UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Speaker: Giles Colborne In this talk we’ll look what algorithms are good for, and where they fall down. It’ll discuss what it means to design a service using algorithms and the skills you’ll need to develop and adapt if you’re to thrive in the next era of experience design.

The Structure of Discourse in Human-Computer InteractionSpeaker: Abi JonesAbi Jones compares human-to-human and human-computer conversation and interaction, introducing you to the conversational machines in your life and those to come. Learn what makes for great human-computer speech interaction from the first turn to the last, how computers interpret speech, and why it’s more enjoyable and addictive to talk to a 1960s chatbot than most intelligent assistants available today.

Speaker: Adam Connor By understanding what principles are and where they come from we can move beyond the lists of best practices and heuristics we’re all familiar with and create unique, consistent experiences. Inconsistency is one of the most common points of breakdown and frustration in the interactions and experiences we have. Whether we’re interacting with other people, applications, our bank, our doctor, our government, anyone, we form expectations and understandings of what someone or something will do based on our previous experiences and their past behaviors. When something happens that doesn’t fit with those expectations–that seems out of character–we’re caught off guard. What do we do next? What should we expect now? Principles act as rules that guide how we think and act. Formed by our motivations, values and beliefs, we use them as “lenses” through which we examine information in order to make decisions on what to do. And because of their persistent influence on our behavior, they influence other’s views and expectations of us. Using these same kinds of constructs throughout the design process we can design interactions and consistent behaviors that set and live up to expectations for our audiences.

Speaker: Per Axbom Adopting techniques from behavioral sciences we are, as UX practitioners, becoming ever better at nudging users to perform the tasks we want them to perform. But when we remove all barriers and deliver the fairy-tale experience of requiring minimal brain capacity to move forward, we are in fact abandoning our promise of allowing users to make the best choice. In this talk, where fairy-tale and reality intertwine, I will help you catch yourself and remember why you became passionate about UX in the first place.

Speaker: Melissa Perri Over the past few years there’s been a push in the product development world to “make products that people love”. A great User Experience is now essential to creating a successful product. While many companies focus on having the best design and the greatest experience, they are still missing the most important step in product development - learning about their customers.With Agile and Lean gaining popularity in more companies, we talk about techniques to get things out to users faster. At the core of this has been the Minimum Viable Product. Unfortunately, many people still do not understand the MVP. Some see it as a way to release a product faster. Others are scared of it, viewing it as a way to put broken code on your site and ruin products.The sole purpose of Minimum Viable Product is to learn about your customers. This step that has been so overlooked and yet it is the most essential part to creating a product your customers will love. The more information you can uncover through experimentation, the more certainty there is about building the right thing. In this talk, Melissa will go over how to design the most effective product experimentations and Minimum Viable Products. She’ll explain how to get the rest of the organization on board with this method of testing, and how to incorporate it into overall Product Strategy.

Speaker: Stephanie Rieger In this presentation we explore some of the fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the internet at the hands of consumers in emerging economies. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities, and challenges, we will face when growing a truly global web.

Speaker: Amber Case In this presentation, Geoloqi co-founder Amber Case will take you on a journey through the history of calm technology, wearable computing, and how developers and designers can make apps “ambient” and inspire delight instead of constant interaction. This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing starting from the 1970’s-2010’s and how mobile interfaces should take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way.

Speaker: Denise Jacobs Despite the prevalent mythology of the lone creative genius, many of the most innovative contributions spring from the creative chemistry of a group and the blending of everyone’s ideas and concepts. How can we best leverage this collective wisdom to generate creative synergy and co-create? Let’s look at the process of recognizing and removing our personal creative blocks, connecting and communicating with others, combining ideas using play, and constructing a collaborative environment to discover effective methods for tapping into a group’s creative brilliance. Through these steps, you’ll learn to capitalize on the super- linearity of creativity to embrace and leverage diversity to create better together.

Josh Clark What if this thing was magic? The web is touching everyday objects now, and designing for the internet of things means blessing everyday objects, places, even people with extraordinary abilities—requiring designers, too, to break with the ordinary. Designing for this new medium is less a challenge of technology than imagination. Sharing a rich trove of examples, designer and author Josh Clark explores the new experiences that are possible when ANYTHING can be an interface. The digital manipulation of physical objects (and vice versa) effectively turns all of us into wizards. Sling content between devices, bring objects to life from a distance, weave “spells” by combining speech and gesture. But magic doesn’t have to be otherworldly; the UX of connected devices should build on the natural physical interactions we have everyday with the world around us. This new UX must bend technology to the way we live our lives, not the reverse. Explore the values and design principles that amplify our humanity, not just our superpowers.

