Workshops

We value design, and routinely judge our products and experiences on its merits. But we can easily overlook a large part of our lives in this regard- the design of work. This session is for those who want to tackle issues like collaboration, culture, and the lifecycle of ideas from a designer’s perspective. At the end of the day, if we can get a little better at creating, changing, and guiding how we do these things as individuals and as teams, we might be able to accomplish anything, and maybe have some fun along the way.

In this session, you will add to your designer toolkit by trying out techniques you can use with clients and teams to define, generate, prototype, select and follow  through on ideas. We will step outside the daily grind mindset into hands-on, team-based activities, but also make sure that everyone comes away with specific ideas that they can take back to improve their own ways of working.

Session takeaways include:

• Why bother to “design work?” – Who is doing it and why?
• 7Ps framework for fewer, better meetings
• Using visual thinking to clarify and communicate an idea
• Core exercises from Gamestorming to open, explore and close ideas
• Common pitfalls and challenges in team work and tactics for addressing them
• Facilitation tips to use for good
• Culture: Getting past the buzzword and trying to shape it

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 help you tackle 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, Melissa Rach 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 secrets to selling content strategy to clients or within your organization

Good game design evokes the right feelings in gamers to keep them playing, engaging, and exploring, but it’s not as hard as you think. It’s also applicable to a lot more than you realize. In this workshop you will break into groups and design rules for a simple game – to create different types of feelings in the people who play it. The design framework we’ll be using to do this is simple, but powerful, and you can apply it to anything you do. Join us and see for yourself!

The gap between physical and digital has blurred: we use Wiis to get in shape, we order online to pick up an item in a physical store, and our smartphone’s GPS can help us to find hot dates within walking distance. The future of design is everywhere the customer touches our product or service—digital or physical. User experience practitioners must move beyond the screen to design for a holistic customer experience that is seamless across channels and devices.

In this interactive workshop, Samantha will share hard earned, proven techniques for selling the need for holistic customer experience design, and how to raise our own value and visibility along the way. She will also provide specific tools and recommendations for designing for the full experience lifecycle across all channels and touchpoints. You will leave the day ready to integrate cross-channel design techniques into your toolkit, ensuring a more holistic and satisfying experience for your users regardless of where they are interacting.

No doubt you’ve heard (and experienced) the designer’s lament in at least one of its common forms: We could do so much more if we got involved earlier…They think we’re just here to hit it with the pretty stick… Why doesn’t it get built as we design it? The list goes on. Experienced designers and design leaders have realized that it takes significant organizational change before design and user-centered thinking are fully adopted. Before we can make much progress in changing our organizations or our clients, though, we need to make sure we’re up to the challenge.

In this half-day workshop, Kim will help you build skills in both change leadership and nuts-and-bolts practice leadership. These skills aren’t just for managers; designers at all levels can use them to be more effective. We’ll cover:

• Principles of effective leadership
• Roles for practice leaders (of which management is only one)
• Assessing and coaching others in design and collaboration skills
• The relationship between leadership and culture
• Assessing your organization’s culture
• Adapting your individual leadership approach to your context
• Determining how much your team should adapt to culture or try to change it
• Helping key individuals through change
• Planning your approach to wider change

Come prepared to share some of your best (and worst) leadership moments, and to try some specific skills via role plays and other exercises.

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

As designers are called upon to tackle experiences across channels and touchpoints, we need new tools to ideate experiences and make those experiences operational. This workshop will introduce you to ideation across touchpoints and time through acting. We’ll leave the Sharpie’s, post-its, and whiteboards by the wayside to use our instincts and emotions to create service experiences that feel human.

Then we’ll take a deeper look at service blueprints, the primary service design tool to help designers and organizations understand the service architecture required to operationalize the experience. We’ll talk about the advantages and disadvantages of this tool, and then get our hands dirty making a low fidelity blueprint.

