Workshops are included with your registration. You will be invited via email to choose your workshops closer to the event. Keep an eye out for that very important email.
Workshops
UX Week workshops are designed to deliver tools and build skills you can use in your real life as soon as you get back to your desk.
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Designing Smart Things: User Experience Design for Networked Devices
Wednesday August 24 [ All Day ]
The wide availability of many different kinds of network-connected digital devices—from tablets to TVs to bathroom scales and cars—raises deep questions about how to design user experiences for and with those devices. In this workshop Mike Kuniavsky, author of Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design, will introduce you to concepts of user experience design for the post-PC/post-phone world.
How do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, Mike will describe underlying trends, show the latest developments and ask some broader questions. As a group, we will analyze the big hits and disasters to uncover what makes a successful ubiquitous computing user experience, and what doesn’t.
This workshop will introduce both fundamental concepts of ubiquitous computing user experience design and specific techniques for designing services and interfaces.
Topics covered will include:
- Design for multiple scales
- Design for services used by multiple devices
- Rethinking everyday objects and experiences
- Understanding use context
- Hardware/software mashups
- Sketching in hardware
Expect hands-on design explorations, group ideation and the opportunity to make the abstract future of user experience design a little more concrete.
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Content Strategy Will Save UX
Wednesday August 24 [ All Day ]
Dealing with web content is hard. It’s complicated, expensive, time-consuming, and often overwhelming. The bad news is that, even though it’s the reason people come to your website, it’s also the #1 killer of a good UX. The good news? The practice of content strategy can save it by tackling the tough issue of content right from the start of your design process.
How does it work? Who can do it? What if your clients and boss don’t want to pay for it? To answer these questions and more, Kristina Halvorson will introduce you to the process and tools of content strategy. She’ll also speak directly to its challenges (how to overcome) and opportunities (how to seize them!).
- Learn about the fundamentals of content strategy and how to explain them to your stakeholders
- Get an up-close look at core content strategy processes and associated key deliverables
- See examples of successfully executed content strategies on websites and cross-platform
- Work with other workshop participants to hone your new content strategy skills
- Discover Kristina’s secrets to selling content strategy to clients or within your organization
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Become a Data Whisperer: Turn Research into Design Opportunity
Wednesday August 24 [ All Day ]
Have you ever experienced that moment of paralysis when you come back from doing fieldwork and you have absolutely no idea how to make sense of the mass of data that you have just collected? If yes, this workshop with Brianna Sylver is for you.
In this session you will gain an action plan for what to do after fieldwork. Data, from a real multi-market project, will be provided to you. In the span of a day, you’ll be introduced to a variety of analytical and synthesis tools that enable you to:
- Understand the data being provided to you.
- Describe the insights in that data.
- Articulate the design drivers/criteria emerging from those insights.
- Ideate solutions to meet the needs uncovered in the research data collected.
Whether you’re responsible for leading research in your organization or work collaboratively with researchers on your team, you’ll be sure to leave this session learning how to yield more meaningful insight and tangible action from the valuable hours spent with your users in the field.
Come get your hands dirty! There won’t be any sitting around in this session!
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Gamestorming Your Workplace (A.k.a., How to Design Using Words AND Pictures)
Wednesday August 24 [ All Day ]
Since the vast majority of us have to either plan or attend ideation, design and review sessions, why not become a Jedi at designing and running them? The simple but revolutionary techniques of visual thinking and gamestorming assure that you make the best use of everyone’s time and dramatically shorten the length of time in which you do it. The value of visual thinking and participatory design with a group is enormous and the benefits include:
- Using a simple, shared visual language to increase understanding and information retention
- Applying improvisational discovery to keep participants engaged
- Mapping the big picture, solving problems and innovating as a team
- Creating visual meeting artifacts to drive decisions forward
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or an artist of any caliber to learn how to design better. In this day-long workshop, you’ll learn the fundamentals of visual language, how to illuminate complexities by mapping the big picture and how to use improvisation and games to innovate and solve real problems. At the end of the workshop you’ll feel more confident about using visualization and you’ll recognize the power of doing so.
So let the games begin!
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This Is Service Design
Co-taught by Jamin Hegeman & Jared Cole
Wednesday August 24 [ All Day ]
The more designers examine the human experience when designing products, the more acutely attuned we become to broken experiences beyond products. If you’ve been frustrated by your bank, the doctor’s office, TSA, or the DMV and desire and believe you can fix these service challenges, service design is for you.