Stephen Wendel Do your users fail to engage with your app, or don't follow through on their goals? Steve Wendel, the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and author of Designing for Behavior Change, will present the three main strategies you can use to support behavior change: building habits, informing choices, or cleverly restructuring problems to help people take action. You’ll learn how to make your products make more effective — for you business, and your users.

Mike Atherton This is not your usual UX talk. It’s a little about information architecture, a bit about content strategy, but mostly it’s about how we can use information floating around the web to build content-rich products, and how we should try harder to weave our work into the fabric of the network. Linked Open Data lets us expose, share, and connect knowledge. A single, extensible network of information stretching across an increasingly semantic web, making our products more findable, and our content more reusable. It’s happening now. Used by the BBC to build their Music pages, the New York Times to build topic pages, and by Google and Facebook to build their knowledge graphs. Where once we linked up pages, now we need to link up the underlying information and tell connected stories with the whole web.

Marissa Phillips About a year ago, most people didn’t know that Facebook had a separate app for messaging, and Messenger didn’t offer much that you couldn’t already get from the Facebook app. Since then, Messenger was completely redesigned, and it’s now used by millions of people. Learn how the team approached the task of redefining Messenger and struggled with separating it from Facebook. • See how the voice of a sub-brand emerged. • Get tips for writing content that’s really mobile-first. • Hear some approaches for delivering bad news to your audience.

Abby Covert What does a restaurant menu, a business to business sales process and an eCommerce website have in common? All of these things involve structuring information for an audience to understand. And while the audience and context may change, the practice of seeing our way through the associated complexities and iterations does not. Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable. No matter what your job or mission in life: if you are working with other people you are dealing with information architecture. Whether it is determining the labels for your products and services or creating navigational systems to help users move through a complex ecosystem of marketing channels, everybody architects information. In this short talk, Abby Covert will teach us some basic lessons on how to think about the structures and language choices that we make everyday.

Brad Frost Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so it's essential to break UIs into their atomic elements in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs. This session will introduce atomic design, a methodology for creating robust interface design systems. We’ll cover how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization and clients up for success.

Speaker: Margot BloomsteinOnline experiences can be fast, efficient, easy, orderly—and sometimes, that’s all wrong! Users click confirm too soon, miss important details, or don’t find content that aids conversion. In short, efficient isn’t always effective. Not all experiences need to be fast to be functional. In fact, some of the most memorable and profitable web engagements employ “slow content strategy,” content speed bumps, and surprising content types that aid interaction. We’ll examine examples of content strategy in action that demonstrates how to identify and control the pace of user experience, adding value for both our users and the businesses that engage them.

Umesh Pandya "Investigate what it would be like for a young vision impaired person, to travel London’s transport network in the near future.” In this lightning talk, Umesh Pandya will share the story behind Wayfindr and how ustwo and the Royal London Society for Blind People designed and validated a system that helps vision impaired people move through the London Underground Network independently. Umesh will talk about the tools, techniques, methodologies they used over the course of this investigation – from concept through to a live pilot over the span of 6 months.

Speaker: Nicole Fenton Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to each other. In this session, Nicole will talk about writing—an often invisible partner and material in the design process. You’ll learn how to communicate behind the scenes to define what you’re making, prototype quickly, gather consensus, build clarity, and ship meaningful products.

Speaker: Stephen Hay There's a fine line between persuasion and deception. On the web, that line is frequently crossed. Sometimes purposefully, sometimes unwittingly. The best way to avoid falling prey to those attempting to deceive (or accidentally becoming the deceiver) is to be able to recognize the techniques yourself. Find out how people deceive through design, why these practices eventually fail, and how you can make your work persuasive without being deceptive.

