Lightning sessions, part of our main program, are 20 minutes long and jam-packed with content; you'll find insight on topics that are relevant, enlightening, and magical. Click here for the detailed schedule!

our lightning sessions include:

Accessibility is Not a Checklist

Jimmy Chandler

As more and more people live longer, the number of people with disabilities will continue to rise. The good news is that web applications can enhance the lives of people with disabilities. The bad news is that many applications are poorly designed for this increasingly significant audience.

Too often, people approach accessibility only when required to, and simply by looking at a checklist. But accessibility is not a checklist; accessibility happens by considering it from the beginning, understanding industry best practices, and by taking a user-centered design approach. This means knowing how people with various disabilities will interact with your product in a way that is successful.

Learn how to incorporate accessibility in a cost-effective manner into your projects. Jimmy Chandler will demonstrate 10 methods in 20 minutes for improved accessibility that all interaction designers can use right away. These tips will help you enhance the user experience for those without disabilities, including those using mobile devices.

At the end of this session, you will understand how to include people with disabilities in usability studies, what the most important principles of accessibility are, how to look out for the biggest pitfalls, and where to go and what to do next.

Applying Film Making Tools to Interaction Design

Adam Connor

When it comes to setting the stages upon which individuals build experiences, Designers can look to a number of industries for lessons and inspiration. The film industry, over its long life, has at times both excelled and fallen short of honoring its audience with solid material and engaging stories.

Well-made films have shown us that they can drive engagement and interaction. The marketing world has long used this to its advantage. Films succeed in evoking responses and engaging the audiences only when there is a combination of well-written narrative and effective storytelling techniques. It's the film maker's job to put this combination together, and to do so they've developed an extensive set of tools and techniques that allow them to focus (and disrupt) attention, emphasize information, foreshadow and produce the many elements that together comprise a well-told story.

We're responsible for creating products that aren't just easy to use, but that people desire to use. Our designs should drive users to want to interact with them. It stands to reason that the methods being used in the film industry to communicate with and engage audiences can also be used in the interaction design space.

The purpose of this presentation is to extend the current topic of the use of stories in design and focus on the technical aspects used in film to communicate with audiences. We'll look at some tools used by film makers such as: cinematic patterns, beat sheets, storyboards and editing techniques. We'll consider how, why and when they're used and which aspects of these tools we can make use of as Designers.

Beautiful Interactions: Codifying Aesthetics In Interaction Design

Callie Neylan

In established design fields — i.e., architecture, graphic design, and industrial design — much has been written about what makes design under these classifications beautiful. Common design elements such as form, line, balance, unity, variety, rhythm, contrast, texture and color have been analyzed and presented to design students for decades, resulting in codified visual languages that constitute good design.

But as system interactions that span two or more of these older disciplines become an increasing part of our everyday lives, what of the relatively new field of interaction design, the beauty of which is not generally confined to the visual? What are the design elements that make an interaction beautiful and to what human senses do they appeal? In what ways are these beauty-forming elements similar or different from other design disciplines? Which ones are new? Which are shared?

Through cross-analysis of these related design fields and general notions of beauty throughout the world, I will define what makes an interaction beautiful and propose a theoretical framework for codifying design elements in interaction design.

Computer Engineer Barbie: How Interaction Design can entice a new generation of women

Cheryl Platz

Why is it that computer science curriculums in the United States have such a hard time attracting and keeping prospective female students? Many university computer science curriculums focus on the theoretical rather than the practical applications of the science. Many of the women I've encountered are looking for something more hands-on, with more direct social benefit. Interaction Design as a field hits the right balance of technology, social benefit, and creativity — but our chosen career is still relatively unknown outside the walls of this convention! This session will discuss trends in computing education, and suggest outreach activities to get the word out and spark the imaginations of the next generation of career women (and men).

