Phil Sharp

Senior Marketing Manager, UserTesting.com

With the help of UserTesting.com’s archive of usability videos, Phil Sharp uncovers unique insights about design, UX, and conversion rate optimization, and then shares them with the rest of the world. He’s kind of like Indiana Jones, but without the hat, whip, or dashing good looks.

Phil is passionate about making the mobile web a better place and is focused on making it as easy as possible for companies to improve their sites and apps.

For more, keep up with Phil on Twitter as @iamphilsharp.

The Four Mobile Traps (And How To Avoid Them)

After spending months reviewing thousands of mobile usability tests, UserTesting.com has identified the four most common traps that companies fall into when creating their mobile websites and apps.

These mobile traps show up over and over again because they grow out of some of the best practices that make a company successful in the traditional computing world. Plus, they’re not obvious until you know about them.

Samantha Starmer

VP Customer Experience, Razorfish

Samantha Starmer is Vice President of Customer Experience for Razorfish’s national Commerce and Content practice, where she works on strategy and best practices for creating seamless experiences across all touchpoints of the customer shopping journey. Prior to Razorfish, Samantha was Director of Customer Experience at REI, a leading national outdoor retail co-op. There she was responsible for creating and incubating teams focused on customer experience, interaction design, information architecture, and omnichannel experience strategy.

Samantha has over 15 years of experience in leading large, customer-centered programs from strategy through design, execution and optimization at companies such as Microsoft and Amazon. She is passionate about creating holistic customer experiences that are seamless and provide delight across channels, time, and devices. Samantha has a Masters in Library and Information science from the University of Washington where she regularly teaches graduate level courses on information architecture and user experience. She is fortunate to have been invited to speak and teach globally on customer experience and designing for this omnichannel, convergent world.

For more, keep up with Samantha on Twitter as @samanthastarmer.

The Future of Experience Design – Mobile & Beyond

The future of experience design is not just the web or even mobile – it is everywhere a customer touches our products and services. The ubiquity of technology in our lives means that our interactions across different devices and mediums are becoming increasingly intertwined. We can work out using a Kinect, track our children’s whereabouts with an iPad app, and use our phones to check for best prices on a product while in shopping in a store. We therefore increasingly need to design experiences that are seamless across all interactions – physical and digital. As we are increasingly digitally connected, and as device diversification grows, mobile interfaces take on the role of intermediary between our online and offline lives. Samantha will describe the challenges and opportunities of this exciting future, and provide recommendations for how experience designers can be successful and increase their value by taking advantage of this new world.

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.

How Do I Get Started in Mobile?

It seems like everyone–and everything–is working in mobile, but maybe you haven’t yet had the opportunity to get up to speed. This session will help you catch up and give you a broad overview that helps you understand the ways that you can steer yourself in order to learn more in areas that are important to you.

Mobile can me many different things today, but it is most commonly referring to mobile phones and tablets, so it is important to have a basic understand of what designing and developing for the myriad of devices that exist looks like.

There is no denying that there is plenty to know to do great work in this space, and new technologies and processes are introduced all the time. It’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind faster and faster, and if you are not working in the mobile space yet, it is even easier to become increasingly intimidated by what’s out there. This will be a quick journey of the basics and some common themes that are evolving today. Get ready to get up to speed and get pointed in the right direction!

Dan Shipton

CEO, Change

Dan Shipton is the CEO of Change, a cash register app for the iPad built by BitMethod in Des Moines, Iowa. BitMethod is made up of mobile craftsmen who swoon over well-made apps and love finding ways of making complex things simple. Before taking on Change, BitMethod built apps for companies such as SmartyPig, Kum & Go, and the 80/35 Music Festival.

For more, keep up with Dan at donebuffering.com or on Twitter as @danielshipton.

Preparing For Sea: A Captain’s Guide For Shipping A Mobile Product

Captain Dan Shipton will be sharing stories straight from his logbook about his experiences shipping a mobile product. While swinging the lamp, he’ll discuss how to prepare your product for sea by focusing on foundational design first and avoiding feature creep. He’ll also cover how to make your design process more efficient, especially for future voyages.

The Captain will end his chat with lessons for navigating choppy waters, including the hazards of being mobile, how to approach testing, and the challenges of rejection. By the end of his talk, you’ll feel your sea legs kicking in–enough to batten down the hatches and cast off on your own mobile adventure.

Jon Buda

Designer & Developer

Jon Buda is web developer who loves to design, or a designer who loves to code–depending on the day. He enjoys solving problems holistically, thinking about back-end, front-end, and design all as equally important parts in crafting great experiences.

