Anna van Slee

Strategy & Development Consultant

Anna makes toys and games, because toys and games are awesome. There’s not one recipe for awesome sauce: Anna has led teams that have produced everything from comic books, to virtual worlds, to augmented reality mobile experiences. She’s designed playful experiences for global brands such as Nerf, Tonka, G.I. Joe, Furby, My Little Pony and Happy Meal. Anna brings her play expertise to beginners with her action-packed activity book Adventures in Experience Design, which she co-authored with UX guru and fellow cheese lover, Carolyn Chandler.

Come play dress-up with Anna at her playCHIC Fashion Show, or just follow her on Twitter at @AdventuringAnna.

Carolyn Chandler

Director of User Experience, Eight Bit Studios

Carolyn Chandler has been working in the field of User Experience Design for over 20 years, after finding it due to a driving interest in psychology and anthropology. As Director of UX at Eight Bit Studios, her areas of specialty include design strategy and leadership, interaction design, and user research and modeling. She co-authored A Project Guide to UX Design with Russ Unger (now in its second edition) and Adventures in Experience Design with Anna van Slee. Due to her work in teaching and mentoring students and start-ups, Carolyn was named one of “Chicago’s Tech 50” by Crain’s Magazine. She appreciates cheesy puns and words like spork.

For more, keep up with Carolyn at dhalo.com or on Twitter as @chanan.

Marcin Treder

Founder & CEO, UXPin

Marcin Treder is a designer, psychologist, philosopher, and founder and CEO of UXPin — UX Design Platform, SaaS company funded by some of the best investors in Silicon Valley. Originally from Gdansk, Poland, he now resides in Mountain View, California.

For more, keep up with Marcin at marcin.is or on Twitter as @marcintreder.

Ameeda Chowdhury

Co-Founder & Product Lead, CodeArtScience

Ameeda is a co-founder and product lead of CodeArtScience, a startup focused on redefining quality and relevant learning experiences at scale. She is a developer and product person whose year long stint teaching in New York City charter schools set the stage for her to begin CodeArtScience. She also loves to mentor new coders through her role one of the lead organizers of RailsBridge Chicago.

For more, keep up with Ameeda on Twitter as @ameedahc.

Designing Learning That Sticks: Collaborating with Users to Redefine the Engagement Problem

Why is it that despite innumerable teens and young adults expressing deep interest in exploring coding and app building, most still struggle to pick it up from the innumerable online and offline learning options available? By collaborating closely with our users from prototyping to now, we discovered that we needed to redefine the users’ problem from “learning to code” to “building immediately useful things with code”. Additionally, we also learned that users must be able to build from their smartphones and develop a measurable sense of mastery over the concepts. As a result, Grokker.io enables users with no coding background to build immediately useful things with code while learning

This talk will be about how we created and refined this continuous collaborative design process with our core user community of Chicago area high schoolers, across multiple high schools, with a tiny startup team. We will address the challenges of creating and maintaining this design culture as well as the payoffs, including massively reducing product and market risks. We will also look at how our laser focus on the user’s ultimate goals allowed us to create resonant and delightful experiences for our users, while also delivering excellent skills acquisition outcomes.

Beth McKeever

UX Engineer, Software for Good

Beth McKeever is a UX Engineer at Software for Good where she works with clients — like Biovest, Fair Trade USA and DIVI — who are making the world a better place. Prior to that she spent time working on Target’s mobile website and HealthPartner’s web experience for members and patients. She believes in crafting great experiences through a collaborative and lean process. Beth has spoken at MinneWebCon, UXPA MN, IxDA MN and a variety of local meetups about collaborative design and user research.

For more, keep up with Beth at bethmckeever.com or on Twitter as @linoleumtile.

The 4 Fool-Proof Steps to Becoming a UX Professional

UX makes a difference. In this field, you have the ability to radically improve products. Because of your influence, a retailer will make more money, a non-profit will generate more awareness and a product’s user base will grow. People will enjoy their interaction with software more because of what you craft for them.

So do you want to become a UX Professional? Join me as I share 4 fool-proof steps to make this dream a reality. You’ll learn about the variety of skills involved in a UX career, resources to guide you along the way, and ways to break into your local community, or make UX a reality at your current company.