Consume Consume Consume

Peter Knocke

Have we lost balance in life? Our daily routine moves in hyperdrive with content creation, curation, and consumption at every step. It is now possible to shoot, edit, and upload a video before your morning coffee, yet it is also possible to spend an entire 8 hour shift without leaving the warm glow of Google reader. Designers and developers now have the tools to build highly influential devices and systems which users can be defenseless against. From the eyes of our clients, we are designing beautiful systems where users pleasantly consume glorious amounts of rich content, yet how is this impacting our overall lives? We are now only a misguided click from falling down a rabbit hole of continual consumption. As we witness more and more people being constantly connected to at least one form of media, we must consider the ugly side of our beautiful designs.

I wish to analyze the balance of consumption, curation, and creation throughout history and will attempt to determine what an ideal balance is. I will then estimate when, where, and how today's designs have influenced our everyday balance of life. Finally I will instruct upon how to design systems which encourage a positive change towards a healthy balance in life. As a community that prides itself upon a building a better world, it's time to turn hyperdrive off, and take a much needed step back to ensure that we are moving in a positive direction.

Design for Evil: Ethical Design

Kaleem Khan

Interaction design and the broader user experience design field have no ethics guidelines. Practitioners take shortcuts due to time and budget pressures, participate in questionable business practices and projects, and act without considered thought. These all have a direct impact on ethical lapses and opens the door to unintentional mistreatment of our clients and peers, participants in research studies, and the people who use our designs. In contrast, other design disciplines (architecture, graphic design, industrial design) and social sciences (anthropology, psychology, sociology) have long-established ethics frameworks. Behavior of professionals and how work product is handled and used are shaped by ethical principles and practices. This ethical imperative aims to protect stakeholders' welfare and govern how practitioners treat them. Issues and scenarios discussed include: Privacy/publicy, locus of control, default choices, and digital, physical, social, and emotional aspects of our practice. This session is recommended for anyone who wishes to address the ethical challenges we face in day-to-day practice, and begin thinking about how to best bring design ethics to our work.

Photoshop.com 2.0 - the making of an experience ecosystem

Ethan Eismann and Geoff Dowd

Photoshop.com debuted three years ago with mixed results: customers liked the online editing and sharing tools but also wanted access to information and inspiration, as well as faster performance. Today, Photoshop.com attracts more than 3 million unique visitors per month, and provides a mix of tips, techniques, stories, and online photo tools for a diverse audience. This presentation tells the story of how the Adobe XD (Experience Design) team, using a design-driven strategy, collaborated with engineering and marketing on a top-to-bottom redesign of photoshop.com. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at how we drove a customer-centric design concept to market. We'll also describe our practices for designing the ecosystem of web pages, web apps, and mobile apps at the heart of Photoshop.com.

Design for the Developing World

Susan Wyche

As designers explore how to appropriately develop technology for users in the developing world, they must reconsider the interaction styles embedded in the applications and devices they create. In this talk, I present results from a study examining how professionals living and working in Nairobi, Kenya, use computers in their everyday lives. There are two takeaways from this presentation. First, I describe the constraints participants encountered when using technology in an infrastructure-poor setting. These constraints are limited bandwidth, high costs, differing perceptions of responsiveness, and threats to security. Second, I use these findings to critically evaluate the "access, anytime and anywhere" construct shaping the design of future technologies. I present an alternative vision called "deliberate interactions" — a planned and purposeful interaction style that involves offline preparation — and describe how technology can be designed to support this online usage behavior.

Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the Nasa Space program and Beyond

Michael Meyer

Making sense and gaining advantage through a pragmatic understanding from the front lines of the Web — using the lessons of history from the Roman spread of civilization to the Nasa Space Progam and through to an insider's view of the design world over the last 10 years.

The danger we face as people —designers, leaders, strategists, team members —is that as we grow larger, we can get farther and farther away from each other, and ultimately farther away from the people we design for.

Learn from a leader in bringing a dedicated business sense to the Design world about the power of proximity in creating satisfaction and achievement in both a personal and professional arena.

