Now that CSS Grid is here, what are we going to do with it? Sure, we can create page layouts very similar to the ones we’ve been using for the last decade, but CSS Grid also opens up a world of new possibilities. Graphic designers of the 20th century fell in love with using a grid for their layouts. How might we apply their ideas to the web, and what might have to change? What do we need to think about when designing for this new paradigm? In this far-ranging talk, Jen will explore the realities and possibilities of new layout technologies and how they will change our craft. You’ll leave with exciting new techniques and ideas for your design and development toolkit — and, more importantly, with the inspiration to create bold, new, previously unimagined layouts for the 21st century.

About Jen Simmons

Dubbed “the Terry Gross of the tech industry,” Jen Simmons is the host and executive producer of The Web Ahead. Her in-depth interviews explain emerging technology and predict the future of the web — and won the 2015 Net Award for Podcast of the Year. Jen is a Designer and Developer Advocate at Mozilla, where she advocates for web standards and researches the coming revolution in graphic design on the web. She’s spoken at events including SXSW, An Event Apart, Fluent, Generate, Future of Web Design, and Respond. Her talk, Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts, was awarded Best Conference Presentation at CSS Dev Conf 2014. Jen launched her first client website in 1998 and spent years making sites for small businesses, arts organizations, and creative individuals. Her more well-known clients include CERN, the W3C, Google, Drupal, Temple University, and the Annenberg Foundation. Jen earned a MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. She lives in New York City.

The web is about words—ok, and cat videos—but otherwise lots and lots of words. We’re well past the tipping point of ‘more mobile than desktop’, and the use of content management systems has skyrocketed—so the way we set those words has a bigger impact than ever on design, usability, and brand differentiation. There’s no doubt that typography is our most important tool in great design and UX, but that can’t come at the expense of performance. Otherwise we risk our great designs never being seen. Enter the latest development in type technology: Variable Fonts, coming to web browsers near you. Envision a single font file that can scale in size, width, weight and even x-height—exactly as the type designer envisioned. All controllable with CSS. Everything from super-fine-line delicacy to the chunkiest slab headlines; wide widths in banners and slightly narrower body copy for better line lengths on mobile devices. If type is the voice of your words, that voice just became a chorus. We’ll look at the technology, how to use it, timeline for release, and most importantly: their impact on the dynamic range of our design capabilities. Make no mistake: variable fonts will have a more significant impact on web design than anything since responsive design itself. Learn how you can use them today and be ahead of the web tomorrow.

About Jason Pamental

Jason is Senior Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera (isovera.com), where he heads the design and development team, leads workshops, and works with clients establishing their digital strategy. Seasoned design and strategy leader with 20+ years’ experience on the web. Projects range from Ivy League to the NFL. Researches/writes on typography for the web: author of Responsive Typography from O’Reilly, articles for .Net Magazine, PRINT Magazine, HOW, Typecast Blog, Fonts.com. Frequent speaker and workshop leader, having presented at over 50 national/international conferences; featured on numerous podcasts including The Web Ahead, Boagworld and Creative Briefs. Really just filling time between walks with Tristan & Tillie around Turner Reservoir, posting photos on Instagram (instagram.com/jpamental).

In 1983, Michael Crichton wrote a screenplay about a graduate student who uses genetic research to clone dinosaurs… but you’ve never seen this movie. Crichton knew the narrative didn’t work. What university would actually fund research for dinosaur cloning? A better setting? A theme park. Kids love theme parks, so Crichton’s Jurassic Park iteration two told the story of a theme park filled with cloned dinosaurs… from the view of a child. You get the point. Sometimes ideas are just bad, in stories and in code. This talk is about recognizing bad ideas and turning them into good ones.

About Sara Simon

An art school graduate and former English major, Sara is the web developer at Vermont Public Radio. She works both in and beyond the newsroom to build technologies that help to find and tell stories.

What’s the point of great UX if you can’t sell it in? Great UX will have no impact at all if you can’t sell it in. Thankfully, there are a number of simple and proven steps you can take to greatly increase your chances of selling in great UX. This talk will outline and de-construct the three crucial areas that determine sell in success: 1. Truly understanding the client/agency dynamic 2. Understanding how to sell is not about selling at all 3. Getting to “yes” is easy when you don’t have to ask for it Understanding these areas and how to leverage them will contribute greatly to increased success. Distilled down from nearly 30 years of agency and digital experience, and incorporating real-world examples, Bill Drew shares this proven and practical approach–one that any creative professional can take to improve their chances of selling in great UX.

About Bill Drew

For nearly 30 years, Bill Drew has proven he has the perspective, talent and intuition that lead to attention-getting and business-building work. Bill’s varied experience at multiple agencies has uniquely prepared him to lead client engagements across virtually any business category. From one of the largest agencies in the country to starting his own pioneering Vermont agency, Bill has seen business and agency life from virtually every angle. Client and category experience speak to Bill’s ability to quickly apply the simple principles of human understanding to any and every project. Whether it’s Wrangler or New Balance, Stowe or Ritz Carlton, Keurig or iRobot, Bill asks the simple but often overlooked questions that lead to creative problem solving. Today, Bill leads the creative and strategic teams at HMC Advertising in Richmond, Vermont.

Design Best Practices for Virtual Reality: After 30 years, and a few false starts, Virtual Reality is finally becoming mainstream. And just like the dawn of the Web, there’s a lot of bad experiences out there. Let’s try to skip the “junk phase” in the evolution of VR and utilize some solid UX thinking in our creations. You may have been tasked with creating a robust and amazing virtual experience. What can you do to make it stand out from the competition? From navigation to camera direction, I’ll explain the best practices for both interface and experience design for VR. You will learn how to identify and mitigate disorientation and improve user interaction. I’ll also discuss how to get started with WebVR, explaining the tools and browsers, so those new experiences can be brought to a wider audience via the Web.