Carl Beien

User Experience Consultant, GfK

Carl Beien also has over five years of user-centered research experience. He started his career doing community development, and will eagerly make the case that the precepts of UX are equally applicable in poverty reduction as they are in web design. He has spent the last three years doing UX research with GfK UX.

For more, keep up with Carl on Twitter as @cbeien.

Courtney Roberts

User Research Senior Expert, Market Logic Software

Courtney Roberts has over five years of user-centered research experience in a variety of industries including healthcare and mobile. After two years of honing UX research skills as a consultant at GfK UX, she fulfilled a personal goal of living and working abroad by moving to Berlin, Germany. There she found herself on the client side as the sole UX researcher at Market Logic Software, a software company that helps companies plan, execute and reuse their market research.

Carl & Courtney present:

Maximizing UX Research: In-house vs. Consulting

UX research provides robust qualitative insight firmly rooted in actual user behavior, but is frequently left out of the user-centered design process. Consequently, products and services often don’t meet user expectations, and this results in frustration, decreased utilization, and sometimes total abandonment.

In order to be successful, stakeholders in the development process must understand how to best utilize UX researchers. We will describe how UX researchers engage with projects in two different business contexts: as in-house staff, and as outside consultants. For UX researchers, this is your chance to see what it’s like on the other side. For everyone else, this presentation will explain how to efficiently harness user research to produce designs that are more successful the first time around.

Daniel Zarick

Proprietor at #33cc77

Daniel runs #33cc77, a product+design studio based in Chicago. He designs+codes web apps, mobile apps, and games. Past projects include OneShot, The Shakedown, Mocky, and others. Months before finishing art school school in Chicago, he moved to San Francisco to join a then-nascent Twilio. At Twilio he built internal tools for a fast-growing team and helped design a patent-pending fraud detection system. Daniel now lives in Chicago again, helping to grow the design/independent community. He lives with his dog, Marlo.

For more, keep up with Daniel at 33cc77.com or on Twitter as @DanielZarick.

Questioning Default Design Decisions

“Well, that’s how [another company] does it.”

It’s easy to default to common design patterns when building a product, but that doesn’t mean those are the right choices for your software. This talk will discuss some of these common patterns and show alternative options.

Dimple Rao

Senior Product Manager, Walgreens

Dimple leads the Digital Pharmacy Product team at Walgreens. She is responsible for driving digital innovation to improve adherence and build consumer engagement through a seamless omni-channel experience for Walgreens’ patients to get, stay and live well. Dimple has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

For more, keep up with Dimple on Twitter as @raodimple.

Ryan Wynia

Director of Product Design, Emmi Solutions

Ryan leads Emmi Solutions’ interdisciplinary design team responsible for creating interactive experiences that empower patients and influence healthy behavior. In his role, he ensures applied behavior, cognitive and social sciences are leveraged throughout Emmi’s human-centered, design-led approach to patient engagement. A keynote speaker at the 2015 International Persuasive Technology Conference, he is recognized for his insight into the way people interact with technology, their environment and each other. Ryan has studied Behavior Design with Dr. BJ Fogg, Director of Stanford University’s Behavior Design and Persuasive Technology Labs, is accredited and certified in Evidence-Based Design by the Center for Health Design and is a Master Trainer for teamSTEPPS—the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s system for improving patient safety.

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

Dimple & Ryan present:

From You & Me To We: Re-designing the Product — UX Partnership

As Marshall Goldsmith cautions in the title of his best-selling book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The brittle and tenuous cooperation between product management and user experience teams that often exists today won’t be enough to support the nimble production paradigm required to create the digital products of tomorrow. With the evolving role Design in the product and user experience functions and the organization at large, reconsidering the PM — UX partnership is perhaps more important than ever.

Drawing on their respective backgrounds—including experience as colleagues—Dimple Rao and Ryan Wynia will offer forward-thinking perspective on the relationship between PM and UX. They will argue the PM — UX relationship is a collaboration that’s truly significant and is capable of enhancing or inhibiting the contributions of the other to the benefit or detriment of the product and organization.

Jared Caponi

President & Owner, Exploded Map

Jared is a web industry veteran who has been practicing information architecture, user experience and digital product consulting under the name Exploded Map since 2009. Prior to that, he spent over a dozen years working as a brand strategist, project manager and executive producer at digital agencies in New York City.

