Jared Spool

Founder, User Interface Engineering, & Co-founder, Centre Center

Jared Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

For more, keep up with Jared at uie.com or on Twitter as @jmspool.

Ryan Singer

Product Manager, 37signals

Ryan Singer leads product design and manages the development process at 37signals. He recently led the ground-up redesign of Basecamp, their flagship app. He lives in Logan Square with his wife and two dogs.

For more, keep up with Ryan at feltpresence.com or on Twitter as @rjs.

Adam McCrimmon

Co-Founder, XYZ Game Labs

Adam’s passion is the exciting world of Tabletop Gaming! In 2016 he co-founded XYZ Game Labs and created the card game called RobotLab with his team. He currently spends most weekends playing, talking about or designing tabletop and board games.

For more, keep up with Adam at about.me/amccrim or on Twitter as @McAtoms.

PDF = Prototype

Providing clients with wireframe and design PDFs is common place. But those flat files generally aren’t very good at giving them a sense of what it’s like to use your awesomely planned site/app/etc. No matter what program you use to make your PDF there’s a quick and easy way to turn it into a prototype. In fact–We’ll make one in 20 min or less.

And in turn you’ll help clients see the importance of wireframes in the creative process and help them to understand that the content and functionality drives the design. Not the other way around.

Brad Nunnally

Senior Director of User Experience, IntelliBridge

Brad Nunnally is the Senior Director of User Experience at Intellibridge and a co-author of “Designing The Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation” for New Riders (Voices That Matter) and “UX Research: Practical Techniques for Designing Better Products” for O’Reilly Media. During his career, Brad has worked with clients spanning almost every major industry, mostly focusing on healthcare, financial services, and government digital services.

Brad has enjoyed writing and speaking on topics that include user research, interactive prototyping, and how cognitive psychology applies to design. These days, he contemplates how the government can be redesigned to be more person centric and how organizations can build and mature design teams to meet the demands of how business and technology work today. When he is not thinking about the world of design, he spends time learning important life lessons from his children, playing too many video and tabletop games, and learning woodworking through a constant string of failures.

The Layers of Prototyping

Prototyping is less about the tools you use and more about the process you follow. The process of prototyping can be broken down to three key layers–wireframing, screen flow, and state management. The completion of any of these layers is where a designer can stop, but as each layer is completed, the prototype gets closer to being a true representation of the final interaction design concept. By going through these layers one at a time, the overall complexity of the prototype melts away and the designer can take on the design one piece at a time. This is a process that has served me well in my career, and it has helped designers just getting into prototype tackle large and complex designs.

Jon Hadden

Founder & Design Director, NiceUX

Jon Hadden is the founder of NiceUX, a user experience design and development consultancy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In his 12 years of designing, coding, speaking, and writing, Jon has produced usable products and services for millions across the globe. He’s a volunteer with Boxes and Arrows, guest speaker with the University of Minnesota Design program, and has been lucky enough to have worked with Happy Cog, Yahoo!, and space150.

For more, keep up with Jon at niceux.com or on Twitter as @niceux.

HTML Prototyper’s Toolbox

Without the correct tools for fast and efficient HTML prototyping, even the best process can be deemed too expensive to attempt. However, the desire to be able to test one’s design in the browser, at a low cost is always the goal for experience designers. The HTML Prototyper’s Toolbox is a set of layout patterns and components, built on top of Twitter’s Bootstrap framework that NiceUX uses to create rapid coded prototypes.

This session, Jon will teach you a pragmatic process and method to using the toolbox to create high fidelity HTML prototypes in the same amount of time you would spend with other prototyping methods. Simply knowing the basics of how front-end code works, we’ll be able to use the toolbox to create a prototype in 30 minutes.

Russ Unger

User Experience Designer & Researcher, Author, & Speaker

Russ Unger is an Experience Design Director in Chicago where he leads teams and projects in design and research. He is co-author of the book “A Project Guide to UX Design,” “Designing the Conversation,” and the forthcoming Speaker Camp for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter). Russ is also working on a book on guerrilla design and research methods that is due out well, sometime.

Russ is also co-founder of Chicago Camps, which hosts low-cost, high-value technology events in the Chicago area, and he is also on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. Russ has 2 daughters who both draw better than he does and are currently beginning to surpass his limited abilities in coding.

For more, keep up with Russ at userglue.com or on Twitter as @russu.

Live with 6-8-5

The 6-8-5 Method can be used in a number of ways to help with ideation and brainstorming, but also for fine tuning your design. This session will focus on rapidly generating ideas in the form of rapid sketches around a set of requirements, then validating and fine-tuning them through structured pitching and critiquing. You won’t need a laptop—just bring your favorite pencil and get ready to sketch!

Sharlene King

Senior Art Director, Acquity Group

Sharlene King is a designer working as a senior art director at Acquity Group and living it up in Chicago. She designs on the weekend, in the after hours, and with a mouthful of food for a variety of clients from global pharmaceuticals to incorrigible start-ups. Once she wrote something for Distance, a designer quarterly of long essays. According to Netflix, she likes “Visually striking prehistoric science and nature documentaries for ages 5-7” also known as dinosaurs.

