From business to buttons. Designing for effect. Malmo june 11-12 2009

Over the years presentation software such as PowerPoint has gotten better, but presentations largely have not. The presentation tools have advanced, but we have not. Why? Part of the problem has been a focus only on how to use the tools themselves rather than on how to clarify and amplify our ideas and messages through through fundamental design and storytelling principles.

In this talk, Garr will explore current popular presentation approaches and highlight techniques from some of the world’s top business leaders, turning conventional wisdom concerning PowerPoint and presentations on its ear.

Garr's Presentation Zen approach challenges the conventional wisdom of making “slide presentations” today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Based on research from the cognitive sciences, combined with principles of graphic design, visual communications, and the world of Zen aesthetics, Garr will dispel popular myths about what is an effective presentation and offer up effective alternatives and approaches for designing and delivering much better presentations.

The lessons in this talk are not about dressing up presentations or decorating slides, they are about understanding and embracing concrete design and delivery principles that will help make your presentations clear, powerful, and memorable.

The customer of yesterday focused on quality differentiation. The customer of today assumes quality as a given.

The new differentiators are beyond quality and usability, but is directly related to holistic aesthetic design consideration.

Designers bring a new level of "fit" to this new class of products and services. They imbue stories that engage and delight. Surrounding all this is depth, connectedness, and individual expression, that adds up to the "soul" of a design.

Achieving this level of design is hard work. But even more, it requires a rich and rigorous understanding of the make up of interaction design as the design of situations, and of behavior of products as they respond to human interfacing.

How to get there is through a rich understanding of design foundations as the core tools and language for communicating this holistic vision.

Let's look at what all this means practically for your product and services and explore them together in conversation.

Another dot com boom? Or really adding value to customers?

All manners of social media (e.g. user generated content) are now added to digital media.

These prolific web 2.0 additions are often costly and ill thought-through (if they are thought-through at all) and of little practical use or value to the customer.

So rather than sit back and ignore seemingly crazy social media, I say: Let’s educate the design and development world in constructive user research and user needs analysis.

Let’s teach them how to measure social media appropriately, using examples from the world of retail, media and electronics, and quantitative tools such as web analytics packages and surveys. Then we will see what’s pure crazy and what’s not!

Here's an explosion in "personal informatics": Services that surface information about you and your network to your advantage.

Reviewing visualisations like the Dopplr Personal Personal Annual Report, Matt Jones will examine how great UX design can maximize the services’ benefits and impact.

Jones will identify patterns and principles that work for power-users and new users alike, drawing on many other applications, devices, and services from the cutting edge of personal informatics.

Services are central to the economy and the service component of traditional products is increasing. Still; services and their development remain under-researched. When 800 Swedish service firms where asked (in 2008) what domains should receive more academic attention, the three most frequent answers were:

1. Methods for Service development
2. Service quality, and...
3. Customer relations. In the same survey customers were pointed out as the most important source of ideas for new services.

This presentation will highlight service development challenges and discuss how the field of user-centred design may overcome them. New methods for service development will be presented and illustrated by examples of their application. Moreover, the presentation will cover experiences from an ongoing project concerning Volvo's development of new services for the transportation market.

Why do users visit a website? Most likely it's for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design?

Delivering the right content to meet user needs requires attention throughout the process. It must be planned, analyzed, produced, edited, managed, and maintained.

This session will address how to integrate content strategy into the website design process, ensuring that the content that gets written is the content that's needed, and the content management system supports maintenance over time.

5 Guiding principles in co-creation and 5 co-creation cases from the practice of Fronteer Strategy

In this Rooftop Factory people will be engaged in an actual co-creation session, but then highly compressed. Rooftop is the name of the methodology we have been using for the last few years. We have experience in Co-creating with management teams of companies such as Heineken, Nokia and Philips. Can we do a similar process here with a group of individuals and Co-create a new vision on Co-creation? We will share our findings from the sessions we have been doing the last 6 years. We want to work with you on the next step in Co-creation. We will try to answer some questions that are very relevant right now, such as:

"Can Co-creation truly create new value?" "Is Co-creation just a hype or will it become a true program of change for companies and organisations?" "How should organisations deal with the complexities around Co-creation; can a company be too open?"

"In Co-creation, who will be the owner and beneficiary of the developed ideas?" "What is the future of Co-creation?"

What we normally do in one full day, we will now do in 3 hours. The group will be taken through this actual case from start to finish. All Rooftop exercises will be done, but ones that take 1 hour normally will now take 20 minutes. Feel the energy of co-creation and join the experiment. See how the proven Rooftop methodology is stripped from its niceties and works with the bare essentials. We will follow our standard steps in the process though:

Create a vision Find the biggest opportunities Develop new concepts Define the right approach

We hope to prove that even in a very short time frame people will have the feeling to be truly co-creating. Looking forward to seeing you.