Service design offers designers a toolset to make services tangible and visible and to provide new service concepts. In this workshop, we will use some of the key service design tools to create a new service. We will envision new service concepts, act out pieces of the new service, and also rapidly generate business models to give our services a balance of human and business appeal.
By the end of this workshop, you will be familiar with:
- Customer Journey Map
- Service Blueprints
- Acting as Prototyping
- Business Model Canvas
→ Slides from Jared & Jamin’s workshop
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Seductive Interaction Design
Wednesday August 24 [ AM Only ]
A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.
As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.
In this fun-filled, interactive workshop, Stephen P. Anderson will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.
Using the Mental Notes card deck, participants will start with an application that is perfectly “usable,” and take it to the next level by exploring how things like feedback loops curiosity and social proof could make a site more seductive.
Who is this workshop for?
Designers, developers, marketers and product managers– anyone involved with the design of website and applications. The focus of this workshop is on how to design for behaviors, which is one thing diverse product teams can align around!What will you learn?
By the end of this workshop you will:- Discover practical ways to apply ideas from psychology to interaction design
- Learn 15 principles from psychology (such as Curiosity, Set Completion and Sequencing)
- Understand why making things usable isn’t enough
- Understand how our design decisions influence behavior
- Be able translate business goals directly into behavioral goals (allowing us to measure UX decisions)
- Learn how even business apps could benefit from a little playfulness
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Fake It, Till You Make It
Wednesday August 24 [ AM Only ]
How do you go from a brilliant idea to a product on the market? First, you fake it. Bring your concept to life quickly and cheaply.
Rapid prototyping is the perfect way to design and pitch your app. This workshop with Philip Fierlinger presents a range of realworld prototypes, created for startups and major brands, covering a variety of different methods.
The workshop provides hands-on lessons for building rapid prototypes. Whether your product will be built in HTML, Xcode or any other technology, you’ll learn how to quickly create convincing prototypes using Flash (no experience in Flash necessary).
Flash prototyping is a very simple yet extremely powerful technique that combines the best of paper prototyping, wireframes and HTML prototyping. The method you’ll learn dramatically increases the speed and agility of the design and development cycle, while decreasing documentation to almost zero.
→ Slides from Philip’s workshop
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Design Fiction: How the Practice of Design Can Use Fiction to Create New Things
Wednesday August 24 [ PM Only ]
From Dick Fosbury to the guy who put wheels on luggage, creating disruptions to convention in positive ways has often meant looking at the world differently. Fiction, especially science fiction, is a way of telling a story about and then forcing one to think about the world by looking at it with a different lens.
Design can approach its creative and conceptual challenges to make things better, or to think differently or to disrupt convention by combining its practice with that of fiction.
In this workshop we will look at the practical ways of employing the rhetorical, creative and cinematic aspects of fiction to help think, act upon, design and create new things.
The principle is simple. If cinematic and literary fiction is able to help imagine and communicate things that may not be possible, how can these same forms of story telling help design practices create disruptive visions of the near future?
In the workshop Julian will share a number of relevant case studies where design and fiction were brought together. The process and outcomes of these case studies will be discussed. Through these case studies we’ll discover approaches, techniques and principles for a pragmatic designing-with-fiction process.
Prerequisites:
An open mind, notebook, pen. Familiarity with science-fiction film, optional.Outcomes:
A set of tools, approaches and processes for initiating practical design fiction in the studio. -
Guerilla Research Methods
Wednesday August 24 [ PM Only ]
This hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods to help you make better data-driven design decisions. We’ll provide a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you’ve conducted your research.
Topics Covered:
- How to sell guerrilla research into a project from the start
- How to recruit better participants
- How to form better research questions
- A number of inexpensive, quick, but highly effective research methods when time and/or budget are limited
- Valuable “how-tos” to execute the research
Questions Answered:
- How do I get my boss or client to buy into doing research for my project?
- What is guerrilla research and how is it different than traditional research?
- What are some guerrilla research methods and what kind of results can I expect?
- How do I pick the right method(s)?
- What’s the downside/shortcoming of guerrilla research methods compared to other research methods
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Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Thursday August 25 [ All Day ]
There are plenty of workshops that teach you how to design well. There are more that teach you how to test and improve your offerings. But there are very few workshops that teach you what to design. In this workshop Indi Young, author of Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, will teach you the skill of building mental model diagrams–a powerful tool to help you create products and services that do a better job of meeting the real needs of your users.