InDesign & Websites: A Compendium of Reasons it Works

As an industry, we fall into habits like relying on software that may be antiquated. Responsive websites are evolving from rare into standard. The platforms users have to choose is ever-increasing in variety. The way we interact with a website today is different tomorrow.

We need to reconsider our software for its strengths and weaknesses rather than rely upon what’s familiar for the sake of familiarity. As designers, we need to shake ourselves from habit and adapt.

In this talk, we’ll cover reasons why you should use InDesign for web design, how to calmly explain your conversion to a developer, how to ensure your client doesn’t completely break down into pure panic, and other surefire ways to be the most interesting person in your office by being novel in your software choices. There might even be some talk about CS6 versus CS5.

Chris Webb

User Interface Engineer, Groupon

Christopher works as a User Interface Engineer at Groupon. He’s meticulous about hand-crafted HTML, carefully pruned CSS, and pushing the web forward. He’s interested in responsive web design, building iOS apps, and hacking on Arduinos. When he’s not pushing daily deals, he spends time with his loving wife, their two beautiful kids, and his rambunctious dog.

For more, keep up with Chris at conspirator.co or on Twitter as @conspirator.

Supercharge Your Toolchain: Haml, Sass, Coffee, Git, & Heroku

Learn how to write faster markup with Haml, smarter CSS with Sass, and better JavaScript with Coffee Script while we build a simple Rails3 application. We’ll touch on the benefits of a git repository and the ease of deploying to Heroku. Intended for anyone interested in more expedient tools.

Dan LeBoeuf

Senior UX Architect, Manifest Digital

Dan LeBoeuf is a Senior UX Architect at Manifest Digital and graduate student at DePaul CDM studying HCI and Computer Science. With 16 years of industry experience, his career began as a visual designer. He shifted to front-end development and ultimately leveraged broad experience and combined capabilities to drive his fascination with digital user experiences and constructing solutions.

Dan’s passion lies in collaborating on UX designs, wire frames and prototypes. He specializes in creating native mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as developing web applications for device agnostic solutions. He has led projects for major automotive manufacturers, health care providers, personal line insurers, risk management insurers and shipping / industrial supply distributors. In his spare time, Dan participates in in Post-It Note Wars with neighboring Chicago buildings.

For more, keep up with Dan on Twitter as @danleboeuf.

Testing Tools of On-Device Mobile Prototypes

So, you’ve built your mobile app prototype… now what? It’s time to test, test, test. Mobile prototype testing is used to evaluate functionality and potentially uncover unforeseen points of issue prior to major development efforts. It’s also used to make necessary and recommended usability updates to improve the user experience. Conducting an in-person test session, a proven effective model, gives unique insight and means of interacting with the participants while observing their process in real-time.

Similar to a favorite wireframing tool or text editor, there is a variety of approaches to conduct and capture your test session. In this presentation, we’ll review mobile prototype testing tools that range from straightforward to comprehensive. From bootstrap to enterprise testing software. From bending acrylic to forged 606 aircraft grade aluminum. In addition, Dan will walk through options and decisions made while building Manifest’s custom configured research facility.

Dennis Kardys

Design Director, WSOL

Dennis Kardys is a Chicago based UX designer and author with an affinity for all things mobile. He’s the author of the recently published Mobile Web Triage, and a contributing author to Smashing Magazine’s The Mobile Book. As Design Director at WSOL, Dennis leads a team of wisecrackin’ designers and developers in helping universities, hospitals and corporations alike take the plunge into mobile and responsive design.

For more, keep up with Dennis at robotregime.com or on Twitter as @dkardys.

Replacing Photoshop Comps with HTML Prototypes in the Real World

Many clients (and bosses) still clamor for static, finalized Photoshop comps to sign off on. How do you convince them to evolve beyond rigid deliverables and embrace a prototype-based approach to interface design? In this session I’ll share recent experiences upending internal design processes and discarding Photoshop comps in favor of HTML based design guides. We’ll cover practical considerations for getting stakeholder buy-in (and sign-off) and walk through the code you need to start building device-agnostic design systems.

Param Rengaiah

Experience Architect, Aspire Systems

Param Rengaiah’s LinkedIn title is Solutions Architect/Experience Architect, but he considers himself a developer and a hacker. He is currently employed by Aspire Systems. In his quest to find the ingredients for creating useful software products, his technical interests revolves around scalable enterprise systems, digital media, mobile, cloud, enterprise social media, open source innovations and user experience. If he is not in front of his laptop or iPad hacking some code or reading, he spends rest of his time either sleeping, watching old movies on Netflix or playing with his two boys.

How to Build CMS–Free Websites

We are going to learn how to build a Website without any CMS–using only light coding techniques, existing stuff on the web, and you’re hosting provider, you can mimic the power of modern day content publishing platforms.

