We are planning an IAS09/IxD09 Redux! We have invited a number of fantastic people in the UX community from DC, Richmond, Philly and NYC to come down to the nations capital for a half day presenting condensed versions of their talks. There will be structured and unstructured discussions and networking to boot.

Some of the rocking speakers will include:

Todd Zaki Warfel: Sketching & Prototyping: Rapid Design Techniques

Twitter: @zakiwarfel

Bio: Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal design researcher at Messagefirst, has been designing interactive products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included fortune 500 companies like AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, as well as smaller companies like Numara and rPath. An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and member of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe.

His upcoming book, Practical Prototyping (Rosenfeld Media) will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool and show you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. Anticipated publication is in 2009.

Jared Spool: Revealing Design Secrets from the Amazon

Twitter:@jmspool

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

Bio: Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

Olga Howard: Making the Case for Social Networks in Organizational Settings

Twitter: @olgahow

Why should your company/organization use social networking tools within the organizaiton? I’ll answer this and other tricky questions.

Bio: Olga Howard is an independent user experience architect. She has helped large and small companies including, MTV, PBS, Martha Stewart Online, and more. As a community strategist, Olga helps clients create organic, healthy, and successful environments. As an information architect and usability consultant, Olga has been developing processes and tools that allow for faster and less expensive information architecture with high quality results.

URL: Social Networks in Organizational Settings

Whitney Hess: Evangelizing Yourself: You Can’t Change the World If No One Knows Your Name

Twitter: @whitneyhess

Bio: Whitney Hess is an independent user experience designer based in New York City. She helps make stuff easy and pleasurable to use. She is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and UX consultant for boxee, among other startups, agencies and major corporations. Whitney writes about improving the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain and can pretty much always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess.

Livia Labate: The User Experience Health Check: A Measure a Day Keeps The Redesign Away

Twitter: @livlab

The UX Health Check allows UX professionals and their collaborators to introduce metrics of success and benchmarks to their product and service design decision-making, from the most strategic to the most tactical aspects. Measures of success that qualify and quantify user experience efforts are scarce and not widely adopted. The UX Health Check approach introduces a common language for UX professionals to measure how direct investments in improving the user experience result in concrete outcomes. The session will provide a summary of the approach with the goal of getting the audience interested in giving it a try. Once you go Health Check you never go back.

Bio: Livia Labate is a use experience designer, currently Principal of Information Architecture and User Experience Design for Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia. She volunteers on the board of the Information Architecture Institute and can be found wondering about where the UX practice is headed at I Think Therefore IA.

URL: UXHealthCheck

Dave Malouf: Foundations of IxD

Twitter: @daveixd

This is a REALLY short version of a complex topic that aims to discuss the nature of interaction design as a material of form similar to visual design and industrial design and explains how foundational education and practice leads to better communication & critique (wish me luck!)

Bio: Dave is current the Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is one of the core founders of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and its first VP. Before coming to SCAD he had a rich design career in industry most recently in the Innovation & Design Department of Motorola Enterprise Mobility as a Senior Interaction Designer.

Dan Brown: Designing Rules: The Engine of User Experience

Twitter: @brownarama

With static pages long behind us, the job of the information architect has evolved from thinking about the inherent structures of content to thinking about the frameworks that govern the management and display of content. As rules become increasingly relevant to the user experience (describing what to display when and to whom) information architecture will need language and conventions for describing those rules. Designing navigation these days, for example, means describing rules that drive categorizing content and displaying those categories. A navigation system now must explain how to accommodate unforeseen changes to content, how to deal with content that can live in more than one place, and how to offer flexibility in how content is found.

Bio: Dan is the co-founder of EightShapes, a user experience firm in the Washington, DC area.

Joe Sokohl: A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely

Twitter: @mojoguzzi

TBD

Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Twitter: @cchastain

As designers we too often neglect to define a common vision, or coordinating force, behind the scope of what we’re designing, making or building. Without some means of unifying our efforts we can easily end up with a product or service that falls short of its potential for delivering an optimal user experience. One path to holistic coordination is to employ the concept of themes as used by fiction writers and filmmakers. In experience design, themes can be used to pattern and unify product solutions as well as a  means of unifying teams, assisting in the work of defining strategy and helping to design for the intangible pleasure, emotion and meaning in experience. By aiming to capture the value and focus of the experience we intend to deliver to users, themes guide us in the design process and, by extension, strengthen the impact and meaning of that experience.

