Kim Goodwin

Author, Designing for the Digital Age

You may know Kim Goodwin from her bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age. Kim is a consultant who helps organizations build their UX capabilities. She has served as VP of Product & UX at PatientsLikeMe and as VP Design & General Manager at Cooper, leading an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers and the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum. Kim has led projects involving a tremendous range of design problems, including Web sites, complex analytical and enterprise applications, phones, medical devices, services, and even organizations. Her clients and employers have included everything from one-man startups to the world’s largest companies, as well as universities and government agencies.

For more, keep up with Kim on Twitter as @kimgoodwin.

Stephen P. Anderson

Founder, The Mighty Minds Club

Stephen P. Anderson is a design leader focused on workforce learning and organizational development. And he’s on a mission: To make learning the hard stuff fun, by creating “things to think with” and “spaces” for generative play. Through custom-designed toolkits, on-site training, and via The Mighty Minds Club, Stephen helps product teams work through their most difficult situations. As a keynote speaker, Stephen continues to challenge and inspire audiences as he exposes the quirky connections between games, play, learning, interactive visualizations, and other exciting topics. Stephen is excited to share his newest book Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding, which is now available for purchase.

For more, keep up with Stephen at poetpainter.com or on Twitter as @stephenanderson.

Billy Carlson

Design Education, Balsamiq

Billy currently works as a Design Educator at Balsamiq, a design software company, where he helps designers and product folks learn best practices of all phases of UI and digital product design. He also serves as an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute teaching introductions to Human-Centered Design and UX Design.

Previously, he led large UX teams at various corporations’ internal design groups. He also led the design and development of several mobile applications, the design of the Artist Shops program, and facilitated many partnerships as the Director of User Experience at Threadless.

When he is not at his desk, you can find Billy at home telling bad dad jokes to his wife and four children, or replaying the Cubs World Series win, over and over again.

For more, keep up with Billy on Twitter as @billycarlson.

The 10 Principles of Effective Wireframes

Wireframing should be a part of every digital design project and each team should have a hand in making them. You don’t even need a computer to create great wireframes—a sketch on a white board works just as well if you’re doing it right. And what is doing it right? I’ve identified 10 principles that can help make the daily life of working on digital products a bit easier.

There are lots of teams working together to create products, however only one seems to properly communicate to everyone visually: The design team. We all encounter problems in our everyday life and there are times when we devise solutions to fix those problems, and that is a design. And that, indeed, makes us all designers. In this presentation, I will explore why everyone should wireframe and tips on how to make the wireframing process a collaborative success.

Jabali Williams

Director of User Experience, U.Group

As Director of User Experience, Jabali’s impact spans both clients and disciplines. From working on multi-award winning website redesigns to leading the growth of the user experience discipline—to include both content strategy and UX/UI design—Jabali walks the line between hands-on support and strategic oversight.

Jabali can be found regularly at local UX events and has spoken at several meetups, conferences, and institutes of higher education including: GoodGovUX, UXPA, and the University of Maryland.

For more, keep up with Jabali at jabaliwilliams.com or on Twitter as @jawidesign.

Sunny Stueve

Senior UX Architect, U.Group

Sunny Stueve is a Senior User Experience Architect in Washington, DC. For the last several years, she has focused on incorporating human centered methodologies, intuitive design, and research into the agile processes of complex, large-scale, enterprise applications in support of National Security missions. She’s currently leading a UX team in support of the US Customs & Immigration Services. Sunny is a user advocate, a UX evangelist, a minimalist designer, an empathetic listener, and a lifelong learner.

Jabali & Sunny present:

Navigating Your UX Career — From Early Growth to the Fork In the Road

There’s plenty of resources on how to land your first job in UX — we want to help you take the next step…and the next. When you’re getting started, every new project is an opportunity, but how do you identify the ones that will prepare you for your next role? What skills and experiences are hiring managers looking for in mid-to-senior level positions? And once you achieve Senior level, what’s next?

Sunny and Jabali will share their experiences—having seen both sides of the hiring table. They’ve grown their careers, they’ve grown teams, and they’ve shared the experience of reaching the summit and wondering what to do next. At that fork in the road, they didn’t exit; they got creative. This discussion will help you take a hard look at the work you’re doing today and how it can shape the next step in your UX career.

