Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Design with audio
Friday 9th March 2012
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Designing for Context
by Ben Fullerton, Leah Buley, Nate Bolt, Ryan Freitas and Andrew Crow
As designers take on new problems of convergence and ubiquity, we find ourselves facing new challenges. The products we create are accessed through multiple devices, different channels and a wide audience. How do we accommodate the context of use?
Whether you design mobile apps, services or web experiences, you know that people have different needs and desires. Those issues are complicated further by a landscape of technology.
This discussion will highlight these new challenges and offer solutions based on years of design experience. Topics include:
• What should you be aware of when designing a product or service for use in various locations and environments?
• How does motion and distraction affect interaction and content design decisions?
• Do you provide for casual use vs. urgent need?
• How does the form factor or input method of your device steer your design efforts?
• What happens in an ecosystem of products?
• How does social and cultural context play into the strategy of your design? -
Design from the Gut: Dangerous or Differentiator?
by Laurel Hechanova, Naz Hamid, Phil Coffman, William Couch and Jane Leibrock
The internet is a never-ending data source. Through it we are able to monitor visitor activity, study traffic patterns, and use these analytics to help guide users in the directions we want. Usability testing gives us behavioral information which can either affirm design decisions or inform necessary changes. Research and analytics go a long way in selling a creative direction to clients who are focused on engaging with their customers and in how marketing dollars will impact their bottom line. But what about a designer's instinct—that moment when a designer just knows what they're building is right? When and how do their years of professional experience, inspirational collections, and life observations become deciding factors? Learn from a panel of design veterans, with experience that ranges from client services to product development, about past experiences and their personal stance on the subject.
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Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles
With responsive design designers need to rethink the process they go through to work with clients and developers to create successful visual designs. Rather than creating traditional comps, style tiles are a deliverable that help you to communicate with your client, establish a visual language and work iteratively with developers. In this presentation, Samantha will explain how to reinvent your process to leverage Style Tiles as a deliverable.
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Unstuck: Get (and Keep) Your Creativity Flowing
by Noah Scalin
Has your creative engine stalled out? Don’t worry; you’re in good company. Everyone needs a creative tune-up from time-to-time and this is where you’ll get the tools for the job. Artist/designer Noah Scalin, author of 365: A Daily Creativity Journal and Unstuck: 52 Ways To Get (and Keep) Your Creativity Flowing at Home, at Work, and in Your Studio, will share the story of his own yearlong Skull-A-Day project and the benefits he gained from this daily practice – including becoming a published author & sought after corporate speaker, and yes even making an appearance on The Martha Stewart show. He’ll also introduce you to several easy ways to immediately start generating more creative energy that will benefit your life and work.
Saturday 10th March 2012
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Designing Experiences for Women
by Brad Nunnally and Jessica Ivins
Women have become the digital mainstream. In the US market, women make up just under half of the online population, but they spend 58 percent of e-commerce dollars. Women are online gamers, shoppers, bloggers, and social media consumers. And yet, we still don’t know how to design for them.
The immediate impulse when designing for women is to “shrink it and pink it,” meaning products are splashed with the color pink, and content and messaging are dumbed down. But women want what’s relevant to them. They want products and online experiences that are intuitive, not insulting to their intelligence. They want function, not frills.
This session reviews the historical and contemporary landscape of designing for women. We’ll review misguided, yet well-intentioned designs based on assumptions and stereotypes that have flopped. Likewise, we’ll review success stories of well-designed products and experiences that truly meet women’s needs. We’ll also look at when gender should factor into your design and when it shouldn’t. Ultimately, when designing for women (or men, or both), you’ll want to get it right.
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HTML5 APIs Will Change the Web: And Your Designs
by Jen Simmons
HTML5. It's more than paving the cowpaths. It's more than markup. There's a lot of stuff in the spec about databases and communication protocols and blahdiblah backend juju. Some of that stuff is pretty radical. And it will change how you design websites. Why? Because for the last twenty years, web designers have been creating inside of a certain set of constraints. We've been limited in what's possible by the technology that runs the web. We became so used to those limits, we stopped thinking about them. They became invisible. They Just Are. Of course the web works this certain way. Of course a user clicks and waits, the page loads, like this… but guess what? That's not what the web will look like in the future. The constrains have changed. Come hear a non-nerd explanation of the new possibilities created by HTML5’s APIs. Don't just wait around to see how other people implement these technologies. Learn about HTML APIs yourself, so you can design for and create the web of the future.