Speaker: Josh Seiden Imagine you have a limited budget, a disruptive idea for a social-networking product, and a short timeline to get your vision built and launched. How do you know if your idea will work, without burning through all your time and money? In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into a recent project to see how we went from idea to successful launch in just under 4 months—on time and on budget—by using a “learning from live systems” approach. Product teams often use prototyping to explore new products, but in social-networking systems, prototyping will only get you so far. In other words: some kinds of innovations just need to be launched to test. Come hear the story and learn when this Lean Startup-inspired approach makes sense, and hear a detailed case study on how our small team of designers, developers and product managers did it—carefully launching and developing our client’s business in a way that minimized spend and risk, and maximized the chances that this new venture will succeed.

Speaker: Lisa WelchmanIf this is the information age, what special role do information and user experience architects and play? The rise of industrial aged forced changes in supply chain management for physical goods. What changes do we need to make in the information supply chain in order to make sure information gets to the right, person, in the right place, on the right, device, and at the right time. And, what ethical concerns and considerations does that bring to the table, and whose job is it to resolves those concerns?

Speaker: Jared Spool We are in an age where poor user experiences become the focus of nationwide attention. One doesn’t need to look beyond recent catastrophes, such as Apple’s iOS6 Maps, Healthcare.gov, and the demise of Blackberry’s smartphone to see the necessity of getting the experience right. Yet, what do we know about ensuring our next design isn’t going down the same road as those that have failed before us? We need to understand how design integrates with our organization’s strategy, to ensure we’re supporting and enhancing it, not taking away from it. In what may possibly be his most entertaining presentation ever, Jared will show you how to integrate user experience strategy with your business’s objectives. He’ll explore the world of business models, demonstrating the role a UX strategy plays in providing significant value to the organization’s bottom line. You’ll learn: - How an expanded notion of content is critical to understanding the value of user experience. - Where to tailor your design strategy to the five priorities every senior executive cares about. - Which of the emerging business model variations for content might be the right direction for your business.

Speaker: Jess McMullinMany governments are dealing with today’s challenges using tools from the last century. UX design (and designers) can help meet those challenges and make a difference in our communities, in our nations, and in the daily lives of regular people.The public sector needs better design, from making forms, processes, and official websites easier to use to helping decision-makers understand and collaborate better when creating policy.Design can help create better experiences for citizens, more effective service delivery for government, and create better outcomes and more efficient use of scarce resources.This talk will share the need and opportunity for UX designers to help create better citizen experiences, offer some principles and examples, and invite the audience to discuss how citizen experience fits in the European context.

Speaker: Steve Baty The questions we ask ourselves at the idea generation stage of design play a critical role in the nature of the ideas generated. Bold questions beget bold ideas; and incrementalism begins in the same way. In this talk we will look at how problem framing and reframing can impact the ideas teams generate, and how problem statements can be ‘tuned’ to better deliver feasible concepts within your organisation. We’ll look at some recent examples from our work at Meld Studios as well as some well-known case studies from around the world.

Speaker: Bill DeRouchey The most significant things are often hidden in plain sight. In the world of design and technology, it’s the button. Let’s take a 100 year tour of the history of the button to see how it’s changed how we think, understand and interact with the world. Products, movies, advertisements and more will reveal how we evolved from a mechanical to a digital world.

Speaker: Christina Wodtke The web world thinks of game design as the next silver bullet, and companies are slapping badges and progress bars over every annoying thing they wish users to do. But as users tire of everything looking like a game, “gamification” is starting to get discarded as just another fad.. Games have been core to human experience since ancient times, and the game industry now makes more than the movies industry. If we want to create amazing experiences for our users, there is plenty to learn beyond the tricks of Gamification. I’ve studied game design from the people who actually make games, such as Dan Cook (Triple Town), Mark Skaggs (Farmville), Amy Jo Kim (Rockband) and Erin Hoffman (Sims Edu) and it has transformed my design practice. Let me share what I have learned. Come and hear how mastery, mysteries and meaningful choices can make your site a pleasure for your users. Take Aways * When to use game mechanics, and when they’ll backfire * How to make your personas more powerful with play-style * Replace tutorials with more integrated and pleasurable teaching. * Understand key game mechanics, how they work and how to use them * Learn how to use the power of games appropriately to drive engagement and retention. * Practical approaches you can use back in the office monday morning.