Based on interviews, mental model diagrams give you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought-processes, creating empathy for the people who buy and use what you build. Models can be relatively simple or incredibly complex, depending on the breadth of the design problems you’re trying to solve. Either way, they’re a powerful tool.
This workshop will benefit almost anyone involved in the creation of a product or service. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to conduct effective interviews, recognize which data should be included in a diagram, and sketch a mental model of your own.
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Designing Mobile Web Experiences
Thursday August 25 [ All Day ]
Each day, device manufacturers ship more than a million touch-screen phones that enable new ways for people to interact with the Web. But when they get to your Web site or application –what kind of experience will people with these devices have? Will they be delighted by your mobile Web experience or frustrated? In this workshop on Web design best practices for modern mobile devices, Luke Wroblewski will detail how to think about and design for Web organization, actions, inputs, and layout on mobile.
Through presentations, collaborative sessions, and lots of examples, you’ll learn how to:
- Use “content first/navigate second” organizational structures optimized for small screens and mobile use cases.
- Design for increasingly prevalent touch interactions with appropriate targets and gestures.
- Construct forms and input fields to make input on mobile easier and more frequent.
- Manage layouts across multiple devices with ruthless editing, device classes, and responsive/flexible designs.
- And more… Armed with these design best practices and principles, you can make sure people have a great mobile Web experience whenever they visit your site.
→ Slides from Luke’s workshop
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Only Good Touching: Doing UX Strategy and Design in a Multi-touch Point Universe
Co-taught by Todd Wilkens, Paula Wellings & Chris Risdon
Thursday August 25 [ All Day ]
Have you ever wanted to make an orchestrated, integrated, cross-product, multi-channel, location-sensitive, smart commerce, service designed product ecosystem for the masses? Yes?! Then this workshop is for you! Except that in this workshop, we will throw out the buzz words and provide a sensible framework for bringing products and services into both the glory and the minutia of people’s everyday lives. We will focus on the power and peril of a touchpoint. Just because you can touch someone, does that mean you should? We will explore how you can ensure that every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.
The structure for the day will be a mix of shared insights and case studies followed by group activities to put the ideas into practice. When you wrap up the day, you will have:
- guiding principles for engaging with people across time and space
- a frame work for mapping human experience across multiple situations and interactions
- skills and tools for generating concepts for appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing “touching”
- an understanding of how to prototype and orchestrate experiences for a variety of connection points
- a commitment to not being that creepy guy on the bus
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Business Origami
Thursday August 25 [ AM Only ]
Business origami is a simple, powerful method for modelling services and systems that you can learn to use quickly and get great results in your own design projects. The simplicity is on the surface. Business origami uses stylized paper cutouts to represent the different parts of a system: the people, the locations, and channels used as well as the specific touchpoints and interactions of individual scenarios. These cutouts are arranged on a horizontal whiteboard, which allows participants to show relationships in the system, including different venues, the flow from one area to another, and the value exchanged at each interaction.
The power comes from participation. Business origami shines in a codesign workshop setting. Since it offers direct, hands-on tokens it’s easy for everyone to contribute instead of requiring skill with diagramming software or flowchart conventions. By involving a cross-section of business representatives, users, and members of the design team you can quickly capture models of current experiences and then explore opportunities for improvement or create entirely new designs. Because the model is immediate and tangible it creates a shared visual reference that builds common understanding, unifying the team and the vision for the project.
This participation increases buy-in, creates common ground, and helps you facilitate a successful solution. The sessions themselves are powerful experiences for participants, but you can also use business origami models to document journey maps, scenarios, service blueprints and other downstream design deliverables.
In this session with Jess McMullin you’ll learn the fundamentals of service design (so we’re on the same page), participate in a modeling exercise yourself for current and future systems, and then analyze that model to document new opportunities. We’ll also share tips and tricks that make for successful business origami sessions and discuss how this method fits neatly into your current design process, whether you’re consciously doing cross-channel design or not.
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Critical Thinking for UX Designers (or Anyone)
Co-taught by Russ Unger and Stephen Anderson
Thursday August 25 [ AM Only ]
Love creative problem solving, but need something more practical— something specific to User Experience? Russ Unger and Stephen Anderson will share with you the exercises they use to solve the REAL problems. You’ll flex your critical thinking muscle through a series of jumpstarter activities. Even better, attendees will be encouraged to participate, if not embarrass themselves in front of a room full of their peers as they challenge themselves to see past the first, obvious—and often incorrect—answers, and start to flip problems on their heads to see solutions from a different view.