Using his own unique path from US Navy Nuclear Engineer to Harvard MBA to leadership roles at IDEO, Frog Design and Adaptive Path, Michael will frame both the business and organizational imperatives for the new millennium, based on a renewed sense of team-building, expression and client understanding — and the maximum impact that we can gain from applying our internal best practices to our external audiences.

What are the structures we need to put in place to design and maximize the closeness of designers, engineers, users, and business decision makers — using the tools and technologies we have now? If we don't stay true to our core, how can we design for others?

Designing Immersive Online Environments for Kids

Debra Levin Gelman

Imagine a brilliant yet egocentric group of people with highly established social hierarchies, fickle brand affinities, a strong sense of right and wrong, limited powers of deduction, and more creativity than you can possibly comprehend. Now imagine that you have to design a virtual world for these folks that they'll not only be able to use, but frequent, praise, evangelize, and maybe even help build.

Oh, yeah, and most of these people can't read.

Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of designing online immersive environments for kids.

Fun with non-digital solutions

Scott Geoffrey Newson

This session will show a variety of non-digital solutions to interaction problems, i.e. that did not involve making a website or coding an app. These are found solutions, not my own, and come from a variety of sources. For example:

• Encouraging community members to send texts about crime and problems in the community to the local police. (Greater Manchester Police, UK)
• Creating jobs in town councils for specific roles such as 'waste strategy awareness manager', who interact with community members to provide and collect information (various town Councils, UK)
• Using pets to keep seniors active and social. (Personal family; external research)
• Providing community supported agriculture boxes to undergraduate university residences. (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

By demonstrating a variety of successful solutions to problems, the goal is to broaden the pallet of tools interaction designers consider. This is not to suggest that digital solutions are inferior, but to demonstrate a variety of approaches and to initiate discussion around how different approaches might be appropriate for different situations.

This would be most interesting to individuals working for clients and looking for solutions to existing problems, particularly those working for community/government clients interested in social innovation. The specific examples might be less interesting to theorists and artists, but they might also benefit from discussing a variety of solutions to interaction problems.

growBot Garden: The Co-Design of Alternative Agricultures

Carl DiSalvo

Over the past 100 years, design had played a significant role in advancing agri-business by producing products, systems, and services that support large-scale corporate farming. The question we ask is, Can design now play a role in shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services and systems would need to be designed that shift? How can the technologies of automation and monitoring that support large-scale corporate farming be redesigned for local small-scale agriculture? The growBot Garden project explores these questions by bringing together interaction designers, farmers and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture?

The growBot Garden project is structured around a series of public and participatory design workshops that draw from practices of co-design design, critical design, tactical media and hacking. In these workshops, people come together to collaboratively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible, alternative, agricultural futures. These representations and prototypes are documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages that might emerge at the intersection of technology and agriculture.

In this lightening session we will present the growBot Garden project, calling attention to both it's specific successes and failures, and the broader challenges and opportunities of melding co-design and interaction design in the context of sustainable agriculture. Attendees will be inspired, and too, will come away with a case-study of socially-engaged interaction design they can extend to their own projects.

Healthcare interfaces: How interaction design can help fix medicine

Dave Cronin

We find ourselves at a critical moment in the evolution of healthcare. The progress of medical science means that people can now overcome many previously fatal and debilitating conditions, and we know enough for most people on the planet to live long, healthy lives. But we are not yet achieving this dream: even people who have access to healthcare are not universally enjoying the kind of outcomes science suggests they should, and the cost of healthcare has been rising quickly, to the point it is in danger of being unsustainable, on a personal and global level.

Watching the public debate, it's easy to see this as a policy issue, but the politicians, doctors and insurers could use a hand in the imagination department. Many of the biggest opportunities to improve healthcare have to do with interfaces and interactions. Some of these interfaces and interactions have to do with onscreen GUI's, and some are between people and institutions. Almost all of them stand to benefit from the kind of holistic, imaginative problem-solving designers can help with.