Matthew Eng

Design & Research Lead, IBM Design

Matt is a Design and Research Lead for IBM Design. He has worked on projects for companies such as American Airlines, AT&T, Ogilvy and Symantec. During these projects, he has conducted numerous design and research efforts that helped to align and focus stakeholders with diverse needs. His experience leading small teams of designers and researchers at IBM, has helped him to discover new techniques for bringing together multidisciplinary teams and internal stakeholders into the research and design process for quicker alignment.

When he is not untangling team priorities, he shares his lessons and experiences with other communities such as UX Australia, Euro IA, ADDC Barcelona, Big Design, and TEDx San Antonio.

For more, keep up with Matthew at tapswipeclick.com or on Twitter as @engmatthew.

Research Your Team First: Key Communication Techniques to Build Trust & Clarity in Product Teams

Instead of trying to “win” an argument, what if we invested in understanding our counterparts’ and stakeholders’ needs first with the goal of building their trust? We are passionate about our work, and in collaborative environments, we need to align our differing views of user needs, innovative ideas, and product vision across disciplines and management levels. This often means we spend a lot of time pitching our concepts for adoption into a product roadmap.

In this talk, you will learn communication techniques to uncover the key problems that cross-functional teams can rally around. We will also cover how to apply these techniques to help our teams feel more prepared for conversations about project scope, priority shifts, and even work-place conflicts.

Michaela Hackner

Director of Design, UX Content, & User Research, Morningstar

Michaela is passionate about using words and stories to make the world a better place. She started her career designing content in the nonprofit space where she worked with women entrepreneurs in Cambodia and East Africa, and led the design of web experiences for the Gates Foundation and Red Cross. After watching those close to her struggle with money, she joined Capital One Bank to build out their content strategy practice and led teams to design digital banking experiences that reduced financial anxiety (and saved the business money).

Now you can find her at Morningstar, a global financial services firm, where she leads centralized UX content strategy and user research teams that help the product organization design tools and information that enable the success of investors and the people that serve them.

In her free time, Michaela is trying to complete all six Marathon Majors, plotting her escape to Montana with her husband, and knitting while her dog sits on her feet.

For more, keep up with Michaela on Twitter as @Kalabird.

Scott Sullivan

Head of North American Design Group, Ascendum

Scott is the Head of North American Design Group at Ascendum, and helps to build products and services to assist people in making positive long-term changes to their behavior.

Prior to Ascendum, Scott was at Adaptive Path in San Francisco, later working on behavior-focused financial services at Capital One bank. With an arts-driven education and diverse influences, his work has run the spectrum from education to energy; finance to interactive performance art.

For more, keep up with Scott at scottsullivan.io.

Michaela & Scott present:

Lunch Break Discussion & Debate: CS + UX = BFFs?

Fresh off their critically acclaimed spoken word tour, friends and former colleagues Michaela and Scott discuss the relationship between Content Strategy and Experience design, delving into timeless questions such as Do humans actually have souls? and What’s a UX writer?.

This Frost/Nixon style discussion will probably definitely be audible over the sound of your chewing on the lunch break, and will haunt your lunch-related dreams for years to come.

Michelle Schulp

Independent Digital Designer & Developer

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

Now, she collaborates on projects with clients ranging from solopreneurs to enterprise. She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

For more, keep up with Michelle at marktimemedia.com or on Twitter as @marktimemedia.

Design for Interaction: Using Animation to Enhance User Experience

Modern browsers, JavaScript libraries, and CSS3 have made it easier than ever to create exciting, dynamic animated experiences within web interfaces. But we have also seen the unfortunate side effect of trying to do too much: websites that are resource hogs, eating up bandwidth and slowing load times to a crawl, all for effects that are ultimately just there for the “show” factor.

This talk will discuss how to use these animation skills for good: to establish context, convey status, give feedback, and yes, even add a little delight. Along the way, we’ll discuss the principles of animation that guide everything from your favorite feature films to the actions of a button on your screen, and learn how deliberate animation choices can improve the experience for your user. We will also touch on the available tools in JS and CSS and how to choose which one is the right one for your animation task.