Speakers

Leah Buley

Workshops: Good Design Faster, Day One (a two-day workshop)

Good Design Faster is a two-day workshop that helps you understand how to get ideas out of your head, onto paper, and into a prototype format with remarkable quickness. Because you’ll be working in groups, it’s best for everyone if you take the full two-day workshop.

Part One: Sketching for UX Desgin
You will learn the fundamentals of, wait for it…. sketching by hand. Sketching is a remarkably powerful tool, and you can learn the basics of sketching for user experience design in an afternoon!

This workshop will focus on helping you to become a more confident/better visual communicator by demonstrating simple drawing methods to improve your collaborative design processes.The format for this fast-paced workshop will be a balanced combination of demos, discussion and hands-on drawing practice. We’ll start the session by covering basic, beginner skills like straight lines, rectangles, line weight, color use and shading and move on to some lightweight techniques for drawing motion, people, hands, 3D space, page layout and visual narrative. All techniques will be focused on communicating interactions for web, desktop and mobile and include methods adapted from industrial design, comics and film production. You’ll finish the session with a portfolio of sketches, tips and new methods to feel confident drawing your ideas for your team and your stakeholders.

In this first part of the workshop you will:

* learn basic techniques and skills for sketching
* learn to draw elements specifically relevant to UX design
* experiment with creative storytelling for your ideas
* embrace the power of sketching to communicate clearer and faster

Part Two: Design Sprints and Sketchboards
Colleagues and clients always want results sooner. How can you deliver without compromising quality? Building on the sketching skills learned in Part One, we share Adaptive Path’s sketchboard method, an approach for exploring a variety of ideas before settling on one direction. This session will be a hands-on, fast-paced guide to quickly generating your own great experiences.

The skills to achieve good design faster are vital for any UX professional’s toolkit. They make it possible to explore a variety of ideas before settling on one direction. They’re a great antidote to the wireframe rut, for designers who find themselves perfecting their wireframes only to see them misinterpreted or unimplemented. And they’re all but essential for anyone whose team uses an agile methodology. This workshop is for anyone who wants to develop ideas and incorporate outside feedback more efficiently. Brandon will guide participants through a process that will get them sketching, sharing, and evolving better ideas right away.

You will learn:

* Techniques for rapid sketching and idea generation
* How to use sketchboards to share ideas and focus discussion on the right questions
* Best practices for eliciting quality feedback and working it back into the design
* Making sketchboards work for your situation

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Leah Buley is an Experience Designer for Adaptive Path. As someone interested in the potential of user experience design to help businesses make better decisions, she is dedicated to making this a reality within her own projects as well as for her clients. Leah has worked with organizations in a variety of industries, including financial, legal, telecom, and non-profit.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Leah was a user interface designer for Barclays Global Investors where she designed transactional financial systems, client-facing web sites, end-investor tools, and internal applications. It was here that Leah also championed firm-wide education and better integration of user experience design into the project lifecycle. Before Barclays Global Investors, Leah worked for New York-based interactive agencies Flat and Plural, as well as BMC, an information services company in Los Angeles. Leah started her career in design as an opinionated web developer.

Leah has a Master of Arts degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies from Barnard College. She is a member of both the American Society for Information Science and Technology, as well as the Information Architecture Institute.