In this talk, I'll briefly frame the big opportunities for interaction designers to help revolutionize healthcare, from encouraging healthy behavior by individuals, to increasing the reach and impact of healthcare institutions, to improving the way care is delivered by those institution. The bulk of the talk will focus on design strategies for this latter area, using examples from work I've been involved in as well as from the broader industry. Topics will include clinical decision support, knowledge-enabled workflow management, treatment and other point-of-care interfaces, and how systems can better enable the practice of evidence-based medicine.

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds

Lindsay Moore & Austin Brown

There has been a historical divide between human-centered design for the physical world — considered the domain of industrial designers and engineers — and the digital world — the domain of user experience designers, information architects, and human-computer interaction specialists.

We are entering an era of ubiquitous computing where digital experiences will no longer be limited to desktop computers and mobile devices and will seamlessly integrate into everyday objects and activities. As this intersection between technology and the physical world becomes more central to our everyday lives, there is a need for a new, cross-disciplinary approach where industrial and digital user experience designers look to each other for input and to create new standards.

Based on their experience and backgrounds in both industrial design and user experience design, Austin and Lindsay will demonstrate how they've redesigned three everyday objects based on the combined disciplines of industrial and digital interaction design.

From this process, they will demonstrate the design aspects that these two disciplines can learn from one another, such as:

• Using affordances to help users understand how to interact with an interface
• Providing feedback about what a system is doing or how an interface is reacting to an input or action
• Using mappings and mental models to enhance understanding and learnability
• Using data visualization to increase understanding and motivate behavior
• Using gaming models to incentivize participation/use and to increase user enjoyment
• Using joy or moments of delight to help users build a relationship with a product or grow into a product through exploration

Redefining Personalization as Real-time Conversation

Cindy Chastain

About 9 months ago, I started a fairly innocent task of creating an experience strategy for a personalization initiative introduced by our client, a major telecom service company. As would be expected, the client's initial focus was primarily on marketing opportunities: getting the best offer in front of the right person at the right time. But as we began formulating a strategy, we saw an opportunity to rethink what it meant to have a personalized brand, product and shopping experience. Where we landed, very simply, was with a deeper, more robust idea of conversation: dynamic, real-time, transparent, social, multi-channel and controllable. We wanted to create an individualized (not merely personalized) experience that recognizes desires, anticipates needs and provides utility, real value and service to the customer. But how could it be done? What would it do for the company? What would be needed to support it?

This presentation will ask more questions than give answers. Rather than give you a reveal of Everything We Learned, a fully-baked case study, or prescriptions for design this presentation will meditate on some issues that have arisen in the midst of designing for cross-channel personalization, issues that will have implications on our design future.

Introducing IA, ID and UX into New Media Pedagogy, Journalism and Content Publishing

Steven Johnson

Hopes and dreams now pinned to the iPad notwithstanding, the publishing industry in general — and traditional newspaper journalism in particular — remains in a state of crisis.

This session describes how principles of IA, ID and UX must be on the agenda for journalism schools and old media bastions looking to effectively create and distribute content online and across multiple platforms.

Classic divisions of labor, print prejudices, institutional inertia and ivory tower thinking are no longer viable, as content producers both large and small struggle to remain relevant and profitable.

As the paradigm shifts beneath them, content publishers will need to not only embrace, but also fully understand concepts and processes that most new media professionals now take for granted.

Finally, this session shares theory and practice focused on connecting Information Architecture to the business needs and Interaction Design to the customer needs for content sites, with a special focus on the user experience of news and information sites.

Leaning Back With NPR: How We Created A Relaxing Experience For The iPad

Scott Stroud

This is the story of a radio company returning to its roots: enlightening and entertaining people in the comfort of their living room (or wherever they roam). When Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iPad, he was seated, lounging in a leather armchair. Our challenge at NPR was to design an app that fulfilled the promise of a lean-back experience on a transformational new platform. What you'll learn:

• How to fight back the zombies that are your conventional design patterns
• How to satisfy multiple user goals (sifting, seeing, reading, listening) without sacrifice
• How to limit trade-offs and kill the fear of an impossible deadline
• How to work like a start-up inside an established organization
• How to reflect the core of what your product offers directly in its facial features
• How innovating on new platforms can influence legacy products
• How to thrill the most observant, discerning folks. (In our case, that's people like Robert Siegel, Ari Shapiro, and Sylvia Poggioli.)

