Schedule: Design & User Experience sessions

Design is your site’s front door. If you have a clean and clear design, people sail in. If your gateway is cluttered, you risk confusing or alienating potential users. But sites have competing needs, especially with an ever growing onslaught of new content that must be included. This track focuses on best practices and clever solutions to design challenges on the web.

9:00am–9:50am Tuesday, 09/28/2010

CSS3: The Future of Web Styling

Location: Empire East

Håkon Wium Lie (Opera Software)

Average rating:

(4.26, 23 ratings)

Most browsers have implemented parts of CSS3, the newest addition to the Cascading Style Sheets standard. Now that the tools are firmly in the hands of the developers, how do they create elegant sites that work across browsers and across devices? The creator of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie, shows just how this can be achieved. Read more.

10:05am–10:55am Tuesday, 09/28/2010

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

Location: Empire East

Andy Budd (Clearleft Ltd)

Average rating:

(4.33, 33 ratings)

So you've designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren't using your site. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control. Read more.

11:10am–12:00pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010

HTML5 vs. Flash: Webocalypse Now?

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Eric Meyer (Complex Spiral Consulting)

Average rating:

(3.40, 20 ratings)

It's become somewhat fashionable of late to refer to HTML5 and the web stack as a "Flash killer". The Flash/Flex community, understandably, has not suffered this kind of talk quietly. The ongoing absence of Flash from Apple's wildly popular portable devices has only fueled the fire. Openness, stability, ubiquity, consistency, and security are all thrown around like the discs of Tron. Read more.

1:30pm–2:20pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010

Traditional News Values in a New Media World

Location: Empire East

Katie Couric (CBS News), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

Average rating:

(4.31, 13 ratings)

Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News and a veteran journalist in mainstream media, discusses the pros and cons of an increasingly digital information age and the need to maintain strong ethical and factual standards as a reporter in any medium. Read more.

2:35pm–2:55pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010

Loitering on the Motherboard

Location: Empire East

Kevin Slavin (Area/Code Entertainment)

Average rating:

(4.40, 10 ratings)

A meditation on New York City and how it is being reconfigured. Read more.

3:10pm–3:30pm Tuesday, 09/28/2010

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Albert Shum (Microsoft), Paula Guntaur (Microsoft)

Average rating:

(1.71, 14 ratings)

How should UI designers bring to life their ideas for mobile experiences? Should we think in terms of standalone apps on a platform or also for web flexibility? How do you integrate the user’s experience to flow seamlessly between Apps and the Web? This session will run through the design thinking and process, and show the tools to take your apps to the next level of web integration. Read more.

9:00am–9:50am Wednesday, 09/29/2010

Behind the Kimono: A Look Behind the Scene of Two Designers

Location: Empire East

Todd Zaki Warfel (Messagefirst), Russ Unger (18F)

Average rating:

(4.12, 17 ratings)

We call ourselves UX professionals, but don't show our work in public. It's time to nut up or shut up. This highly energetic session will provide an in-depth behind the scenes look at the process behind the design, including: research, IA/interaction design, wireframing/prototyping and visual design. The presentations will end with a time-lapse video of the entire process from start to finish. Read more.

10:05am–10:55am Wednesday, 09/29/2010

DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade (without calling in a pro)

Location: Empire East

Moderated by:

Whitney Hess (Vicarious Partners)

Panelists:

Average rating:

(4.21, 24 ratings)

Have you fallen in love with your solution and forgotten the original problem? Are you certain that your product actually makes people’s lives better? Not every company can hire someone like me to help you listen to your users, so you’re gonna have to learn how to do some of this stuff yourself. Read more.

11:10am–12:00pm Wednesday, 09/29/2010

Combining Qualitative Research, Quantitative Analytics, and Vision to Improve Design

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Laura Klein (Users Know)

Average rating:

(3.17, 24 ratings)

So, you want to make your product into something that people will love. How do you figure out what your users are doing and what to build next? Do you A/B test? Conduct user interviews? Run a survey? Brainstorm at a whiteboard? Come learn how to combine all these methods and more into a streamlined process for understanding what your users really want and delivering a product they will adore. Read more.