Having worked with various companies around Chicago, he believes in building products that are both useful and usable through quality code, clean markup, and simple, efficient design. Jon also helps to co-organize Refresh Chicago, a monthly gathering of designers and developers covering all manner of web-related topics.

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

Keep It Quick: Speed Up Your Mobile Site for Fun and Profit

As attention spans are heading towards zero and more and more of the population is constantly on-the-go, optimizing your mobile websites to load quickly and efficiently can make an enormous difference in visitor engagement, and most importantly, your bottom-line. Designing for performance should be a top-priority in keeping your visitors happy and allowing them do what they need to do quickly.

You’ll learn a few techniques on how to keep your mobile websites lean and loading quickly, how page speed is actually a component of good UX, how to test and benchmark under various network conditions, and how slow loading times can turn away visitors and potential paying customers.

Shay Howe

Co-founder, Lead Honestly

As a designer and front end developer, Shay Howe has a passion for solving problems while building creative and intuitive products. He specializes in user interface design and front end development, working inside HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a daily basis. Additionally, Shay teaches a front end design and development and helps co-organize Chicago Camps, Refresh Chicago, and UX Happy Hour.

For more, keep up with Shay at shayhowe.com or on Twitter as @shayhowe.

Modern Style Guides for a Better Tomorrow

Times are changing and so must the process in which we design and build websites. The days of designing static compositions in Photoshop are a thing of the past, instead, responsive design within the browser is the future. This new world is not without its own risks, but if we focus on maintainability, organization, and modularity we can achieve a better tomorrow.

In this talk Shay will outline styleguides, living documentation on the design and development of a website, and their role within web design and development process. Looking at a few modern practices and standards, this talk will cover the benefits of stylesguides, the strategy behind creating one, and how to best utilize one within your project.

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 How? Mobile Now.

If you’re not taking your existing web properties mobile, you’re already slipping behind. But it’s not too late to start making changes, even if you don’t have the time to invest in a full mobile strategy right away. Jumpstart your mobile approach using this set of design techniques geared toward making your website easier to use for people on tablets–see real-world examples and hear practical advice that you can use right away to make your site mobile-friendly as quickly as possible! If you need to improve your website’s tablet experience but don’t have time or resources available to you to stop everything and go responsive, these easy-to-use-and-implement techniques will help you find your way. Quickly.

Darby Frey

Software Engineer & Consultant

Darby Frey is a software engineer and consultant who has worked on web and mobile applications for many clients including Groupon, Toyota, Paramount Pictures and others. Currently he is working with The Starter League in Chicago to create tools to educate and empower the next generation of designers and developers.

For more, keep up with Darby on Twitter as @darbyfrey.

Building a Mobile Layout

Designing for mobile is challenging. With the ever changing landscape of devices and screen sizes, there is no way to predict every possible canvas we’ll be desiging for. Luckily, there are few tools at our disposal that we can use to be confident in our designs.

In this session we will introduce some of these tools, including flexible grids and media queries. We will also dive into some code and see how these components can be created and how we can avoid some common pitfalls along the way.

Gail Swanson

Design Lead, Ascension Digital Studio

Gail Swanson helps people solve their problems without blowing themselves up. Throughout her career designing for glowing screens, she’s been dedicated to helping talented folks be more successful at their jobs. Gail built the strategy practice at 18F, and integrated agile design into product teams in several organizations. She now works as Design Lead in Ascension’s Digital Studio, revolutionizing the technology clinicians use with their patients every day. Gail speaks and writes about all manners of design, strategy, and digital innovation.

For more, keep up with Gail at practicallyux.com or on Twitter as @practicallyUX.

User Research Goes Mobile

Success making for mobile users depends upon how well we can fulfill users’ needs while matching their perspectives. This is easy when your users are tied to a desk, but when they are moving throughout the world, things can be a little complicated. To get the insights we need, we use an array of user research methods. Let’s take a look at adapted methods for field research, ethnography as well as usability testing on small devices. And, let’s have some fun using core research principles to customize research for unique devices or situations. Whether you are a designer, developer or just interested in mobile technology, Gail will get you thinking beyond surveys and one way glass.

Golli Hashemian

Senior Experience Designer, R/GA

Golli Hashemian is a user experience architect in Chicago, currently working as a senior experience designer at R/GA. Her experience includes designing and developing web and mobile applications for companies like Accenture and IBM. She believes in user-centered design as an approach that can be applied to solve almost any problem effectively. She consults with startups in her spare time, is a design mentor and team advisor at the Starter League, and the founder of DUXX: Chicago Women of Design & UX.

An Assessment of Mobile Design Approaches: Which is Right for You and How Do You Know?