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users

Stephen Anderson

Yes, business applications can be made fun and gamelike. No, points, levels and badges are not the way to create sustained interest.

While many sites have added superficial gaming elements to make interactions more engaging, the companies that "get it" have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again.

So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will share common patterns from game design, learning theories, and neuroscience to reveal what motivates—and demotivates—people over the long haul.

Macro vs. Micro

Kalani Kordus & Karl Adam

With today's ever advancing technologies—better tools, frameworks, libraries— software/web development is becoming increasingly faster in many regards. Yet in large companies, the processes for designing, developing and deploying software/web products remains cumbersome. To a great extent, the processes have remained the same for nearly a decade, and are very slow. On the other hand, smaller companies (startups) are able to go from inception to deployment in very little time. They are able to iterate and experiment with new features sometimes on a daily basis. Can large companies learn from small company processes, and vice versa?

Kalani Kordus and Karl Adam will juxtapose their large company (yahoo!), large team experience with their small company (smudgeproof), small team adventure. Their current design/development process—a mashup of traditional and progressive techniques—is akin to musical improvisation, Dirty Jobs and UFC cage fighting.

Making mistakes fun: Game mechanics are not a panacea, but they are kinda useful!

Paris Buttfield-Addison

If you can't quite make every type of user mistake impossible, then you should at least make them fun, right? Game mechanics and game design techniques have been a much proliferated meme in the UX, IxD, and design worlds as of late (for varying definitions of 'late'). Touted as a 'solution' to the challenge of motivating certain behavior in users, or making experiences more engaging, sadly these elements of the game development world are often blindly applied without finesse or elegance - akin to to hitting the user over the head with a colorful hammer.

In an effort to put this right, and help correct the flaws in the application of game mechanics that our team was seeing over and over again, we put together this 10 Step Plan to borrowing from the world of game design when considering your interaction and user interface design. Game design techniques aren't applicable to every interaction design situation, but when they are they can make the experience that much more compelling, sticky and entertaining.

Learn when, and when not to consider game design and mechanics, and how best to leverage them when appropriate. Learn why game mechanics aren't just a set of interrelated feedback loops (with a heavy set of rules) and see how to integrate classic mechanics, such as collection and feedback, as well more interesting elements such as obstacles, difficulty, competitions and mini games. Finally, learn how and when to use the most interesting game mechanic of all: rewards. Oh, and most importantly: learn how to stay true to the interaction you're designing without turning it into an actual game.

This session is about putting the heart and soul of game design into IxD, and using it to focus the well-meaning intention of games in the first place: making stuff more fun! This session is for everyone.

Marketing is not a 4 letter word

Megan Grocki

Mention "marketing" to most design professionals and their thoughts turn to bloated ad campaigns based on broad conclusions drawn from dated demographic research. Marketing has been perceived as manipulative, pushy and greasy. It's that breathless, in-your-face infomercial or the annoying guy calling you at dinner. Some traditional marketers have given the craft of marketing a bad name.

But a new strain of marketing is less about manipulation and deception, and more about two-way conversations, transparency and personalization. It's about building something that people actually want to use, or writing a blog post that 200 people comment on.

The old mindset has been that designers craft the product & marketers peddle the product. Today, effective marketers and designers both build loyalty, trust, perceived credibility and meaningful experiences. This directly affects profitability, retention, satisfaction and word-of-mouth recommendations.

As designers venture further into creating evocative experiences, the line between design and marketing blurs even more. Now great marketing - and, yes, there is such a thing! - comes from truly understanding who your users/customers are and what they want/need to do. Throw in deep understanding of their emotional triggers and cognitive expectations and "marketing research" starts to sound a lot like design research.

