neutralization of common foes, and how-tos for procedures important to designers serving in the field.
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Augmented Reality: Utility Beats Hype
by Mike Woods
Augmented reality has made some bold promises to change our world. While movies and fiction have captured the public’s imagination, the [unaugmented] reality is that augmented reality experiences have varied widely. Using augmented reality as an example, we’ll discuss how to safely ride the roller coaster of hype that accompanies the launch of exciting new technologies like augmented reality and how to gracefully transition a technology from flash-in-the pan to commercially-viable, real-world tool. By understanding the hype around augmented reality, we can learn to evaluate emerging technologies and plan our projects for the best chance of succeeding in the long-term. As some early adopters have used it, augmented reality bites. But it doesn't have to. To make good business sense of interactive ideas, emerging technologies should pass the practical sniff test; fail it and you risk producing a mere gimmick, but passing it can yield genuinely useful technology.
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Everyday Conflicts: Strategic Paths to Successful Conversations
As designers we run into an extreme amount of tension. Let's face it, this won't change. With the potential for vital conversation at any moment of the design process, how can you prepare yourself for battle without going to war?
Workplace conflict, arguments, discussions - Whatever you want to call it, these heated debates can bring design to a halt, emotions to a peak, and projects to disaster. Join me in this interactive panel as we look a the challenges of political agendas and the perils we face to bring about great design.
What You Will Learn
- Impact of Conversational Problems - Quick overview of issues that arise when we handle conversations incorrectly.
- The Warning Signs - We will take a look at indicators of an important conversation (verbal, body cues, internal triggers, etc.)
- Analysis of Past Conversations & Interactions - We will look at some example design / interaction conversations examples.
- Removing YourSelf From The Situation - We will look at techniques to help divorce yourself from the conversation so you can present your most important goals effectively.
- Conversational design patterns - Lastly, we will take a look at apply design patterns to conversations to help identify problematic situations quicker.
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Intentional Environments: Designing a Culture of Co-Creation
Design doesn’t happen inside a vacuum. It happens inside teams, inside the context of relationships, inside physical spaces, inside organizations with very particular cultures. Ignore that intricate ecosystem, and you might as well give your project a death sentence.
Teresa Brazen will draw from her experience bringing this holistic outlook to the design process. Pulling from methods used in filmmaking, fine art, design research, facilitation, improv, and UX design, she crafts “intentional environments” for her teams and clients. These literal and figurative environments cultivate work that is actionable, co-created, co-owned, and much more likely to succeed in the world.
She’ll discuss the benefits of intentional environments, walk you through how to design them and share methods for keeping them activated throughout the design process. You’ll walk away understanding how to cultivate intentionality and inspire teams and clients along the way. But more importantly, you’ll have a powerful new framework that will enrich your entire design process.
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Myth of Paying Attention
Users are not like us — they view the world with a completing different filter. As designers, we’ve trained ourselves to notice every little detail about a design — everything grabs our attention. We assume that users do the same when coming to a site or using an application for the first time. We assume that all those details that took us, as the designers, hours to figure out just right will catch a user’s eye and invoke pleasant thoughts and emotions that go along with facilitating a positive user experience. But, that’s not how our brains work. In fact, the average user will miss almost everything within their field of vision when working with a design for the first time. This phenomenon occurs all the time during usability studies, much to our bewilderment.
Fortunately, recent research within neurological and cognitive science offers some clues to why this behavior occurs. This session will review several concepts that shows how little people actually pay attention to the things they interact with, and will provide some tips and tricks for getting past this mental limitation.
What Will You Learn
- Fundamental aspects of the human brain and how they impact how we interact with the world.
- Limitations of both human perception and our understanding of reality.
- Design techniques or concepts the play directly on our inherent mental strengths.
- Utilize how the brain functions to better plan out major redesign efforts.
- Understand instinctual human behaviors to better augment their user experiences
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Back to the Drawing Board, Again and Again and Again...
by Kevin Schumacher and Luke Walter
Adding UX practices inside a fast-moving and strict agile environment is one of the biggest challenges in the development community. Taking into consideration the research and planning, as well as the preliminary testing needed to develop sound foundations for design reasonings for every UI decision, a UX practitioner can seriously slow down the agile process in a well-oiled dev team. In addition Lean Principles and Methodologies like Kanban are being introduced at greater levels at both enterprise and startup making design decisions increasingly more complex.
What You Will Learn
- Jumping in a moving car! Inserting UX requirements during an iteration or version release.
- The Crystal Ball - Coming up with UX requirements that won't be edged-out by edge cases.
- Can't we all just get along? Getting along with developers without going native, while staying true to UX philosophy and adding requirements
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Core Focus: What Job Are You Doing?
Companies must continually ask themselves, 'Are we in the steam locomotive business, or in the transportation business?' Companies do not last forever. As a matter of fact, over the last 35 years, no technology company has maintained prosperity the entire time. This is shorter than the average time a person will be employed.
So with behemoths like Kodak dying off year by year, how can a company maintain long-lasting prosperity? We will explore "Jobs To Be Done" - a framework that asks the question of what job consumers "hire" products to solve.
The most famous example of the application of this framework is a fast food restaurant's attempt to improve sales of milk shakes. At first, they tried to improve the product through customer segmentation. What they learned though is that customers were "hiring" milkshakes as a breakfast alternative that entertains during the morning commute. By better understanding, and addressing this job, they were able to gain share against their real competitors: boredom and bagels.