Session Takeaway:
- Gain a better understanding of what critical thinking is, why it is important in the world of User Experience Design
- Identify ways to evaluate the visual and verbal messages in your work
- Spot artificial constraints to focus on the root problem(s).
- View problems from a different perspective and remove yourself as a consumer/user.
- Learn how reframing problems can lead to radically different solutions.
- Dissect problems to uncover solutions you may have previously overlooked.
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How to Become (or Work With) a Product Manager
Thursday August 25 [ AM Only ]
You listen to all the stakeholders’ needs, consider the various priorities, and come up with a set of requirements for a product to address these needs. Then you work with the engineers to iterate and build the product, ensuring that it’s the best product possible. Does that sound like what you do? Then maybe you’re a product manager.
The role of a designer or information architect is remarkably similar to product management. So why does it always seem like one is the Dark Side of the other? Why does it feel like we can’t get a seat at the table when it comes to strategy decisions, and how come the two sides seem to always be in conflict?
This half-day workshop with Kevin Cheng will help you understand what’s it’s like to be in product management, from the perspective of a designer. Based on my personal experiences of transitioning over the years from programmer to designer to product manager, I hope to bridge the gap between the two camps, and perhaps even help those who want to cross the bridge.
The workshop will be a mix of presentation and exercises which will teach you:
- Some key differences between UX and product management, and maybe discover whether it’s really something you want to do.
- What skills transfer over to product management.
- How to use your skills to your advantage and be a better product manager.
- What a day-to-day role of a product manager is.
- The different types of product management roles.
- A better understanding of a PM’s goals so you can work more effectively with one.
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PRE-EMPTING GLOBAL CRISES: A COLLABORATIVE DESIGN SESSION FOR UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL PULSE
Co-taught by Chris van der Walt, P.J. Onori & Kate Rutter
Global Pulse is an innovation initiative that is developing a new approach to crisis impact monitoring. Global Pulse is developing HunchWorks, a place where experts of all kinds can post hypotheses—or hunches—that may warrant further exploration and then crowdsource data and verification. HunchWorks will be a key global platform for rapidly detecting emerging crises and their impacts on vulnerable communities. Using it, experts will be able to quickly surface ground truth and detect anomalies in data about collective behavior for further analysis, investigation and action.
Adaptive Path has been collaborating with the Global Pulse team to identify the challenges surrounding HunchWorks to help with some of the complex UX problems and design solutions. With a idea as big HunchWorks, we wanted to open up the task to the UX community in order to push the work forward.
Session Takeaways:
- Learn UX principles through hands-on engagement
- Be a part of designing for the UN’s initiative to detect and mitigate crises.
- Work with members of the UN Global Pulse team to solve specific UX/design problems.
- Employ different methods for collaborative generation and synthesizing of concepts.
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Motion in Experience Design
Thursday August 25 [ PM Only ]
Join Remon Tijssen in a workshop that provides insight into why motion in interactive experiences is important. Learn why and how to think about motion, what the different functions of motion in the broad range of interactive experiences are and how do they relate to different technologies. Tijssen will map out different uses of motion in interactivity, give conceptual and practical advice, showcase projects and guide you in getting hands on creating a protoype to explore and define motion for an interactive product.
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Better Meetings By Design
Thursday August 25 [ PM Only ]
Brilliant ideas go nowhere without the full engagement and trust of everyone involved. Whether you’re part of the team, you lead the team, you lead the department, or you lead the company, you’ve got to sell those concepts to push them into reality. The environment where they are sold is the business meeting.
In a half-day workshop, Kevin M. Hoffman (Experience Director, Happy Cog) will lead you through how the team at Happy Cog applies design thinking, participatory decision making models, and unorthodox experiences to make meetings better. Happy Cog successfully explores, communicates, and executes web site & application design with a diverse range of companies and corporate cultures. Whether it’s establishing early concepts, getting back on course, building buy-in, or thinking about the larger process, these approaches can be applied quickly and can lead to a increased understanding and engagement throughout any project.
Topics Covered:
- Meeting Roles
- Facilitation Basics and Advanced Ideas
- Meeting Process and The Role of Meetings in Projects
- Tools and Tricks for Fun, Efficient Meetings