He holds a BA in Art History from Wheaton College with an advanced focus on how visitors interact with museum spaces and how signage, supporting content and various curatorial decisions affect visitors’ perception of art.

For more, keep up with Jared at explodedmap.com or on Twitter as @jaredac.

Personalities, Politics, Art & Design: The UX Remix of the Guggenheim Museum

The history of the Guggenheim Museum reads more like a modern user experience case study than you might expect. While it’s earned its place as a celebrated work of architecture and a revered art institution, the story of how it got there is filled with relatable tales right out of the experience design playbook. Within this story, you’ll recognize the hallmarks of any scrappy start-up from launch to success. Along the way, we’ll uncover and discuss principles of user centered design, the importance of strategic pivots, how constraints create problems and opportunities, and managing change in organizational politics.

The Guggenheim Museum story takes many fascinating twists and turns from it’s humble origins as a small, focused collection in a New York City apartment to it’s current iteration as a diverse global art institution that oversees one of the preeminent modern art collections of the world. In this talk we will look at decisions, characters, problems and evolution points in the museum’s history that have parallels to, and contain lessons for, the practice of modern day user experience.

Jeff Eaton

Partner, Autogram

Jeff Eaton helps large organizations understand, model, and manage their content. For 25 years, heଁs tackled digital publishing, web development, and content strategy problems for organizations large and small.

Whether he’s fixing problems with CMS architecture or editorial workflow, his work sits in the overlap between design, communications, and technology. Today, heଁs a partner at Autogram, a strategic consultancy focused on the intersection of design systems and high-variance content.

For more, keep up with Jeff at angrylittletree.com or on Twitter as @eaton.

Content Strategy — Getting It Started!

Content Strategy! It’s hot, it’s hip, and all the cool kids are talking about it! In the real world, though, integrating a new service into your web shop’s offerings can be a tough slog. In this session, Lullabot’s Digital Strategist Jeff Eaton explains how the company:

• Integrated strategy work into its development projects
• Improved its deliverables to bridge the designer-developer gap
• Used a new service to increase the value of work it was already doing
• Avoided over-promising as its team explored new techniques
• …And continues to evolve its strategy practice

Kamaria Campbell

User Experience Consultant, IBM

Kamaria Campbell is a User Experience consultant for IBM Interactive Experience and Mobile. She began her career as a Usability Auditor at ForeSee, a customer experience analytics firm. There, she led multiple research projects that leveraged design principles to identify best practices for social media accounts and feeds, mobile app design, and communicating product availability on e-commerce websites. In her current work, she primarily focuses on mobile experience design, research, and analysis. To date, she has conducted over 100 heuristic evaluations spanning web, mobile, and social experiences in a range of industries. Kamaria holds a master’s degree in Information with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan School of Information.

For more, keep up with Kamaria on Twitter as @kaccampbell.

Heuristics 101: Understanding & Applying Design Principles

Design heuristics are a powerful tool for UXers to have in their toolkit. These principles provide a way to ground your designs as well as communicate the “why” behind your decisions to peers and stakeholders. In addition, while technology is always changing, these principles remain the same and can easily be extended to new technologies.

In this session, you will learn about common sets of heuristics you can draw on in your work. In addition, you will learn how to tailor these principles for use in emerging technologies such as social media and mobile applications.

Mike Kornacki

User Experience Architect, Johnson Controls, Inc.

Mike’s 20 years of work in the creative arts field has brought him to Johnson Controls, Inc. (JCI) where, over the last five years, he has built a team of User Experience specialists. Within JCI, he is currently setting creative direction for the building efficiency line of business and leading the charge establishing UX as a culture within the organization. He has created the first ever Design Language System (DLS) for JCI products, that has revolutionized the “Johnson Controls way” of product interaction. He continues to push the innovation boundaries of user experience into the future.

For more, keep up with Mike at hellogoat.com or on Twitter as @lordshales.

Experience Innovation — The New Design Imperative

Experience innovation is becoming the most important element in smart companies product lifecycle. They are starting to use experience innovation to remain relevant and retain customer loyalty. Companies like Uber, Delta Airlines, Disney and Nike, to name a few, are figuring out ways to create signature moments that delight users and create significant opportunities for growth. They have learned how to look beyond their products to and see the broader experience their customers have when using their products and services.