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The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity
by David Hogue
Interfaces and devices are providing more and more power and functionality to people, and in many cases this additional power is accompanied by increasing complexity. Although people have more experience and are more sophisticated, it still takes time to learn new interfaces, information, and interactions. Although we are able to learn and use these often difficult interfaces, we increasingly seek and appreciate simplicity.
The Complexity Curve describes how a project moves from boundless opportunity and wonderful ideas to requirements checklists and constraints then finally (but only rarely) to simplicity and elegance. Where many projects call themselves complete when the necessary features have been included, few push forward and strive to deliver the pleasing and delightful experiences that arise from simplicity, focus, and purpose.
In this session, David M. Hogue, Ph.D. - VP of Experience Design, applied psychologist, and adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University - will introduce the Complexity Curve, discuss why our innovative ideas seem to fade over the course of a project, explain why "feature complete" is not the same as "optimal experience", and offer some methods for driving projects toward simplicity and elegance.
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Design for Social Innovation and Public Good
by Jess Zimbabwe, Suzi Sosa, Barbara Brown Wilson and John Peterson
A new movement is gaining momentum in the design world— a movement to expand the applications of high design beyond its elitist client base to solve complex social problems. This panel will engage an array of leaders in the public interest design movement who use design thinking in various ways to address global challenges and engender social innovation at different scales. John Peterson will bring his experience developing the largest interactive matchmaking database for pro bono design services between top architecture firms and deserving nonprofits to the discussion; Jess Zimbabwe’s contribution will be informed by work empowering civic leaders to use design thinking to solve public problems; John Bielenberg will bring his perspective on the influence of graphic design campaigns to bring awareness to complex social problems; while Barbara Brown Wilson will draw from her work in higher education to discuss the role of active learning and interactive online project evaluation to empower students to become social innovators. Suzi Soza, from the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service’s Dell Social Innovation Competition, will moderate the panel.
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Designing for Content Management Systems
The job of a web designer these days includes designing for content that changes, is highly dynamic, and often does not yet exist. Gone are the halcyon days of static, 5 page websites that are just as rigid as a printed brochure (let's be honest, we don't miss that). This reality has created a great deal of debate within our industry and a fair amount of difficulty in our design processes.
In this session we'll cover some basic design concepts and principles that can be applied when designing for CMS-driven websites. We'll also outline some tips and tricks for your design process, and explore some of the biggest hurdles and potential pitfalls in designing for yet created and ever-changing content.
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Hunt or Be Hunted: Get the Design Job You Want
by Amy Jackson, Gina Bianchini, Jason Putorti and Whitney Hess
”Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch…”,lyrics from Fiddler on the Roof about finding a perfect partner. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have someone to guide you towards what is a match for you, advise you in your career life, help you weed through the losers to find the fabulous ‘one’ that will make you whistle on your way to work AND whistle on the way home?
In Hunt or Be Hunted - How to get the Design Job you Really Want, you will be privy to the insights and success stories of three of the industry’s most respected representatives in their knowledge domains. You will also hear from a leading expert in the placement of designers. Each will relate real-world experience, guiding audience members through the maze of questions a designer has in this frenetic job market.Who are you as a designer? What do you want to do, and how do you know it's the right thing.
What's your story? How to present yourself, your portfolio, and where you want to be.
Where should you be full time or freelance? What that means to your life, your career and how you are viewed.
When is it right? To look, to change, to know if this is the one.
How do you get there? Choosing the right company, assessing/selling to what they need, closing the deal.
Don’t be left in the dark. Don’t make blind decisions. Be informed, be guided, then be sure. Listen to these respected resources to help yourself to, “…find me the perfect match.”
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Physical Architecture Meets Interaction Design
by Leonard Souza and Sean Coulter
Physical architecture is about how environments interact with people. Interaction design is about the mind moving through abstract spaces. Somehow the two must intersect.
This session is aimed at taking two design disciplines (physical architecture and interaction design) and finding where they relate, and how they can learn from one another. Interaction design has taken a lot from the field of architecture's creative and scientific process. For example, wireframes are very similar to blueprints (construction documents). These similarities are ever present between the two. Truly, both fields blend art and science, as well as both sides of the mind. Expect to come away with a high-level understanding of how phenomenology influences our interactions, tangible and intangible, and how cognitive science can be used to manipulate perception. This talk will be a lot of fun, so come down with an open mind and a lot of questions!