This presentation will be an interactive discussion, including workshop elements and take aways on how to better evaluate the job to be done.
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Dana Chisnell
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Designing for Real-Time Marketing
The Internet, more specifically social media, has increased the speed with which we communicate. We’re Tweeting, Facebooking, texting, Pinning,Instagramming, and checking in constantly. This steady stream of information combined with the 24/7 news cycle has lead to the need for marketers to increase the speed of their engagement as well in an emerging field called “Real-time marketing.” Where there is marketing, there are designers. How do you design effectively for real-time marketing?
What You Will Learn
- What real-time marketing is
- How real-time marketing being employed right now
- Designing for real-time work flow
- Possible outcomes for real-time design
- Measuring success of real-time design
- Best practices for real-time design
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Defining the New Partnership
by Timothy Parcell and Ezra Englebardt
For years, Art and Copy ruled the roost in the worlds of advertising and design. But as brand interactions shift from passive to active experiences, the way we connect to customers requires a new partnership. Sapientnitro believes that Brand Strategists and Experience Designers play an integral role in delivering the work that breaks through the noise.
This new partnership is critical during the initial stages of client engagement (discovery, defining) through completion (designing, developing, deploying). Whether we’re redesigning lenscrafters.com or building interactive menu boards for Dunkin’ Donuts, a strong partnership between strategy and experience design is at the foundation of all our work.
What You Will Learn:
- How these two disciplines can partner together to deliver a better end result
- How to get involved in the process/concepting sooner
- How to stay involved longer and actually build things
- How to position yourself, and this new partnership, within your company/agency
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Designing for Sensors & the Future of Experiences
Are you ready for the next ten years? Wireframes and prototypes may not be enough. Jeremy will take you on a tour of what Design problems of the future look like, from designing for sensors to walls of screens.
With the advent of sensor-based technology, we are designing more for gestures and voice commands. How do we interact in space without tactile feedback? How do we design for universal gestures?What does a future full of screens and software look like? When everything is an interface, and hardware disappears - what are the tools and methods to tackle this design problems.
Listen to Jeremy predict what trends you should be keeping your eyes on to stay on the top of your game - and why you've picked the right career.
What You Will Learn
- You'll get a view of what's out there on the edge of experiences
- Examples of future sensor based systems
- Examples of future touch and mobile interfaces
- Design methods for sensor and touch interfaces
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Overcoming Innovation Skepticism; Getting Design Thinking in Your Company
by Sharon Torres
What do you do when you and your team watch your competition flying past you with products that are keeping up with our evolving times, and you are facing an organization that deems innovative solutions a low priority? How do you change C-level executives from UX skeptics to UX champions? How can you create excitement for your department so you can build a prototype and raise a little money? What the heck is skunkworks and is it smelly?
What You Will Learn
- Introduce a model for innovative solutions to your company
- Use qualitative measures to make a case for building the product
- How to sell through a team to focus on future products
- Which process allows for execution of innovation products?
- See how focusing on innovation effects the bottom line
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Pencils Down: Stop Designing, Start Developing
Designers can’t help themselves. We are, by nature, perfectionists. We create, then throw away. We create again, tweak continuously, and fine-tune a design indefinitely. Why can we not stop ourselves? Time passes us by, missing deadlines. In turn, developers anxiously wait for us to finish, so that they can work off of something that has been solidified. During this session, you will learn strategies that will push your design to that "good enough" stage, so you will know “when to say when” and move from designing interfaces to developing them.
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2012 Friday Keynote
Saturday 2nd June 2012
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Is the Cloud Almighty?
by Adam Hansen
Cloud computing is here to stay. Research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014 the IT industry will spend over $10 billion in cloud-related services, a jump from $3.7 billion in 2011, but why should you care? If you’re a small business or start-up, being able to use cloud technologies will save you much-needed dollars during the first steps of your trek down the path of entrepreneurship. If you took the right steps, virtualization technologies will also help you continue running your business’s infrastructure seamlessly if you see a sizeable increase in production over a short period of time.
Even if spending is not a top issue for your business cloud computing can still be a boon to your operation, from data storage to content management. Attendees can expect to learn more about what businesses are ripe to take advantage of cloud computing technologies through typical use-case scenarios so you can make an informed decision of whether or not your dollars will be a part of the $10 billion by 2014.
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Beyond Captions: Universal Access, Universal Appeal
Most designers will tell you that accessible design is simply good design because it provides universal access to people with disabilities. Universal access is really just the first of many benefits that accessible design provides.
In this talk, we are going to delve into methods, tools, and techniques available to deaf and hard of hearing people. We will also discuss why CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation or real-time captioning) provides additional benefit beyond universal access to more people, including foreign speakers, remedial readers, people with perfect hearing in noisy/quiet environments, event organizers, multimedia owners.
What You Will Learn:
- Review different communication access services available today
- Watch videos of people using real-time captioning services in various settings
- Learn how captioning can boost the SEO of a website
- Review how CART and transcription services work and why they need to be of good quality
- Make a business case for captions and transcripts that goes beyond universal access
The presentation will be signed by a deaf speaker and voiced by a sign language interpreter for non-signers as well as captioned in real time to show the example of universal accessibility.
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Big Design Conference 2012
United States United States, Addison
31st May to 2nd June 2012
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