1:30pm–2:20pm Wednesday, 09/29/2010

Faster, Easier, Better: Use Content Strategy to Your Advantage

Location: Empire East

Margot Bloomstein (Appropriate, Inc.)

Average rating:

(4.00, 12 ratings)

Hear noise of timelines and budgets? That rumble's yet another interactive team working content strategy into their user experience process. So what's in it for you? If you rock IA, design, SEO, or social media, let's talk content strategy. We'll discuss techniques and processes to help you clarify clients' needs, blog with a purpose, and improve user experience--all while saving budget and time. Read more.

2:35pm–2:55pm Wednesday, 09/29/2010

All Aboard? Turning New Users into Active Users

Location: Empire East

Josh Elman (Twitter)

Average rating:

(4.00, 12 ratings)

Getting users into your site is nice, but it's just the beginning of turning those users into active users of your service. Hear about how we think about onboarding users at Twitter and learn some tools and techniques to help find the best ways to get users engaged with your service every day. Read more.

3:10pm–3:30pm Wednesday, 09/29/2010

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus)

Average rating:

(3.86, 7 ratings)

We continue to accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices work and work on us. We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another, instead. And this is a potentially grave mistake. Read more.

11:00am–11:20am Thursday, 09/30/2010

The Reading Experience and The Web

Location: Empire East

Marco Arment (Tumblr & Instapaper), Richard Ziade (Arc90, Inc.)

Average rating:

(3.20, 10 ratings)

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and Rich Ziade, creator of Readability will discuss the creative ways in which their services are leveraging content on the Web. From providing a better reading experience in the browser to queuing items for reading later on other devices, these tools are providing new, flexible ways to experience content delivered on the Web. Read more.

11:00am–11:20am Thursday, 09/30/2010

Improve Conversion Rates and Supercharge Growth with OpenID and oAuth

Location: New York West

Tags:

Will Aldrich (TripIt)

Average rating:

(3.71, 7 ratings)

Learn how to build a faster onboarding process that converts better, without cumbersome email verification. See how oAuth helps you build mobile apps and integrate with partners to create exponential growth for your business. Explore the future of open standards and data strategies that empower users by letting them take their information with them, whenever and wherever they need it. Read more.

11:35am–11:55am Thursday, 09/30/2010

Designing for Real-time Data Dashboards

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Neil Wehrle (betaworks)

Average rating:

(3.50, 8 ratings)

Understanding what's happening on your site in real-time requires more than just simple visit totals. Chartbeat is a tool designed to give front-line responders in organizations the actionable analytics they need to respond to what's happening on their site. Read more.

1:00pm–1:50pm Thursday, 09/30/2010

10 Sure-fire Communication Tools from a UX Strategist's Toolbox

Location: Empire East

Sarah B. Nelson (Hot Studio)

Average rating:

(4.56, 9 ratings)

For designers, effective communication with teammates, business owners, and other constituents is 50% of our job but almost 0% of our training. User Experience pioneer Sarah Nelson shares 10 sure-fire techniques from her UX toolbox to help you develop good storytelling, persuasive arguments, and successfully create and advocate for the best user experience in your organization. Read more.

2:05pm–2:55pm Thursday, 09/30/2010

How To Do Lean Usability Testing

Location: Empire East

Tags:

Andres Glusman (Meetup), Anna DeYoung (Meetup)

Average rating:

(4.38, 8 ratings)

Andres Glusman VP Strategy & Community at Meetup will share how Meetup built it's own in-house lab and how anyone can do it too. He'll share lessons learned and principles for doing effective usability testing in-house at a super low cost. Read more.

3:10pm–4:00pm Thursday, 09/30/2010

In Defense of Technology

Location: Empire East

Jamie Kosoy (Big Spaceship)

Average rating:

(3.00, 7 ratings)

Flash wasn't invented for you. Web standards weren't either. In fact, neither design nor technology matter because of designers and technologists. These two disciplines have converged for users - or better yet, for people. Join Jamie as he dives into the zen of our trade and how you can make informed decisions on providing the best experience possible for the people you're trying to reach. Read more.