Speaker: Jason Grigsby Windows 8. Chromebook Pixel. Ubuntu Phone. These devices shatter another consensual hallucination that we web developers have bought into: mobile = touch and desktop = keyboard and mouse. We have tablets with keyboards; laptops that become tablets; laptops with touch screens; phones with physical keyboards; and even phones that become desktop computers. Not to mention new forms of input like cameras, voice control and sensors. One of the core things that responsive design has taught us is that we have to be comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what the size of our canvas is going to be. Input has that same ambiguity. It is transient. It is unknowable. Reconciling that understanding from a design and implementation perspective is going to be as big a challenge if not bigger than the one we faced coming to grips with responsive design. We’ve learned how to respond to screen size. Our next challenge is learning how to adapt to different forms of input.

Speaker: Russ UngerI’ve worked for a lot of idiot managers in my career. And then, one day, after I had become a manager, it dawned on me: Now I’m the idiot! You see, most of my career has been an exercise in “trial by fire.” This process worked well when I was a designer and was trying to master the art of the task flow, site map, wireframe, prototype, persona, and so on. In leadership positions, the option to go back to the drawing board or to iterate hasn’t always been readily available—nor as painless to my pride and potentially my pocketbook.Many of these lessons haven’t been easy for me to learn. It’s been tough to simultaneously remove obstacles without becoming one, or learning how to say “no” (and the flavors of yes and no!) when I’ve also wanted people to be satisfied with me and the work I’m doing. However, these lessons have all helped me become better at managing to some degree, while instilling a strong sense of empathy for those people who either report to me, or bless their souls, manage me in one way or another.If you’re interested in learning from some of the hard lessons I’ve learned, or in just laughing at my folly, there will be plenty of material to provide you with either opportunity.

Startups; coworking; traction; lean everything. Traditional forms of work are breaking down and reforming into new models, and entrepreneurs carry the torch of change. At the same time, the UX field has matured and become more stable and specialized, often pushing UX into an execution function. The costs of starting a new product have never been lower. So why aren’t more designers embracing the world of entrepreneurship?Turns out designers have a way of looking at the world that is an excellent match with entrepreneurship. But we also have some ingrained behaviors that hold us back and keep us tethered to the status quo.Drawing from her experiences moving from designer to co-founder to teacher/startup advisor/entrepreneur, Kate will share observations and lessons learned for how designers can effectively embrace the entrepreneurship challenge and amplify the power of good in the world.

Speaker: Mike Monteiro Designers have a responsibility, not only to themselves and to their clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create, but creation without responsibility breeds destruction. Every day, designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change. In this bluntly honest talk, Mike will invite you to consider your responsibilities as a designer and embrace your role as gatekeeper. You’ll learn how to increase your influence and be moved to use your powers for good.

When something new comes along, it’s common for us to react with what we already know. Radio programming on TV, print design on web pages, and now web page design on mobile devices. But every medium ultimately needs unique thinking and design to reach its true potential.Through an in-depth look at several common web interactions, Luke will outline how to adapt existing desktop design solutions for mobile devices and how to use mobile to expand what’s possible across all devices. You’ll go from thinking about how to reformat your websites to fit mobile screens, to using mobile as way to rethink the future of the web.

Speaker: Oliver ReichensteinLearning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse — once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can‘t expect to sell what you can’t explain.This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.“See with one eye, feel with the other.”― Paul Klee

Speaker: Aarron WalterBig data is helping many industries discover new insights creating smarter companies, and now it’s empowering UX practitioners to see patterns in mountains of data. Customer feedback, trends in support issues, analytics, usability test notes, customer interview transcripts, tweets, blog comments and more can be connected and searched to find serious flaws in designs or inform the next design.Research has always been a core part of the UX workflow, but after a study ends, the wisdom gained often slips into a quiet corner of a computer to gather dust and never be seen again. By centralizing all research data and streaming new sources into the pool, designers can learn more about their audience and make smarter decisions than ever before. Informed design is successful design, and big data is making UX smarter than ever before.

What is it that delights users? And how can you measure the return on investment of creating interfaces that make users smile? I’ve interviewed experts and users and come up with some surprising findings that will help you plan and design better user experiences and focus your attention where its really needed.

Speaker: Karen McGrane You don’t get to decide which device people use to access your content: they do. By 2015, more people will access the internet via mobile devices than on traditional computers. In the US today, nearly one-third of people who browse the internet on their mobile phone say that’s the only way they go online—in many countries, those numbers are even higher. It’s time to stop avoiding the issue by saying “no one will ever want to do that on mobile.” Chances are, someone already wants to. In this session, Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever your customer wants to consume it — and what the risks when you don’t make content accessible to mobile users. Already convinced it’s important? She’ll also explain how to get started with your mobile content strategy, defining what you want to publish, what the relationship should be between your mobile and desktop site, and how your editorial workflow and content management tools need to evolve.