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Conduct an acting as ideation session in your organization
• Communicate the advantages and disadvantages of service blueprints
• Produce a quick and dirty blueprint with post-its and butcher paper

It’s critical that designers and developers learn to work together in order to create great products. How many times have you designed something that never saw the light of day? Or it looked a little different when it launched? More often than not, it’s due to the lack of shared product development goals and collaboration between the UX and development teams.

Additionally, technology is advancing at the speed of light. We, as designers, have the challenge of keeping up with these advances while also keeping our eye on the bigger picture — the opportunity for end users. It’s an exciting time where technology can deliver amazing, new experiences. But It can only happen with a tight collaboration between those designing and those developing.

Whether you are on the product side or the agency side, early and tight collaboration with your development team will lead to better ideas, happier customers, team success, and ultimately, better products.

• The material and exercises will include topics such as:
• Soft skills and communications techniques when dealing with the “opposite sex”
• Design methods within agile development process
• Project and feature-set planning strategies and deliverable examples
• Common pitfalls when working together (design and development)
• Case studies that help demonstrate all of the above, and most importantly, success

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your service. If you’ve ever wanted to make an orchestrated, integrated, cross-product, multi-channel, service designed product ecosystem, then this workshop is for you! Except we’ll throw out the buzzwords and provide a sensible framework for bringing products and services into people’s everyday lives. We’ll focus on the power and peril of the touchpoint—where customers connect with your product or service, and we’ll show how to map the customer journey across touchpoints and channels. We’ll explore how 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 framework for mapping human experience across multiple situations and interactions
• Skills and tools for generating concepts for appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing “touching”
• A commitment to not being that creepy guy on the bus

Cyd will cover the latest in web-based UX research, including the key principles, choosing the right tools from among the hundreds available, and when and how to roll your own methods. She’ll also provide hands-on training in remote techniques for qualitative user research, including remote usability testing, remote card sorting, recruiting, and other crafty tools and methods for remote studies. Depending on the number of attendees and speed of the conference internet, we’ll have chances for everyone to practice what we discuss. Laptops are required.

Ready access to information is great. But many times there is too much information, too much data, or too many options to make sense of. People can easily become frustrated or disengage if they can’t connect with what is presented to them.

Stephen Anderson, designer and creator of the Mental Notes card deck, believes that people must be emotionally engaged if you want them to exhibit a certain behavior. In this workshop, Stephen will share the process he uses to create simple visual representations to help people make informed choices and understand complex information.

In brief, design patterns such as spreadsheets, lists, dashboards and grid views suffice for getting data onto a screen. However, when it comes to making sense of this data, these same patterns hold us back from designing great experiences; generic patterns are poor substitutes for a good custom visualization, especially one designed for the content being displayed. Stephen will share with you many examples of such visualizations, and the process used to design each. Topics will include:

• How to design interactive models that make sense of complex information
• Basic graphic design skills that can be used by anyone (and how to avoid simply “dressing up data”)*
• The challenges of visualizing dynamic information, and how this differs from data visualizations and infographics
• How to use metaphor and story to make sense of complex information
• The neuroscience behind perception and judgement
• And much more!

Examples cover a variety of topic areas, such as: Health Insurance plans, medical charts, eCommerce search results, flight times, sales and CRM data, mobile phone bills, recipes, pirated movies, academic research, shopping lists and so on.

In addition to the many numerous information visualization examples, most of which will be new to attendees, there will be multiple hands-on exercises where you will practice the skills being taught.

Information is ripe for a makeover. This workshop will show you useful & engaging ways to present information.

*No graphic design skills are required!

Does your team struggle with developing or prioritizing requirements? Do you have difficulty getting stakeholders to think beyond their organizational silos to consider the end-to-end user experience? Do you sometimes wonder how to connect the dots between your user research and the design in a persuasive way?

If so, scenarios may be just the tool for you. Like use cases and agile user stories, scenarios describe sequential interaction. Unlike those other tools, though, scenarios rely on the generative and persuasive power of storytelling, which is perhaps the most natural creation and communication medium there is.