Multitouch and other new interaction methods are about to explode on the market. Researchers and writers all over the world have been giving us inspirational ideas on how this will change the way we think about and use all kinds of devices. Having reached the social media tipping point, we're all experiencing how different the world looks when we all start behaving differently en masse.

As professionals, more and more of us working with interaction design will be expected to design for multitouch, multiuse and gestural interfaces. Many of the things we do today still works well in such a world, but we need to get aquainted with our new materials. What does it mean to design for large scale? Is there still a place for rapid prototyping, and how? What different ways are there to document gestures?

This workshop will be aimed at discussing a few scenarios of what is likely to be different when our personal information cloud is always present and easily accessible. We'll also get our hands dirty, trying out a few different interaction design tools for designing for large scale multitouch.

UX professionals are often left out of key conversations in the project, especially during initial strategy sessions, early requirements gathering, and the change control process. In part this is because of the perception - sometimes justified - that we always put user needs ahead of business needs and development concerns. Picture this as a three-way tug-of-war. If we pull too hard in the direction of the user, we risk appearing as rigid and unrealistic; but if we give in to conflicting business or development pulls too easily, the solution fails to meet key user needs. If we learn to balance these three different pulls to create a good, productive tension, we can have a greater impact on our projects and our companies. This workshop will discuss the concerns of the three types of advocates - user advocates, business advocates, and development advocates. We'll talk about tactics for maintaining a good tension between each so that the final solution is successful. In this session you will: Learn about the three roles and discuss how they're often represented on projects Understand key motivations for each role, which will help in future working relationships Discuss and practice tactics that will help with understanding when to pull harder and when to let up. Understand how UX professionals can bring valuable insights to team members and open up communication jams, using skills in facilitation and interaction design.

Learn how to use Expression Blend to design great user experiences, from concept to production, with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. See how Expression Blend makes design workflow faster, easier and richer, and explore how designers can lead the interactive experience throughout the design process.

Relationships are formed in the smallest moments and intimate details within each and every interaction, even between people and products. Paying attention to these details can make or break a product, or a company. And when the economy is bad, every edge counts. Interaction design can make the difference in survival times like now. Interaction with a product is far more than how it's used or how it behaves. It's about connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So what is the essence of your product? Is your product human or a machine? When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. Just another company, rigid, mechanical, cold. Yet when your products display a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human. In this session, we'll see examples of how humanity has been designed into products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. We'll discover how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

With the interoperability between the tools in Expression Studio and Visual Studio, Microsoft is enabling designers and developers to work together and in parallel in much more efficient ways than in the past, without losing either creativity or productivity.

In this session we will discuss and demonstrate options and tools to help you and your company succeed, faster and with better quality. You will also get an understanding of the compatibility between WPF and Silverlight, learn the relationship between WPF and the various subsystems of Silverlight including: XAML parsing and serialization, control instantiation, styling and templating, layout, rendering, and more. Also, learn how to build applications that fully exploit both Silverlight and WPF.

UX professionals are often left out of key conversations in the project, especially during initial strategy sessions, early requirements gathering, and the change control process. In part this is because of the perception - sometimes justified - that we always put user needs ahead of business needs and development concerns. Picture this as a three-way tug-of-war. If we pull too hard in the direction of the user, we risk appearing as rigid and unrealistic; but if we give in to conflicting business or development pulls too easily, the solution fails to meet key user needs. If we learn to balance these three different pulls to create a good, productive tension, we can have a greater impact on our projects and our companies. This workshop will discuss the concerns of the three types of advocates - user advocates, business advocates, and development advocates. We'll talk about tactics for maintaining a good tension between each so that the final solution is successful. In this session you will: Learn about the three roles and discuss how they're often represented on projects Understand key motivations for each role, which will help in future working relationships Discuss and practice tactics that will help with understanding when to pull harder and when to let up. Understand how UX professionals can bring valuable insights to team members and open up communication jams, using skills in facilitation and interaction design.

This workshop will offer insight on how to make development projects more efficient using agile methods, such as Scrum, and how to combine them with user experience methods.

We will share case studies from Valtech projects. We will discuss different ways of merging user experience and software development, difficulties that can occur, and the lessons we learned.

This workshop is for those who have knowledge of Scrum and agile software development and are curious about how to merge it with user experience.

Are you looking for new ways to bring design thinking and design practice into your daily practice as a user experience professional? Do you want to learn how great designers of all types get to that "new" idea without having to wait for divine inspiration? Do you think that "sketching" is only a tool left to those who have been formally trained to draw?