Your mobile strategy should depend upon the goals of your website or application, your users, and how it is that you interact with those users. This session will walk you through a step-by-step approach that you can use to evaluate your mobile metrics and gather insights from your users in order to make decisions about whether or not you should take an approach that is based upon Responsive Design, Mobile First, native application, or a hybrid of these. We’re talking due diligence here, and the type that you can do yourself.

A social network or eCommerce mobile strategy is not going to be the same as the mobile strategy for a content site; there are many different approaches to designing for mobile devices. Key decisions, such as how to mobilize your website, should be based upon research, planning, and a healthy dose of the metrics and analytics that are available to you and not by locking into the current buzzword trends. When you know what the buzzwords mean, and you understand who and what you are designing and developing for, these decisions can be a piece of cake!

Jacey Gulden

Web Designer, Brand Journalist, SyneCore

Representing the new breed of uber-brand journalist, Jacey recently graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Journalism which included a focus on web and graphic design; she also earned two minors in Theater and Psychology. She uses this unique mix of communications experience and web development skill to design functional websites for SyneCore’s clients. Constantly seeking new sources of inspiration, in her free time Jacey can be found perusing Pinterest and interpreting life through Instagram.

Rethinking Usability for Responsive Web Design

Join SyneCore Web Designer Jacey Gulden as she delivers a primer on Responsive Web Design (RWD) and usability. Responsive is one of the top design trends of 2013, but many designers have become so obsessed with the trend itself they have forgotten to give critical thought to the effect of their designs on the humans interacting with them.

Your user doesn’t care whether or not your website utilizes the latest technologies or follows the most popular design trends. What they do care about, though, is whether or not your website works and brings them to the information they desire. Give them a great user experience, and they’ll keep coming back for more. Jacey will talk about the importance of an end user centric design and give tips for creating great responsive web designs.

Simon King

Principal Interaction Designer, IDEO

Simon King is a Principal Interaction Designer at IDEO Chicago where he leads both strategic–and implementation–focused work, designing macro- and micro-interactions across a diverse portfolio that includes online financial tools, professional medical devices, mobile device platforms, and in-vehicle experiences for clients such as PNC, Medtronic, AT&T, and Ford Motor Company.

Scratch Your Own Itch: Simple, Designer-driven Apps

Making a useful app doesn’t always require a development team, VC funding, or plans to change the world. We all use services where part of the experience is broken or not quite what we need. Create instead of critique–dive in and build simple apps to make common everyday experiences a little better. To scratch my own itch I created News Now, an iPhone app utilizing the NPR API. Using that experience as a starting point, this talk will look at examples and techniques for making simple single-serving apps that even designers without hardcore development chops can create.

Andy Hullinger

Program Chair, Harrington College of Design

Andy Hullinger is a design professor and the Program Chair for Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. His “***coding for creatives***” curriculum is helping to change the way designers work with creative technologies.

Creator of the award winning children’s book App Dragon Brush Andy has been exploring, teaching, and designing on the iPad right from its start. A former creative director, he consults with Chicago ad agencies to evolve their print campaigns for digital magazines. As a visiting professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, he pioneered the Magazine Innovation Project’s efforts with tablet publishing. Andy lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife, daughter, and son in a house full of good books and happy animals.

How Gesture-Based Design Can Enhance the Narrative Experience of Reading on the iPad

Four years ago the iPad was a rumor! Today our increasingly powerful and sublimely tactical mobile devices have become the primary tools of our networked culture. Is truly “digital” design finally close at hand? How can we design stories that are as delightful to the fingers as they are to the eye?

In this session, Andy shares the secrets, struggles, and successes of exploring this emerging vocabulary of multi-touch gestures by taking you behind the scenes of the award winning children’s book App Dragon Brush and scrutinizing the work of his students in the Magazine Innovation Project at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Christian Crumlish

UX Leadership Consultant & Author, Design in Product

Christian Crumlish is a product and UX leadership consultant at Design in Product, where he also hosts a product/UX community. He is currently leading the product management of covid19.ca.gov for the state of California’s Office of Digital Innovation. He has been a startup mentor at Code for America and StartX. Christian earned an AB at Princeton in philosophy, where he graduated sine laude.

Formerly, he was head of product at 7 Cups, winner of the 2016 Stanford Medicine X Prize for health systems design and a 2019 World Economic Forum Pioneer. He has also co-chaired the monthly BayCHI program, was senior director of product at CloudOn, was director of messaging products for AOL (AIM), was the last curator of the Yahoo design pattern library, and served two terms as a director of the late lamented Information Architecture Institute.

He is the author of the bestselling Product Management for UX People: From Designing to Thriving in a Product World, The Internet for Busy People and The Power of Many, and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces. Christian lives in Palo Alto with his wife, Briggs Nisbet, and an ever-growing collection of ukuleles.