If you are asking why, here’s one reason–its the easiest and yet most flexible and powerful option for a developer/designer.

We will be using Jekyl, GitHub and Prose.io. We will also touch upon other options and extensions such as Jekyll Bootstrap, Octopress and Cactus.

Will Hacker

Interaction Design Manager, Cars.com

Will Hacker is a Manager of Interaction Design at Cars.com, where he leads a team responsible for experience design and usability for a portfolio of consumer-facing automotive shopping, research, and financing products. He is also the author of Mobile Prototyping with Axure 7, and his work has appeared in Boxes and Arrows, Mobile Commerce Daily, Smashing Magazine, UX Booth, and UX Magazine. Will is a frequent speaker at design events in Chicago.

For more, keep up with Will at willhacker.net or on Twitter as @willhacker.

Mobile Prototyping with Axure

So you have a great idea for an iPhone or iPad app. But you lack the coding skills needed to bring it to life for testing and refinement before moving to development. Well a new set of features in Axure RP 6.5 allow you to rapidly prototype iOS applications for on-device testing with native-looking iOS UI widgets, home screen icons, splash screens, full-screen display, and swipe event detection. And all without writing a single line of code.

In this session Will shows some of the techniques he used to create a demo iPhone app using some of the new features in Axure. You’ll learn how to simulate the user experience using dynamic displays, stored data in variables, multiple chained events, and more. For mobile user experience designers without ready access to iOS developers who can assist with prototyping, Axure provides a great way to get your ideas in people’s hands for design exploration and iteration.

Adam Lupu

Director of Learning & Development, Global Playground

Adam Lupu is a learning scientist and cognitive engineer. He specializes in applying the latest scientific research on learning and development to the creation of training programs for technologists, designers, and business leaders. A former teacher, Mr. Lupu has an MA in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University, and has spent the last year developing technology mentorships, leadership seminars, and learning labs at Chicago-based Code Academy. As Director of Learning and Development at non-profit Global Playground, Mr. Lupu is responsible for developing an online learning platform that educates students and teachers around the world in technology and cultural literacy. He is also a staff writer for Technori.com and co-founder of TEDxEvanston.

360 Prototyping: Learn to Look at What You’re Building from Every Angle

Prototyping might be defined as applying a craft to learn about your product as you conceive and construct it. In order to learn more about your product (and what it can be) you want to look at it from all angles, not just the perspective you have inherited from developing your existing skills. In other words, designers, developers, and idea builders all benefit from being able to think about what they’re building using each other’s differing points of view.

So how can you learn a new framework for conceiving of a product without spending years practicing a new craft?

Research in the science of how people learn confirms that there are three different ways to pick up new perspectives and use them to inform what you create. In this session we will discuss these three pathways to 360 prototyping and everyone will get a chance to try on a new way of looking at what they make.

John Polacek

Lead Web Developer, Gesture

John Polacek leads front end at Gesture, the mobile fundraising platform for charity events, and is the author of many open source projects like Expressive CSS, Stacktable, Responsivator, BigVideo.js and Scrollorama.

For more, keep up with John at johnpolacek.com or on Twitter as @johnpolacek.

The Never Ending Quest to Build Cool Stuff

It has never been easier to create amazing things. With the vast knowledge on the other side of a Google search, the possibilities are endless. Do you want to create radtastic HTML5 node-jure Raspberry Pi Quadcopters in the Cloud with an API? Let’s freaking do it!

In this session, we’ll talk about what it takes to build cool stuff, mainly on the web. John will tell you about things you can do and stuff you should know.

Jonathan Snook

Lead Designer, Shopify

Jonathan Snook writes about tips, tricks, and bookmarks on his blog at Snook.ca. He has also written for A List Apart, 24ways, and .net magazine, and has co-authored two books, The Art and Science of CSS and Accelerated DOM Scripting. He has recently written the book, Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS, sharing his experience and best practices. Snook currently works on the design team at Shopify.

For more, keep up with Jonathan at snook.ca or on Twitter as @snookca.

Getting Your CSS Under Control

CSS is easy? CSS is messy. We couple things so tightly with the HTML that we make it harder to build and iterate quickly on an ever-growing project. This session will look at some approaches from the book, Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS, that can help create a more flexible platform for faster development and easier prototyping.

Quite Strong

Creatives of the Female Variety

Quite Strong is a collaborative of five female Chicago-based creatives. We are art directors, graphic designers, web developers, illustrators and photographers. Quite Strong is a platform for us to pursue personal creative endeavors, to engage our community locally, to interact with the larger design community, and to promote and empower female creatives everywhere.

For more, keep up with Quite at quitestrong.com or on Twitter as @Quite_Strong.

Power in Numbers: 15 Simple Ways to Harvest the Power of Your Community by Teaming Up

Quite Strong is using 15 numbers to show you the power of numbers. In this chat you will hear from 3/5ths of Quite Strong on different aspects of engaging in your design and development community, some tried and true practices of getting involved with projects and people, and how to turn your connections into opportunities.