I have come up with a list of 6 ways UXers can do to get our clients or our companies we work for to start innovating experiences. I will share with you examples of how others have done it and how I have led a UX team in a giant engineering organization like Johnson Controls to innovate and impact our business directly. Ultimately we need to start doing this for the companies we work for or for our clients. Experience innovation is not a new idea and it only a matter of time before your company’s or client’s competition figures it out.

Natalie Kurz

Director of User Experience, Flexion

Natalie Kurz has spent the last 20 years helping elevate digital experiences from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Her unique skill set bridges the gap between strategy and execution, manager and designer, analytical and creative thinker. She’s led a wide breadth of projects for a slew of industries, most notably working on applications, mobile experiences, and product development for the healthcare, tourism, government, financial, and nonprofit sectors.

Most recently she’s been dedicated to civic tech, spending 3.5 years as an innovation fellow at the CFPB and currently leading projects for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, GSA, Centers for Disease Control, and the U.S. Tax Court as the Director of UX at Flexion Inc. She’s previously presented on UX, content strategy, and agile practices at Chicago Camps, edUI, 18F Speaker Series, Agile Government Leadership, IA Summit, and G2 Xchange podcasts.

The Unwitting Content Strategist

Few of us are formally trained as content strategists. We’re journalists. Information architects. Copywriters. Interaction designers. Digital marketers. Some are multi-headed hydras that get to wear all the hats.

But that doesn’t prevent us from tackling the nebulous task of creating content strategies. So what does that even mean? What goes into creating an actual content strategy that you can sit down and execute? And how can we bring our unique perspectives from other disciples to this field to produce a better outcome?

The first time I had to write a content strategy, I had to figure it out as I went. This talk will offer attendees concrete pointers, outlines, definitions and deliverables associated with that big, scary concept of “content strategy.” Attend this session and you don’t have to feel that same sense of dread I did when asked to “figure it out.”

Nathan Hinshaw

Lead Front-end Engineer, Threadless

Nathan Hinshaw is the Lead Front End Engineer and a Product Owner at Threadless, where he brings his passion for data-driven, cross-device development to the best platform for supporting artists worldwide. He believes in writing lean, modular HTML, SCSS, and Javascript while crafting empathetic, intuitive interfaces. When not creating for the web he can be found at his ceramics wheel or scouring cookbooks for a new all day cooking project.

For more, keep up with Nathan at nathan-hinshaw.com or on Twitter as @nathanhinshaw.

Designing Digital Communities

As the architectural complexities and user expectations of websites continue to evolve, viewing them as the communities that they are–or can become–is increasingly important to both their sustainability and success. How do we as technologists design, build, and maintain these properties; while also evolving the tools we use to support them?

We’ll look at:

• Design patterns, development processes and feedback cycles
• How Threadless has worked to foster collaboration between users and developers by encouraging both active and passive participation
• How to best leverage a community’s shared assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating digital spaces that promote users’ sense of inclusion and satisfaction
• Looking at existing real world design patterns (e.g. universal iconography and visual wayfinding) as a means of creating more accessible user experiences in a digital space
• Responsible development: pushing design and technology forward without dragging users behind you

Travis LaFleur

Information Architect, The Understanding Group

Travis LaFleur is an information architect at The Understanding Group, an IA consultancy focused on creating good digital places. Travis has a diverse background including web and graphic design, educational technology support, and all manor of things prefaced with UX. Prior to joining TUG, he was a Senior Experience Designer at VML, a global digital agency, where he helped lead the design process for large scale responsive sites, mobile apps, and digital marketing campaigns. Travis holds a masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan.

For more, keep up with Travis on Twitter as @travislafleur.

WHAT Before HOW: Practical, Lo-fi Tools for Alignment, Planning, & Understanding

Budgets and deadlines often push us toward making and doing before we have a shared understanding of the problem space. Here we will explore a handful of lightweight techniques from an information architecture perspective that can compliment your existing UX toolkit.

These approaches will help frame your design activities first in terms of WHAT would be good to do, setting you up to create even better HOWs.