Track overview

Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Architecture	Architecture	Java
.NET	.NET	Agile
Java	Agile	Smart phone
Smart phone	Excellence	Excellence
Excellence	Test	Test
Collaboration	User Experience	Cool Languages
Web	Entrepreneurship	Web
Xtra(ck)	Xtra(ck)	Windows 8

Track: User Experience

Enter Userverse: This year's conference has the user at its center. And apparently so has the world. New innovation platforms that interface with technology including Kinect, Playstation Move, Wand as well as new touch devices and screens sizes are flooding the market. There are Apps for everything imaginable. With this in mind one can no longer overlook the user experience. It has become the main selling point and a poor user experience will kill a great idea in a world wide minute. User experience at this year's conference will focus on how to collaborate and focus your work to really shine in today's market and with the world at large. User Experience will highlight what's needed to stand out in this fierce application market and how can you keep your users spellbound.

Thursday

10:00-10:50

How hard could it be? What’s User Experience is and isn’t

User Experience is the newish general term we give to user research, user interface design, usability engineering, and a few other sub-specialties. In the past UX work fell to a select few specialized roles – roles that didn’t fit well in many processes, especially agile processes. Over the last decade there’s been an evolution towards more whole-team thinking and a wealth of new practices that involve everyone in UX design. The session will help developers and others understand what UX is and isn't, how UX practice fits into agile process today, and why it was such a challenge to get it to fit in the first place.

Jeff Patton

Jeff makes use of over 15 years experience with a wide variety of products from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records to help organizations improve the way they work. Where many development processes focus on delivery speed and efficiency, Jeff balances those concerns with the need for building products that deliver exceptional value and marketplace success.

11:10-12:00

Participation in Mixed Reality

This talk will focus on users with disabilities and their experiences in a more and more mixed reality. Drawing on and showing examples from several projects on games, tangible computing and mobile interaction I will try to pinpoint human and technological factors that can help or hinder users from participating in fun and challenging activities. As part of this, I will also show how we have done to engage children with intellectual disabilities as co-designers in our development and design processes.

Per-Olof Hedvall

Per-Olof Hedvall is a researcher in Rehabilitation Engineering and Design at the Department of Design Sciences at Lund University, where he leads the research group CERTEC. His research deals with accessibility and participation. He is particularly interested in new interactive communication media and new forms of augmentative and alternative communication that enable the interaction between children with disabilities and their families. He has also worked extensively on how commercial computer games can be adapted so that people with disabilities can also play them.

13:00-13:50

Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography

Typography in digital experiences is unavoidable, and for years it was a fight we mostly lost. Today, however, technology is on our side! High resolution screens, an expanding library of open fonts and new flexibility in nearly every UI technology have made digital typography more fun and more interesting than ever. We'll cover all aspects of working with digital type: everything from choosing complimentary typefaces to licensing, rendering and a system for layout and sizing. We all love type. Come to this talk to learn why!

Robby Ingebretsen

Robby Ingebretsen is a user experience designer and developer with a singular purpose: making great ideas real. As founder and principal of Pixel Lab, Robby helps clients make stuff -- especially the sort of stuff that gets made from the unique full-bodied blend of a little design love and little engineering kung-fu.

14:20-15:10

Design Composition for Developers

This workshop introduces you to composition, one of the most fundamental principles of design. The workshop is tuned especially for people who have some background in coding. If you are a developer who is working more frequently with designers, evolving to become a designer yourself, or simply a manager who needs to make sure that both roles work smoothly together, this session is an invaluable opportunity to jump-start the process.

Robby Ingebretsen

15:40-16:30

Winning the long term user - with analytics

Very often when developers think about user experience and user satisfaction we focus on short term issues. Of course it is fascinating and useful to create a great, easy-to-learn environment for new users. But it is our long-term users who become champions of the product and can be our most valuable customers. How often do we think about the needs of advanced users who work with the product every day? How do we keep them productive? And how do we keep them interested, challenged and engaged?

Donald Farmer

Donald Farmer is the QlikView Product Advocate, working with customers and partners to establish QlikView as the leading solution for Business Discovery. Donald has over twenty years experience in analytics and data management. In that time he has worked as a consultant, in startups and as a leader of Microsoft’s BI product teams. He is a speaker at many international events on business intelligence, data integration and data management, blogger, and author of several books.

17:00-17:50

From Mac to iPhone to iPad (And Back)

Bringing an application from the desktop to a touch device, or vice versa, is never simple. You must reconsider every last interaction from scratch. But the underlying data, and the user's mental model, need to remain the same. Learn how we brought our full-featured Mac productivity apps to iPhone and iPad, and made them feel like they were meant to be there all along. And even better, hear about the lessons we learned on iOS and that we are now bringing back to the desktop.

William Van Hecke

Bill is User Experience Lead at the Omni Group, one of the world’s most accomplished and affable Mac and iOS developers. His is the nebulous job of making software civilized enough to bring out in public. This involves lots of squinting six inches away from the Cinema Display at 3200% zoom and consulting etymology dictionaries to properly label buttons. It often ends up entwined with documentation, marketing, quality assurance, customer support, and Dungeon Mastering too.