Based on a deep understanding of what makes your “characters” tick, this workshop will show you how to develop compelling stories, then use those stories to visualize a new experience, from cross-channel interaction down to screen design. Specific topics include how to:

• Relate scenarios to use cases and user stories
• Decide when to use scenarios during your design process
• Develop effective scenarios
• Use journey mapping to help you build better scenarios
• Generate requirements from scenarios
• Use scenarios to group functionality and information
• Storyboard coherent flow with scenarios
• Use scenarios for detailed design decisions, such as visual hierarchy

Throughout the session, we’ll use plenty of examples and hands-on exercises.

Infographics are incredibly powerful tools to effectively communicate complex ideas in visual form. Through a mix of instruction, discussion, collaboration and critique, an all-star team will show you how to make compelling infographics that express information and attract eyeballs.

Tiffany will lead you through a brief history of infographics in our universe and approaches for structuring data in design. She will also discuss the ways that different design styles can turn the same concepts into diverse infographics. Brad will be your guide to best practices around strategy, data, client relationships, and what happens before and after design.

The workshop covers the structure and design of data in infographics as well as the lifecycle of infographic creation from concepting and research, through distribution, and effective communication of the final deliverable. The JESS3 team will also provide awesome pro-tips and address common pitfalls at each stage of the process (project management, data research & strategy, design and outreach).

Every element of this hands-on practical workshop follows the same purpose:

In this hands-on, action-packed workshop, discover how prototyping for the web is easier than you think — even if you’ve just begun to dip your toes into the world of coding. Whether you’re an HTML novice or a presentation-layer pro, you’ll pick up practical tips and techniques for prototyping with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. Learn how to:

• Structure your prototype designs faster with HTML5
• Take advantage of new input types to make mobile-ready forms instantly
• Use CSS3 to make sexy buttons without the need for background images or sliding doors
• Use CSS3 selectors
• Make effective use of jQuery transitions with only a few lines of code

You’ll walk away with a number of tools and techniques for prototyping flexible, bulletproof, effective and adaptable interfaces that make up an elegant user experience. Laptops are highly recommended for this hands-on workshop.

As the web is rebuilt around people rather than content, UX professionals will need to understand how to design experiences built on top of social interaction and social platforms. Designing social experiences is different from designing user experiences. For example there is often no clear task to design for, no set user goal, no clear outcome, and your primary persona is anyone who interacts with anyone else. In the next 12-24 months, this skillset will become a requirement for UX professionals.

Paul has been spending a lot of time in 2012 building a design pattern language around social interaction and will share it for the first time in this workshop. He will walk through each design pattern, explain why it is important to internalize, and use examples and exercises to describe how and when to apply it.

Code for America is a new non-profit, and a new kind of organization. Our team is made up of web geeks, city experts, and technology industry leaders. We help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web. Through our Fellowship, Accelerator, and Brigade, we’re building a network of cities, citizens, community groups, and startups, all equally committed to reimagining government for the 21st century.

Some of the applications we’re working on this year include an educational tool for fire safety, a behavior change tool for environmental sustainability, a dashboard for the Open311 system, and a citizen toolkit. In each of these applications, we’re driven by the desire to encourage civic participation. Using these applications, citizens will be better informed and, therefore, better equipped to participate actively in the civic life of their community.

In this workshop, we’ll focus on the best practices we’ve learned for designing for civic engagement, and we’ll bring forward some of the design challenges we’ve faced. We’ll also engage your help in solving them.

Session takeaways:

• Learn UX principles that focus on how to activate and sustain civic engagement
• Be a part of helping Code for America design a fire safety and/or sustainability application
• Work with Code for America Fellows to solve specific UX/design problems related to the Open311 Dashboard
• Employ different methods for collaborative generation and synthesizing of concepts

We’ll apply core improv principles and techniques to teach skills that strengthen team dynamics, to build trust and rapport, and to harness the power of making your teammates look good for supportive collaboration. Participants will enjoy the experiential learning process through interactive, engaging activities, in pairs and in small groups. Facilitated debrief allows for individual reflection, shared learning, and practical takeaways. You’re guaranteed to laugh out loud too!