Sunday 11th March 2012
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Design and the Mobile Startup
by Alex Rainert, Alexa Andrzejewski, Mike Krieger and Ron Goldin
In the evolution of a product, ideas are the seed but the execution is key, and what happens between those two stages can make or break a product's success. Designers are trained to think on their feet, be flexible, and not be afraid to start over or make mistakes. Similarly the key tenets of today's startup culture are to be lean, move quickly, and iterate often. In this environment, where risk and competition make innovation critical, companies must leverage design thinking to help define products, often by adapting the design process. In this multidisciplinary panel of technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs, key players in some of today's most successful mobile products will look at the "textbook" creative process in delivering user-centered results and delightful outcomes. Then, we'll talk about examples of what actually happens in the less black-and-white world of startup culture, and discuss what can be done to leverage design in the making of great products.
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Design. Build. Transform.
Emily Pilloton is a designer and builder, disguised as a high school teacher. In this session, she will tell the story of Studio H, a high school design/build curriculum based in Bertie County, North Carolina, the poorest, most sparsely populated and racially divided county in the state. In one year, her students design and construct a full-scale piece of architecture for their hometown (last year, a 2000-square foot farmers market, along with 3 public chicken coops). This session will make the case for bringing back new, design-infused models of vocational learning as a means to engage students in hand-to-mind creativity, and real-world progress in their own backyards.
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Liberating Data with Interactive Charts
by Ross Perez
Data has been freely available on the web since its inception, but it has always been difficult to access and even harder to digest. Recently, a small but growing group of intrepid data geeks have been scrounging the web for data and turning it into something useful and comprehensible: an interactive visualization! This presentation will show you some of the most intriguing visualizations that have been published in the past year and even how to create your own. Perhaps most importantly, you will leave understanding why these visualizations and their creators are so important to the future of the web.
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Design for Your Audience Not for Yourself
by Tom Censani
With Dribbble, Forrst and other curated sites, the designer's attention has shifted focus to impressing his fellow peers and mimicking influences rather than who we should be focusing on: our audience. We're beginning to lose sight on delivering content in a meaningful way to the people who regularly traffic our sites.Design is beginning to look homogenous and more like a pattern of trends within the design community. Original design should be presented in a way that resonates with the audience and helps the designer grow without losing his own identity in the community.
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How Great Design Can Ruin Experience
by Jon Bell
Why do some of the most high quality designs have trouble finding an audience while poor design is celebrated? How can aspiring designers make things that they're proud of but also make a real impact in the marketplace?
Jon Bell, interaction designer on the Windows Phone design team, provides a fast-paced, irreverent survey of the field, comparing a range of examples from Lady Gaga to Arrested Development, fancy furniture to La-Z-Boy Chairs, Android to Transformers, and Helvetica the Documentary to Windows Phone.
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A Brief History of the Complete Redesign of Google
by Chris Wiggins, Evelyn Kim, Jon Wiley, Michael Leggett and Nicholas Jitkoff
In the summer of 2011, Google completely redesigned nearly all of its applications to be more focused, elastic, and effortless. For the first time in Google’s history, hundreds of millions of users could use a suite of products – from Search and Maps to Gmail, Docs, and Calendar – with a unified, modern look and feel. Join the designers who led the effort for war stories and lessons learned in bringing beauty to Google’s flagship products.
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Demystifying Design: Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact
by Jeff Gothelf
Even in today's experience-obsessed world, Design is often perceived as a tactic to simply “make things pretty.” To combat that oversimplification, designers often shroud their work in a mysterious cloud of specialized tools and jargon. This mystery gives designers (of every sort - visual, UX, interaction, et al) a false perception of value, uniqueness and control over their process and work. In actuality, this self-imposed mystery drives divisions between designers and their teams. To lay foundations for greater collaboration and inclusion, designers need to stop looking at their work in terms of “trade secrets” and start opening up about their process. Through this transparency, the cloud lifts and the true value of Design becomes clear while designers are revealed to be the indispensable product people they truly are.