Speaker: Kelly GotoAddiction or devotion? The complexity of our relationships between connected experiences, devices and people is increasing. Design ethnographer Kelly Goto presents underlying emotional indicators that reveal surprising attachments to brands, products, services and devices. Gain insight into the future of UX and understand the importance of designing user experiences that map to people‛s real needs and desires — the unconscious side of the user experience.

Speaker: Dan SafferThe difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn on mute on your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments–which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored–can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. This talk provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products: as a series of microinteractions that are essential to bringing personality and delight to applications and devices. We’ll delve into the structure of microinteractions—Triggers, Rules, Feedback, and Loops—and talk about why you should: Bring The Data Forward, Don’t Start From Zero, Use What is Often Overlooked, and Play The Long Game.

Speaker: Claire Rowland“Siri, did I leave the oven on?”The idea of the connected home has been around for 40 years or more, but has never taken off as a mass market proposition. But this is changing. Mainstream retailers are starting to bringing out connected home hardware and services to help consumers understand and control their energy use and heating, secure their homes, know who’s in and out, be alerted to any emergencies and generally feel reassured that everything’s OK at home. It will soon be normal to turn lights and appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set your burglar alarm over the web.UX is key to turning this interesting niche technology into a mass market success. But the home is a challenging environment: it’s often a shared space inhabited by different people with different needs and goals, and it’s our refuge from the world: the last place any of us want to feel overwhelmed by technology.In this talk, I’ll cover:what connected home technologies can do, and why this space holds so many opportunitieswhy no-one has got connected home design right (yet), and how experience design is key to creating commercially successful services in this areaa few practical UX guidelines learned from connected home design that can be applied to any complex multi-device system

Speaker: Jon KolkoOur material is less then 25 years old. HTML was invented in 1990, and most of us have enjoyed building with it since. Many of us actually helped invent it, or parts of it: the HTML specification, advancements in client-side scripting, new device platforms, new possibilities. We have an intimacy with the material, in the same way that a potter knows her clay. This technology – this powerful force, this beautiful material – can be aimed and directed. But where shall we direct it, and to what end? In this talk, Jon Kolko introduces design-led Social Entrepreneurship as the profession for directing and humanizing technology. You’ll learn about what it means to be an entrepreneur, and you’ll hear some examples of failure and success. Ultimately, you’ll learn how, and why, to aim technology at problems worth solving.

Speaker: Bill BuxtonIn 1991 Mark Weiser published what is now a classic paper, The Computer for the 21st Century. In it, he laid the foundation for what has become known as Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp. Ironically, by having the word "Computer" in the singular, the title of his paper is at odds with the content, since the whole point is that we will not have just one or two computers; rather we will have hundreds, and deal with hundreds or thousands of others as we go about our day-to-day lives. Furthermore, despite such large numbers, our interactions with these devices will be largely transparent to us due to their seamless integration into our environment.This is a vision that I played a part in shaping, and one that I still believe in. But by the same token, we are now into the second decade of the 21st century, and such transparency and seamlessness is largely still wanting. The 5-10 minutes wasted at the start of almost every meeting while we struggle to hook our laptops up to the projector is just one example.In this talk, I want to speak to this problem and how we might adjust our thinking and priorities in order to address it, and thereby accelerate the realization of Weiser's vision.I will argue that a key part of this requires our focusing as much on machine-machine as we do on human-machine interaction. Stated a different way, I believe that social computing is at the core, but social computing amongst the society of appliances and services – perhaps even more than the society of people. (Obviously the two societies are interwoven.)In sociological terms, this brings us to ask questions such as, "What are the social mores within the society of such devices?" How to they gracefully approach each other and connect, or take their leave and disconnect? How to they behave alone vs together? The point to emphasize here is that besides aggregation and disaggregation, it might be even more about the transitions between one and the other.As with the society of people, appropriate behavior is largely driven by context: social, cultural, physical, intentional, etc. This helps tie in notions such as foreground/background interaction, sensor networks, ambient intelligence, etc.In general, this talk is as much (or ore) about asking questions as it is about answering them. It's real intent is to say that we need to go beyond our current focus on individual devices or services, and look at things from an ecological perspective. The accumulated complexity of a large number of easy to use elegant devices still surpasses the user's threshold of frustration. Our current path of focusing on individual gadgets, apps and services, just transfers where the complexity lies, and increases it, rather than reduces it overall.My hope is to frame and stimulate a conversation around a different path – one where more of the right technology reduces overall complexity while geometrically increasing the value to the community of users.