"Sketching for Interaction Design" is a 1-day seminar and workshop created to teach people what sketching really is all about, why it is powerful and how you can bring it into your daily practice as a User Experience Professional. In this class you'll learn how the great organizations of design and innovation use sketching in their daily practice. You will also gain practice in sketching and see why it is a distinctive tool from prototyping geared more towards idea generation than for testing and communication. It is both a tool for personal use, and a tool for group collaboration.

The course will contain these units:

• Defining sketching as something similar to but different from prototyping
• Placing sketching in the context of a larger design process
• General practice using drawing as a communication tool
• Class project working in teams
• Communicating concepts in interaction design
• Review period of team work
• Take away lessons, and next steps for people wanting to apply sketching to their practice

The course is geared towards people who are practicing interaction design and other user experience practices, but can be beneficial for anyone who is trying to apply core design thinking methods into their personal and business practices. No previous experience with drawing or sketching is required. The goal of this class is to bring the design tool of sketching for ideation and collaboration into your interaction design practice as an individual and a team member.

Becoming an effective User Experience practitioner already requires mastering a long list of skills. Just for starters, you have to be one part artist, one part software developer, and maybe one part peacemaker.

But if you really want to have the kind of influence on projects and products that your expertise deserves, you may also want to develop stronger sales skills.

To be clear, making the case for a design decision, process, or budget doesn’t necessarily involve delivering fancy presentations or having super human levels of charisma. It can also happen when, for example, you frame all of your design decisions in the context of the project’s business objectives--right from the beginning of your process.

Specific skills we’ll work on together in this workshop include: connecting design decisions to business goals, using statistics to make an ROI case, defending design decisions, and generating excitement. We’ll also look at some data points about the value of UX investments you can bring into your discussions. Finally, we’ll explore “Client Mind Control” (a little-known technique for serious UX professionals)

Participants are encouraged to bring current materials from their projects—together, we’ll see if we can increase the priority and budget of these initiatives.

We passionately believe that genuine user-centric solutions based on genuine user insights can empower, enrich and energize both people and brands. By relentlessly pursuing our philosophy, we have helped clients enhance the quality of life for millions of people all over the world. With a constantly increasing complexity in the world of products and services, we keep pushing our performance by evolving the way we work.

During this session we will give you a look into what we believe is the future of convergent design, based on real-life case studies and by interpreting the signs of the future trends. We also share our knowledge and experience within physical, cognitive and emotional ergonomics to be able to give you insights and tools for developing people driven innovation.

"With great power comes great responsibility”, Ben Parker couldn’t have said it better and it’s true in so many ways. In this session we will look upon some of the key success factors of great UI’s with Windows Presentation Foundation. We will also share some insight in where the platform and technology is headed and how we can prepare today!

Co-creation has been on everybody's mind. In practice though examples of co-creation are not commonplace. Where are the success stories?

At Fronteer Strategy we have been doing expert co-creation intensively with our clients. In projects varying from telecom, real estate development, foreign aid, beverages and consumer electronics we will show 5 cases how Co-creation can add tremendous value in any industry. We focus on Co-creation where lead users and experts join a pressure cooker for innovation we developed for our clients.

Understanding the nature of Co-creation is part of making it a success. We will present the 5 key principles to true Co-creation. Partly group psychology, partly common sense and most of all understanding what motivates people made us come up with those 5 mantras.

Forget the buzz word, start working with it!

Good news for user experience designers: even if the recession shrunk your research budget, you can still generate some of the same insights about user behavior by getting creative about how you use website analytics data. What's more, you'll have much more luck selling your ideas to clients and other stakeholders if you explain them in the context of analytics.

Of course, nowadays almost every internet team looks at website usage statistics on a regular basis. But most of the discussion is still about broad measures like “monthly visitors”, “repeat visitors”, “sign-ups”, “conversion”, and so on. In reality the tools have evolved to the point where you can quickly learn things about users you would usually need to get from qualitative research techniques (such as user interviews or usability studies).

We'll discuss a few situations where the analytics are sending a clear message about what the user wants or the performance of the current design. Finally we'll check out a few tricks for “humanizing” the numbers so they're easier to present to product design teams.

All those who participate in design, from interaction designers, to usability engineers, to IA masters, fall victim to the same kinds of challenges when trying to bring good design into the world. From politics, to hubris, to downright incompetence, what can we learn by confessing to, and examining the causes of, our failures? Berkun thinks we can learn everything, much more than studying our successes. This fun, interactive talk, explores why designers fail and offers advice on how to learn from and triumph in the face of these situations.