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Creating Engagement: Brains, Games & Design
This segment gives you a psychological dashboard for creating compelling and engaging interaction experiences. Learn to manage the trigger points for critical psychological processes that determine the mental states of immersion, engagement, and flow so you can motivate your audience to keep playing, start buying, or even change the world. Your design starts in the senses and is translated by the brain into emotion, experience and behavior. With neurocognition and positive psychology, we unlock the translation process for engagement, flow, story, and pleasure. Get a checklist to create more successful and satisfying interactive media, whether it’s on a single platform, across media, or a transmedia, to improve the outcomes of your projects, from design and marketing to advocacy. Avoid unintended consequences of design. Learn to engage the brain to create engaging user experience, motivation and influence behavior.
Monday 12th March 2012
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Don’t Build a Power Glove: Talk to Your Users
by RJ Owen
“Throw away your joysticks, kids,” began the 1989 article of “Design News” praising that year’s must-have Christmas accessory: the Power Glove. At the time it seemed as if traditional video game controllers would soon be a thing of the past.But the Power Glove was anything but a success. While it was a design and technology coup, coolness is unfortunately a poor metric for product success. What the Power Glove lacked was customer insight. During the technology and design crunch nobody stopped to ask, “How is this device for playing games? Do people want to use it?” Thus, the teams rushed blindly into building the wrong thing.Customer insight is the most critical piece of the application and software creation process. You can build something sweet, but if nobody uses it you’re left with little more than a colossal waste of time, effort and money. On the flip side, customer insight applied to the process can result in more customers, increased market share and a better ROI.
Tuesday 13th March 2012
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Community-Centered Design: It's Not About the User
by Richard White and Steve Huffman
It seems like everyone is trying to build an online community these days. Unfortunately, designing a community space is much trickier to nail than your typical web app. The smallest changes can have butterfly-like effects that greatly impact, sometimes irreversibly, community behavior as the community grows. Designing for a community is like running a small island nation with every design decision a matter of public policy. You’ll often find that the needs of your community are at odds with those of individual users.
In this talk, Richard White, co-founder of UserVoice.com, and Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit.com and Hipmunk.com, will cover some of the key concepts behind community-driven design and how you can incorporate them into your design thinking. We’ll also cover some of common pitfalls that drive participants away from online communities or create insular bedroom communities. Most importantly we’ll share our experiences with building online communities and walk you through real data we have collected that illustrate how small design changes can have a big impact.
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Mobilizing Web Sites: Strategies for Implementation
“Mobile first” is the mantra on the lips of most mobile evangelists. The trouble is, the advice of many experts to start fresh with a new mobile design, optimize for performance, and try to accommodate all mobile devices both common and uncommon — this ends up being quite a daunting list. And it can frighten many web designers away from trying to embrace mobile design at all.
But as with anything that is completely new, it is a lot easier to ease into it rather than jump directly into the deep end. Plus, if you’re like most web designers, you have existing web sites that could benefit from some mobile love, yet aren’t likely to be getting a completely new mobile-oriented redesign (either due to time or cost).
Mobilizing web sites encourages web designers to optimize existing web sites for mobile presentation, and to do so incrementally starting with screen layout, navigation, typography, images, forms, and content. Doing this, while aiming for the most common mobile platforms first, gets you to most mobile devices in the least amount of time. Then, taking a product-managed approach, you can continue to progressively enhance your site to improve performance and broaden device support.
Don’t set your expectations too high and think that getting into mobile web design requires perfection. Just get started! Then as you learn more and gain a better appreciation of mobile’s context and constraints, you can raise your expectations and fine-tune your focus.
Mobilizing web sites: start optimizing your corner of the web for mobile presentation today.
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100 Things Designers Need to Know About People
You design to elicit responses from people. You want them to buy, read, register, or take an action. In order to design for people you need to understand how people read, how people see, how people make decisions, what motivates people, and the psychology of social behavior. Designing without understanding about people is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This session presents the top concepts from psychology that impact design. Each concept is backed up by research and examples of how to apply to real-life design situations.
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The Battlefield Art of Design Triage
Many of us are racing to be first to market, or release something in time for a specific event. Running and gunning on the product design battlefield is a tremendous challenge because it takes time to design things that provide ~real value for people and fit into a brand’s ecosystem in a meaningful way. How can you create things that provide utility, joy, and value while you’re chasing a moving target on the battlefield of design? This talk will show you. Discover the essential art of design triage and explore techniques to provide solid user experience design (even when there’s no time), put mortally flawed projects out of their misery, and help deserving projects thrive. Design triage will help you shape things that serve people’s real needs and goals and give you tools to parachute into a fast moving situations so you can provide “nick of time” design that makes what your building truly helpful and delightful.
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