UX Week is SOLD OUT!
posted on August 17, 2010

UX Week 2010 is bursting at the seams and we are currently filled to capacity. If you missed your chance to snag a seat and would like to be added to the wait list please click here. Seats will become available if there are any last minute cancellations. If you want to follow the activity, follow #uxweek on Twitter or look for photos tagged uxweek2010 on Flickr. And if you did get a seat at UX Week, we'll see you soon!

Four new sessions added!
posted on June 23, 2010

If there’s one thing that’s hard for us as we program UX Week, it’s knowing when to stop tinkering with the speaker line up. We can stop whenever we want. Really. In the meantime, we just added four new sessions…

Want to get in on the smartphone app action but don’t know where to start? Suzanne Ginsburg, UX designer and author of Designing the iPhone User Experience (due out just before UX Week), is leading a half-day workshop on designing smartphone apps. She’ll take workshop attendees through an overview of the software and hardware that define the smartphone user experience and lead you through sketching and prototyping concepts and custom gestures, transitions, animations and sound to make your app shine.

Jamin Hegeman and Jared Cole, designers at Adaptive Path, provide an introduction to service design practice and methods in their half-day workshop, From Products to Services: A Service Design Crash Course. Participants will examine a familiar service, map the customer journey, create a service blueprint, and create solutions that support the overall goal of the service.

Rock Band is crucial to our sanity at Adaptive Path and we are thrilled to have Rock Band and Guitar Hero designer Joe Kowalski, now a graphic designer and user interface artist with Double Fine, hitting the main stage with his talk Video Games and the User Interface. Working as a user interface designer in the games industry presents some unique opportunities to engage players. So why are memorable interfaces a rarity? He’ll attempt to answer that question, and offer his perspective on the industry, show some of his work from major titles, and talk about what inspires him.

Christian Palino of Adaptive Path will talk about Eisenstein’s theory of montage and how it provides an analogous model for exploring the relationship of service touchpoints to the space between those touchpoints, and how users experience them both.

 

An interview with Kevin Cheng about comics, villains, heroes, and design…
posted on June 17, 2010

Kevin Cheng is the product manager at Twitter, and co-founder of the user experience web comic OK/Cancel and the online comic publishing network Off Panel Productions.

I met Kevin Cheng a few months back, at an IxDA SFRedux of Interaction10 here at Adaptive Path. We momentarily geeked out about how the things we design are increasingly blurring the boundaries between our digital and physical worlds, and the significant role that storytelling plays in quickly capturing and communicating concepts that could otherwise feel too abstract. Kevin has pioneered a super practical approach of using comics to do just this.

When I heard that Kevin was conducting a workshop at UX Week 2010 called, See What I Mean: How to Communicate with Comics, I jumped at the chance to interview him.

Click through HERE to read the interview.

Kendra Shimmell — kendra(at)adaptivepath.com

 

Three New Sessions Announced
posted on May 27, 2010

Mark Coleran, is a visual designer who has been designing and producing motion graphics for the film and television industries for the past 13 years. His clients and jobs have been as diverse as the BBC to Cartoon Network, creating titles and network identities, to the creation of computer screen graphics for feature films such as The Bourne Ultimatum, Deja Vu, The Island, Children of Men and Mission Impossible 3 amongst others.

He will wrap up day four of UX Week with his talk, The Reality of Fanasty in which he’ll examine why Fantasy user interfaces (FUI) looks the way it does, how it has evolved and the unique challenges and requirements that shape this unusual area of UI work.

Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network (ILN) and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy joins his colleague Chrisi Zuber, a nurse with a passion for design and Director of the Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente to talk about their work developing human-centered designs that positively impact the experience of Kaiser patients and the clinicians who care for them.

Sara Öhrvall, Senior Vice President, Research & Development, the Bonnier Group also hits the main stage on the last day of UX Week. She’ll walk us through what magazine reading of the (very near) future might look like in her talk The Mag+ Concept: The Silent Mode of Digital Magazine Reading.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

 

Leah Buley’s Index Card Interview with Dave Gray
posted on May 18, 2010

Adaptive Path has a brain crush on Dave Gray. He’s the founder of XPLANE, a compay that creates visualizations to clarify complex business problems. More importantly, Dave is that rare combination: super smart and super down to earth. A couple years ago, Dave did a presentation called Free the Facts, in which every slide is a scan of a handwritten index card. The cards start out simply, and get increasingly more detailed and fascinating as the presentation progresses. See? Super smart and super down to earth!

So when I heard that Dave would be presenting a workshop at UX Week 2010, I jumped at the chance to chat with him—via index card, natch. Below, Dave shares a little bit about knowledge games, which he’ll soon be releasing a book on. It’s called Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers, and you can pre-order it on Amazon. Of course, I want it now.

By the way, we learned last week that XPLANE has joined forces with Dachis Group. Big congratulations to Dave, and score for Dachis Group.

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

(You can read more about Empathy Maps and Business Model Canvas at gogamestorm.com and in Dave’s forthcoming book.)

Leah:

See and hear a lot more from Dave and Leah at UX Week. Use code NEWS when registering for 10% off the current price (which is $1,995 early bird, through May 31).

 

Three New Confirmed Speakers
posted on March 29, 2010

Award-winning cultural anthropologist, Michael Wesch, explores the effects of new media on society and culture and we’re thrilled to have him keynoting the last day of UX Week with a talk on Mediated Culture.

Kevin Cheng, splits his time between Twitter, where he is the product manager for the web client, and finishing his book “See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas With Comics”. He’ll be leading a full-day workshop on communicating with comics.

Chris Sandoval, a Lead in USAA’s Member Experience Management organization is going to tell us how USAA, a big, risk-averse, company in the finance and insurance space has embraced social media to improve the customer experience.

 

IDEO MyFord Touch Designers at UX Week
posted on March 22, 2010

Iain Roberts, a partner at IDEO and co-lead of its Chicago studio and Tasos Karahalios, a project leader and senior design engineer at IDEO join us at UX Week to talk about their collaboration with Ford Motor Company.

Ford and IDEO worked together on two major projects to conceive signature interface elements for all future Ford vehicles launching in 2010. The elements connect drivers with in-car technologies and let them stay connected to their digital lives outside the car. Five key features were reconsidered through extensive research, prototyping, engineering, and robust interaction design, a fast, iterative process that helped to accelerate innovation on Ford’s development end, also. Wanting to induce strong “vehicle love” among new Ford drivers—and deepen their devoted customers’ brand adherence—a team of IDEO and FORD designers and engineers focused on designing an interior information ecosystem that drivers would find attentive, approachable, easy to use, and would allow them to keep in touch with their busy lives.