Speaker: Gerry McGovernWhy the tiny tasks in the Long Tail get in the way of the top tasks of the Long Neck—and what to do about it. All websites are made up of a series of customer tasks. Some—the top tasks—are much more important than others—the tiny tasks. Unfortunately, many organizations spend more of their time on the tiny tasks than on the top tasks. This talk will give you a way to prove that the top tasks are where the majority of the focus and attention should be.

Speaker: Jeff GothelfDesigners have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their vision for products and experiences. As technology has evolved to offer more complex and intricate interactions, the deliverables we've been creating have followed suit. Ultimately though, these deliverables have come to serve as bottlenecks to the creation process and as the beginning of the negotiation process with our team mates -- a starting point for conversation on what could get built and launched.Lean UX aims to open up the user experience design process with a collaborative approach that involves the entire team. It's a hypothesis-based design approach that tests design ideas early and often and, along the way, builds a shared understanding with our team mates that eliminates the dependencies on heavy documentation and challenging communications. Lean UX is a solution for the challenge of Agile and UX integration while it also works effectively in traditional waterfall and other hybrid environments.

Speaker: Rachel HinmanMobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.In this talk, Rachel will provide:Insight into how designers and UX professionals can navigate the unfamiliar and fast-changing mobile landscape with grace and solid thinking.In-depth information on advanced mobile design topics UX professionals will spend the next 10+ years pioneeringTools and frameworks necessary to begin tackling mobile UX problems in this rapidly changing design space

Speaker: Jesse James GarrettWhether you design websites or shopping malls, hospitals or mobile phones, you're designing for people, and people want to be engaged by the products and services in their lives. But human engagement comes in many different forms, and traditional design practices don't say much about creating engagement. As design evolves toward delivering integrated experiences across media, designers need ways to understand modes of engagement and mechanisms for creating it. In this presentation, Jesse James Garrett looks at ways the designers of all kinds of products and services can maximize the human engagement of their work.

Speaker: Kim Goodwin If you want a team to see the world through users' eyes, there's nothing quite as powerful as involving them in ethnographic field studies. However, teams can still struggle with translating their field experience into product features and design decisions. Journey maps help teams structure and share field data, identify opportunities, and determine what kinds of tools and information to offer and when.The talk is illustrated with field data and a map of the patient journey through serious illness, based on recent work with PatientsLikeMe.com.

Speaker: Derek FeatherstoneResponsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.

Speaker: Joshua PorterThe difference between a happy user and a confused one is small…many times our success using software hinges on the smallest of interactions. In this talk Joshua Porter will discuss microcopy, or the tiny bits of copy that helps users in times of need. Examples include reminding people to use the right email address, informing them that their credit card is not needed, or that they don't have to create an account to continue. In many ways an interface is made up of many of these bits of copy…here's how to write it well and make users confident they're on the right track.

Speaker: Steve Portigal Some of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

Speaker: Peter MorvillePeter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb, one of the most popular visuals in our discipline, encourages us to go beyond usability by creating products and services that are also useful, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.Now, for the first time, Peter explains why we must go further by creating "architectures of understanding" -- and why designing for insight and inspiration is in the best interests of our firms, our users, and ourselves.

Speaker: Don Norman Complexity is not only good, it is essential. Our lives are complex as are the activities we do. Our tools must match the activities. People think they want simplicity, but they are wrong, as evidenced by the fact that when offered the choice between a very simple product and one with more features, they opt for the feature-laden one. We don't want simplicity: we want understanding. Complex things can be made understandable: that is the role of good design. One solution is modularity, which is why we have so many different kitchen utensils. Which is why owing a portable computer, a desktop computer, a smart phone, and a pad computer -- all of them -- makes sense for some people. Each is used for a different reason, in a different setting for different purposes. Managing complexity is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.