For more, keep up with Christian at designinproduct.com or on Twitter as @mediajunkie.

Tablet First: Designing Holistic Ubiquitous Experiences

Mobility today means more than handsets in pockets. We are entering a world of ubiquitous network access to always-on cross-channel digital services, bringing multiple new dimensions of complexity to the job of user experience strategy and product design. Many practitioners have embraced or experimented with a philosophy called “Mobile First” as a method of designing a core, minimally viable product, and then selectively extending or scaling the interface for traditional “lapdesk” devices. Christian will discuss a variation on this approach he called “Tablet First,” in which experiences are designed holistically and the prototyped and implemented initially on gesture-based tablets. Because the tablet form factor shares some charcteristics both with smaller handsets and larger lapdesks, solving problems for these devices lays a good foundation for extending the experience out across the full spectrum of touchpoints. Christian will draw on his experience leading the product and design teams at CloudOn, a mobile productivity application that launched initially on the iPad and now reaches customers on iPhones, numerous Android phones and tablets, and through the browser.

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.

Convincing Your Boss to Go Mobile Now

A lot of organizations recognize the need to provide their Web visitors with a better mobile experience, but struggle with how to get there. What do you do when the decision to invest in mobile is in somebody else’s hands? Trying to get all vested stakeholders onboard can be an overwhelming challenge. How do you factor in the needs of your content authors? How do you address the disparity of devices that exist? What’s going to be the most sensible long-term or short-term investment of development resources? If you want to get your project off the ground, you’re going to need a plan. In this talk we’ll look at how to build a solid case for mobile.

You’ll leave armed with some useful data, actionable techniques, and mobile web best practices that will help you convince your boss, and others in your organization, to go mobile now!

Greg Nudelman

Mobile Experience Strategist & CEO, DesignCaffeine, Inc.

Greg Nudelman is a Mobile Experience Strategist and CEO of DesignCaffeine, Inc. For over 15 years he has helped his clients eBay, WebEx, Wells Fargo, PayPal, Safeway, Cisco, IBM, Associated Press and Groupon amass millions of satisfied customers. Internationally acclaimed design workshop leader, Greg authored Android Design Patterns: Interaction Design Solutions for Developers (Wiley, 2013), Smashing Mobile Book (2012), Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success (Wiley, 2011) and contributed to half-dozen UX design books.

Designing Mobile Magic Moments with Cross-Platform UX Framework

I’ve always been excited by mobile experiences, that make customers feel that they are wearing the Iron Man suit of armor. Apps that dissolve in behavior and empower users through superior experiences that people can’t wait to tell their friends about. In this talk I will help you understand what makes mobile experience magical, and how to create a magical experience for your own customers using my Cross-Platform UX Design framework. We will discuss unique device ergonomics, new device senors and essential mobile UX design patterns to discover what makes experiences magical. From camera-driven search, voice recognition, Artificial Intelligence and Mechanical Turk to emerging facial recognition technology and Near-field communication–we will cover the latest digital magic trends on iPhone and Android. We will see what works, and what doesn’t. We will look at how to put all of the key elements of the framework together to create delightful experiences for touch devices, and show you how to create magical delight in your own mobile and tablet apps. If you want to learn what makes mobile magical, you can’t afford to miss this talk.

Jason Cranford Teague

UX Lead, Rivet Logic

Jason is a creative strategist, writer, and speaker who has written numerous books and articles about digital design and creative development. His books include the best selling CSS Visual Quickstart Guide and Final Cut Pro and the Art of Filmmaking. He is a regular speaker at leading conferences including SXSW, WebVisions, and The Internet Summit and teaches classes in experience design at Drexel University.

As an internet industry leader for over twenty years, Jason has worked with clients like Virgin Group, The Aspen Institute, The XPrize Foundation, The EPA, Capital One, and Marriott International to find innovative solutions for their experience design products. Jason is currently the UX Lead at Rivet Logic.

For more, keep up with Jason at jason.cranfordteague.com.

Mobile Iconography

One of the daunting issues web developers face with mobile design is how to deal with interface icons and controls. You can create images with fixed dimensions for particular interface context, but what happens when that context changes? Buttons that are the perfect size for clicking on with a mouse pointer are not so good for pushing with big bulky fingers on a tablet or smart phone. You can create separate images for different contexts, but that is rapidly becomes a complex exercise, especially as new screen resolutions are developed. The solution is to stop using images for icons and controls, and instead use webfonts. Webfonts can be scaled up and down without loss of fidelity and allow for a wide range of dynmic styling without having to resort to images. Now that webfonts are ubiquitous, they provide the best solution to this growing issue. In this session, I’ll detail the issues involved, and outline a solution that not only allows for better responsive design, but can also increase search engine optimization and accessibility.