We remember the TV ads that make us cry - marketers count on that. But designers know that products that deliver a compelling and elegant experience stand out from the crowd because they evoke and sustain emotion from the user. Great marketing, like great design, goes for our hearts as well as our heads.

Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown Up Devices

Nina Walia

The "pass-back effect" — when parents hand their mobile device to kids in the backseat or whenever they're on-the-go — creates unique challenges to optimize kid-friendly mobile apps and educational opportunities within the constraints of devices designed for grown-ups. I'll discuss challenges & solutions to address this diverse & growing niche audience, as well as our usability testing and educational efficacy findings. The intended audience are those interested in design for mobile interfaces and kids educational games.

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web

Albert Shum

How should UI designers bring to life their ideas for mobile experiences? Should we think in terms of standalone apps on a platform or also for web flexibility? How do you integrate the user's experience to flow seamlessly between Apps and the Web? When developing Windows Phone 7, our team created a design language codenamed Metro which uses content, typography and motion to define its visual identity. The Metro principles can be used to develop integrated apps on devices as well as beautiful web experiences. For example, you can take pictures with your phone's camera and immediately go see them on the web without losing context making the experience feel personal, relevant and always connected. The focus on the user's content with our signature motion and type helps unify the experience regardless of how and on which platform it was built.

Scandalous Interaction

Tim Wood

Designers have grown complacent — overly dependent on anachronistic design patterns to provide ready-made solutions for the design problem at hand. In many cases this complacency is exacerbated by process, schedule or resource constraints that have always been a factor in preventing designers from truly innovating for users. Additionally, the pressure to design a 'usable' system often prevents designers from taking risks and exploring superior solutions than what may be found by using traditional 'off the self' GUI widgets.

The lost relevance of these common patterns is clouding the future of interaction design and creating a barrier to well-designed products. This clouding effect can manifest as 'complacency artifacts' that appear in the design solutions we create when we do not apply the appropriate degree of design diligence. To create new solutions that are engaging, relevant and usable, interaction designers must understand the mechanisms of control logic underlying commonly used GUI widgets.

Armed with an understanding of the abstraction of control logic, designers can identify their own complacency artifacts and begin formulating new and differentiated interaction models that provide value to clients and end users alike.

While it may seem scandalous to reject design orthodoxy, we are finding ourselves working with an increasingly unconstrained medium with limitless possibilities, so let’s bring scandal back to design and reject the limitations of the past. It makes things far more interesting!

Tacky and Proud: Brazil's Tecnobrega Audiences

Ana Domb

This talk will present the innovation process, the implementation of participatory culture and the appropriation of technologies as it is experienced in Tecnobrega, Brazil's "Cheesy Techno". This music turned many conventions of the mainstream music industry upside down. Its musicians decided to forgo copyright in favor of allowing their music to circulate (and mutate) freely. Today, in a city with very limited economic resources, Tecnobrega is a thriving, commercially viable, industry. The genre's audiences, not only assist in the circulation of content, but through their socializing (on and off-line), they create and trade symbolic capital that directly affects the popularity, and consequently the perception of value, of various parts of the industry. Tecnobrega's commercial success relies as much on the non-monetary contributions of Tecnobrega audiences and fans as it does the market forces that shape the production and distribution of cultural goods. A good part of its legitimate revenue, for instance, is drawn from sales through 'pirate' street vendors and of 'unprofessional' live recordings. Similarly, Tecnobrega's equipes — the groups super-fans of the genre organize themselves into — eventually see financial rewards for their proselytizing and evangelizing of the culture.

Brazil's has become an increasingly relevant market; this case study offers a glimpse into its proactive, heterogeneous and creative audiences. It is the result of ethnographic research I conducted while at the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT.

