Amanda Weller

Senior UX Director, Ipsos

Amanda has over 10 years of experience designing and executing custom projects that deliver creative, insightful solutions to complex problems to create intuitive, innovative, useful, fun experiences for people around the world.

Fluent in various methodologies to deeply understand users needs, pain points, and behaviors. Adaptive and empathetic moderator whose thoughtful analysis produces actionable results. Passion for tech and finance with strong cross-industry experience including consumer products, media, apps, IOT, healthcare, packaging, and service design.

Megan Machamer

Research Director, Ipsos

UX research specialist and ethnographer with 10 years of social science research experience in both professional and academic contexts. A highly dedicated applied anthropologist who is enthusiastic about culture and technology, and specializes in: research design, discovery, ethnography, and international research.

Academically, she hold a Masters in Social Science from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California San Diego, as well as an Associates of Arts in Math and Science with special emphasis in Psychology from MiraCosta College. She has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology since September of 2016.

For more, keep up with Megan on Twitter as @mmmeganmelissa.

Amanda & Megan present:

Remote Digital Ethnography: Understand Online Dating Behaviors Within the Digital Environment

Observing participants can present several challenges, yet still turns out invaluable data that informs our designs—so how in the heck can we observe thoroughly while still maintaining a remote posture? The digital layers of a users’ ecosystem interact to impact their experiences in user experience research today, ethnography should combine the physical and digital planes to understand multiple influences on any one interaction.

In online dating, there are many contextual elements to consider, including: virtual profiles, messaging, filters to find appropriate matches, use of multiple competitor apps, and geolocation, which create the user’s online environment. The UX digital landscape combines the context of the physical world plus in-app environment and connected ecosystems. The user’s environment is primarily digital. The surrounding world is just one plane/layer of consideration in these interactions and digital ethnography can help us understand how to design for these different layers of experience.

Billy Carlson

Design Education, Balsamiq

As a designer, Billy is his happiest when designing for a greater purpose. Whether it’s creating ways for users to enjoy their experience more seamlessly or complete a task more efficiently, he always places the people at the center of what he creates. He 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. Previously, he led large UX teams at various corporations’ internal design groups, such as Threadless, where he led the design and development of several mobile applications, the design of the Artist Shops program, and facilitated partnerships.

Billy’s passion for making started at an early age, but it wasn’t until college that he became fascinated by all forms of design. He prides himself in bringing the creative community together and does so by hosting creative events in partnership with local design groups, as well as mentoring young designers by facilitating portfolio reviews and project critiques. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute.

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

Revisiting Wireframes — Techniques & Principles for the Whole Team

Wireframes are not only design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process to ensure that user goals are clear, many ideas are explored, and developer hand-off is more seemless.

Ian Fenn

Senior Product Designer, Tails.com

Ian Fenn is a Senior Product Designer at tails.com. Since 2014, he has been advising other designers on how to represent their value effectively to potential clients and employers. He is the author of Lobster Book, the definitive guide to UX Portfolio design, and creator of the popular UX Portfolio Essentials course.

For more, keep up with Ian at uxportfolio.design or on Twitter as @ifenn.

8 Ways People Screw Up Their UX Portfolio

Portfolios are required for designers, researchers, strategists, and managers. Yet, most people in our field do not want to show off their work. In many respects, we do not understand the essentials of a killer portfolio until we see it. In this session, Ian Fenn will explain the essentials of your portfolio. He will give practical tips and tricks to make sure you show the best version your “self” in your portfolio. In addition, Ian will explain the importance of treating your portfolio like a product that you design.

Jatin Gupta

Product Designer, T-Mobile Full-time

Jatin is a product designer at T-Mobile currently designing the T-Mobile for Business self-service platform. He is passionate about problem-solving in the digital space while keeping sustainability and ethics in mind. Jatin’s previous experience includes working as a front-end developer, accessibility researcher, and an AR game designer.

When not designing, you can find him reading self-help books or watching table tennis and fantasizing about how his ambitious goal of beating Space X in their domain would look like.

For more, keep up with Jatin at jatingupta.co or on Twitter as @booWendyb00.

A Digital Designer’s Carbon Footprint

Designers may be inadvertently contribute to climate change through their normal, everyday activities. As digital designers, we use a lot of resources and since many of them are digital we tend to overlook the impact we can have on our environment.

We can change our behaviors, practice sustainable design, and reduce our carbon footprint by practically applying behavior change, which is definitely part of our role as designers. A lot of conversations about climate change give a very zoomed-out view where the individual level contribution is completely discarded. We’ll discuss ways to change our behaviors and have an impact on climate change as individuals.

Lindsey Gates-Markel

Senior Content Strategist, Pixo

Lindsey leads content strategy at Pixo, working with teams of clients, designers, and developers to explore the space between what exists and what is possible. She loves dumb questions and metadata.

For more, keep up with Lindsey at lindseygatesmarkel.com.

Think Like a Developer to Design Better Structured Content

If you work on websites from the ground up, you know the pain of seeing your best-laid content plans go awry. Hasty help text, mysterious CMS constraints, and unclear user stories can turn even the sharpest strategy into a sad site.

When you plan structured content with the mindset of a developer, you can avoid more confusing pitfalls from the get-go. Time will be saved, and you’ll ensure developers can use your work, and plan richer content, empowered with a clear understanding of what’s possible.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Why to put on your “data glasses” when planning content
• How to write user stories that resonate with an end-to-end team
• How to turn content needs into a clear UI for content authors

Nikki Espartinez

Independent Product Designer & UX Strategist

Nikki Espartinez is a designer of digital experiences and products. The core themes of her work are User Experience, Design Operations and Design Evangelism. Nikki is very passionate about all three of them.

Alongside that, Nikki also think of the future deeply. From the way we work to the way we actually will live our life, she thinks design is very much integrated on it. To help her explore those thoughts clearer, she started a newsletter on those topics earlier this year.

For more, keep up with Nikki at nikkiespartinez.com.

Mapping the Journey of a Design Career

The User Experience field is an infinitely rewarding one that has no shortage of serendipities, fears, risks, wins and losses. My story is one of fear and bravery, bravery and fear, all told from the fresh perspective of a designer who is convinced she is just getting started.

How do you design a career you’ll be proud of? How do you turn constraints into advantages? These are the questions I want to explore as I talk about my own journey into UX from traditional design. From past failures to wake up calls and personal reinventions, I’ll map out this human’s journey so far.