Cindy Chastain, user experience designer and screenwriter, has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. She is currently the Director of User Experience for Interactive Partners, a New York-based agency specializing in entertainment and media websites.

Dan Willis

TBD

Dave Cooksey: Taxonomy Validation

Twitter: @saturdave

The goal of taxonomy testing is to confirm that a taxonomy’s structure enables users to find and use content. For many practitioners, this means simple card sorting. But there are other means of validating a taxonomy. This presentation describes taxonomy validation methods that go beyond typical card sorting: Delphi card sorting, remote card sorting, usability testing, and search analysis. We’ll also discuss optimal ways of using mulitple validation methods togehter and review why taxonomy testing is needed in the first place.

Dave is Founder & Principal at saturdave, a user experience consultancy based in the City of Brotherly Love. Dave specializes in strategically informing design through user research and testing, crafting user-centric taxonomies, and providing solid design documentation.

Dave is actively involved in the user experience community in Philadelphia and serves as Chair of PhillyCHI, an academic and professional group for those interested in Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Usability and other related disciplines. PhillyCHI hosts monthly meetings and socials for students, academics, and practitioners who share a common interest in user experience.

Dante Murphy: State Mapping

Twitter: @dantemurphy

As websites have transitioned from a series of hyperlinked static pages to rich, interactive applications, the traditional means of documenting their structure and behavior has struggled to keep pace.  Site maps fail to capture the detailed interactions on and across pages, use cases fail to show the relationship between activities, and data flow diagrams ignore the nuances of presentation and user choice.

Enter the state map.  Evolved from scenarios and storyboards, the state map demonstrates the flow of information and interaction across all of an applications possible activities for all user types.  The state map is a foundational design element, able to inform detailed technical, behavioral, and aesthetic design.

This session will demonstrate the creation and use of state maps in three key situations; defining and pitching a concept, designing an application, and reverse-engineering existing applications to facilitate comparison and gap analysis.

Dante is the Vice President of User Experience for Digitas Health, the health agency of Digitas and a global leader in digital and healthcare communications. His responsibilities include ideation, design, testing, methodologies, and building a world-class multi-disciplinary design practice.

Dante’s career in application and experience design began in 1996; previous to joining Digitas Health in 2006, Dante was a Principal Information Architect at GSI Commerce.  Assignments and clients include Toys R Us, Siemens, Radio Shack, Sony, Burberry, NFL Football, Vanguard, adidas, Merck, Astra Zeneca, Palm, and numerous others.

Chris FaheyThe Courage to Quit: Starting, Growing and Maintaining Your Own UX Business

Twitter: @chrisfahey

TBD

Donna Spencer: Design games for information architecture

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

• Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about
  your users language and categories
• Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features
• Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.
In this presentation I will focus on games and tips most applicable to IA projects.

Twitter: @maadonna

Bio: She’s been doing this professionally since 2002, and she’s a regular speaker at Australian and international eventst. Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.

Nasir Barday: Start your own local organization chapter

The UX community continues to grow by leaps and bounds. A large part of this is thanks to leaders at the local level organizing events like this one. Ever thought you’d like to start a local chapter “one day”? It’s easier than you think! I’ll go over the basics of organizing a local event, getting the word out, and growing with other local chapters, if they’re in your area.

Bio: Nasir first got involved organizing local events with the NYC IxDA in 2005, thus beginning his love affair with the Interaction Design Association, which has recently culminated in his service as a Director on the organization’s board. In addition to being an Interaction Design nut and making things pleasing enough to come back to regularly, he’s a recording engineer and musician, with his latest album due Fall ‘09.

Admission Price: $5.00
Refreshments and snacks will be served.

RSVP Here.

This will be held at Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University campus in Georgetown.
Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
Foundry Building
1055 Thomas Jefferson Street NW
Washington, DC 20007