"You already know how to use it": The Neuroscience of Usability

Charles Hannon

Dopamine is released in our brains when we recognize a pattern that our past experiences have taught us will lead to achieving our goals. It is not the achievement alone that produces the dopamine reward; it is the detection of patterns that we think will lead to success that first triggers the chemical. “False positives”—instances where we get the shot of dopamine but then do not achieve our goals-- are frustrating, but they lead to better learning about which patterns will lead to reward, and which will not. This sets up an interesting dilemma: How can designers introduce something totally new, yet familiar? This discussion should appeal to audiences interested in connections between cognitive/linguistic theory and interaction design, illustrated with real-world examples.

The Rhythm of Interaction

Peter Stahl

Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask a user to scan a list of items, then click to select one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. The best such experiences induce a state of flow, in Csikszentmihalyi's sense, during which users get into such a groove that the mechanics of operating the program disappear, allowing users to focus entirely on meaning. Flow is associated with increased learning and positive feelings. Great flows can even cause users to regard the interaction itself as intrinsically rewarding. (Wouldn't that be awesome?)

As guardians of dynamic behavior, interaction designers own rhythm. Yet our work practice lacks appropriate tools and vocabulary. How do you portray a groove in a wireframe, flow chart, or PowerPoint deck? This is becoming critically important as things like animation, hover responses and video make their way into more and more interactive experiences. This is in your future.

This session will dive into how we can design pacing, tempo and rhythm into our interfaces, with examples from the presenter and (even better!) the audience. This could include adapting techniques from animation and movies, game systems, audio interfaces, music and choreography.

The visual interface is now your brand

Nick Myers

Like it or not, more and more interactions between companies and their customers are occurring via an interface. Careful consideration of the interaction and visual design is of paramount importance to any company wishing to grow their customer base or loyalty. The importance of visual interface design has risen sharply since the introduction of smart phones and tablets and is becoming ever more complex. Executives now care more than ever about the visual interface and what it means to their brand. So how does one stand out?

This talk will help designers create visual interfaces for dense, complex products and make their experiences memorable and useful. The talk highlights some of the key differences between more traditional visual design mediums and designing for the interface. It will also discuss how to design a unique visual interface but put the needs of users first, how to add surprise and delight to critical moments of the experience, and how craftsmanship and attention to detail can set you apart in a visually complex medium.

Up with Complexity! Challenging Users for Fun and Profit

Josh Clark

The tried-and-true "Don't Make Me Think" principle doesn't always hold. Discover how carefully placed friction in an interface can actually improve user experience by encouraging people to slow down and think. Complexity itself isn't bad; the trick is making complexity seem uncomplicated. Explore examples of websites and mobile apps that incorporate friction without frustration, with elegantly simple interfaces that nevertheless deploy complex interactions to involve users, prevent errors, improve data collection, and create more immersive experiences.

This is an intermediate talk aimed at designers and information architects, and the goal is to show how simplicity and complexity can live in harmony in the same interface to improve user experience.

I'm the author of "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly Media, 2010) and "Best iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly Media, 2009). I'm a 15-year designer and developer now specializing in mobile app design and user experience. My outfit Global Moxie offers workshops and design services to help creative companies create tapworthy mobile apps.

What do you do, anyway? - Describing IxD to the Outside World

Carl Alviani

In the time that I've worked with interaction designers and written about the IxD field, I've noticed a consistent discrepancy between the discussions that occur within the profession, and the impressions of those outside it. Interaction designers tend to have excellent communication skills when it comes to any topic other than interaction design.

This is a real problem for the profession, which is missing opportunities to extend its influence and utility by communicating how valuable it is. It's an even bigger problem for designers outside of IxD, who continually reinvent the wheel when they fail to realize that many of today's design problems are, in fact, the bread and butter of Interaction Design.

This session presents IxD as seen from the outside, starting with 10-15 quotes and/or video clips of non-interaction designers attempting to describe the value of IxD and the skillset needed to pursue it. It then summarizes these external perceptions (as well as my own) and contrasts them with the dialogs within IxDA and among acquaintances in the Portland IxD community. It concludes with suggestions for narrowing thisdiscrepancy through the use of metaphor, familiar terminology and example-driven storytelling.