About Kirk Membry

Kirk is a Senior Experience Designer at MadPow (madpow.net). With more than 20 years of design experience (IA/UX and Web design/programming), many with Fortune 500 companies such as Dell, IBM, Hitachi GST, Fidelity, Autodesk, and Panasonic, Kirk has seen it all. He’s also an avid photographer who has specialized in 360-degree panoramic images and video for the past 10 years. Some of his work can be seen hanging in the MadPow offices in Portsmouth and Boston.

Evaluative research focuses on gaining a deep understanding of the lives of the end users and the contexts in which they use certain products and services. At its core, it’s about challenging and exploring the problem space, before venturing into the solution space. Using real-life examples of digital tools that help people access affordable housing or register to vote, this talk will explore the different tools used for exploratory research, including ethnographic interviews, contextual inquiry, and co-creation activities and prompts. The audience will leave with a better understanding of the types of insights that exploratory research generates, and how they can complement the findings of evaluative or comparative research.

About Sarah Fathallah

Sarah is a freelance designer and researcher, with a passion for applying human-centered design to local and global development. She has worked with Fortune 500 clients, government entities, and non-profits on topics ranging from financial inclusion and consumer protection, to healthcare, and civil and human rights. In her spare time, you will find her volunteering as a teacher, a translator, or a crisis mapper. Sarah is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris and studied design innovation at the Paris Est d.school as well as UX design at General Assembly. She serves on the Board of Directors of SIMLab, an awesome organization striving to make technology work for everyone.

Nothing brings UX, IA, design, and content strategy to life like launching a shiny new site: teasers fit neatly without any ellipses, images are cropped perfectly for different screen sizes, and related content is wonderfully relevant. But after a few months, things start to slip as ongoing content maintenance and creation steers the site away from its original pristine vision. We’ll explore how to improve the authoring experience for the people who are creating and maintaining content in the CMS after the site is built. We’ll learn how to communicate the information needed for ongoing support of UX, structured content, information architecture, and design. Most importantly, we’ll talk about how to work with our authors to create an admin experience that helps them do their jobs well.

About Eileen Webb

Eileen Webb is a co-founder and partner at webmeadow, a firm that helps progressive organizations develop content and technology strategies to make the world a better place. Her background is in server-side coding and being that odd person who translates between the marketing and development teams. Webmeadow’s offices are located on a solar-powered farm in northern New Hampshire; her Twitter feed is equal parts content strategy and pictures of poultry.

A wise individual once told me that if I wanted to look smart in meetings, there are few sure-fire ways; 1) Draw Venn diagrams, 2) Repeat the last thing the lead engineer said very, very slowly, 3) Ask everyone to ‘Take a step back’, and most importantly 4) ask ‘Will this scale’ about anything. Databases, personas, text fields. Literally anything. I’ve been asked this question about UX. And my answer is always, “It depends. What do you mean by ‘UX’?”. How very Socratic. In this presentation we’ll discuss approaches that have both worked and failed in attempts to move towards user focused software design. How to grow from that one weird, but passionate, dude / dudette in the corner to having it be the first thing people consider when building a new product or feature. I’ll also touch on what UX is and isn’t in the context of larger companies.

About Jeffrey Pierce

Jeffrey likes analog synthesis, salty Scandinavian candy and medieval church music – which leads to a lot of strange looks and awkward pauses. He has tried to leave his childhood home of Vermont a number of times, with stints in Boston, Chicago and Brooklyn, but the fresh air and fresher cheese pulled him back in. With degrees in both music and technology he spends his time listening and thinking about how people think about listening. His work has varied from building robots to scoring documentaries. Currently, he tries to make computers friendlier as the Director of User Experience Strategy at Dealer.com / Dealertrack. Although he doesn’t like to talk about it, he also used to make website splash pages with Flash.

The phrase “design by committee” summons visions of bloated word processors, clumsy banking websites, and unfocused home pages. But it is possible to leverage the creativity, empathy, and domain knowledge of a group to create great designs. This talk covers research and techniques such as priming and parallel thinking for improving group dynamics and shows how Fastly uses these techniques in our design process.

About James Rosen

James A Rosen is the Lead User Experience Engineer at Fastly. He holds a degree in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon, as well as degrees in Music and Italian Culinary Arts. He prefers his spaghetti all ‘arrabbiata and his code non-spaghetti-like.

To resist is human, to test divine! Overcoming objections to user research If UX had a mantra, “Test early and often” could very well be it. In all my years of usability testing, I’ve yet to meet a stakeholder or client who found user feedback useless or wasteful after the fact. And yet, ensuring that research gets a place at the table continues to be a challenge. I continue to hear that there’s “no need,” “no money,” “no time” for research, and I hear it from startups, from agencies, from clients of all shapes and sizes. Why does this still happen? Why is poor user research so often doubted, postponed, or outright dismissed? In this presentation, we’ll look at some stories of why research got cut, from fear of failure and unconscious bias, through organizational inertia and battle fatigue. Once we’ve discovered the roots of the problem, we can design targeted strategies for overcoming resistance and creating processes for giving user feedback its well-deserved priority.

About Eva Kaniasty

Eva Kaniasty is the founder of Red Pill UX, LLC, a user experience consultancy delivering UX strategy, research and interaction design in the Boston area. Eva has improved user experiences in a range of industries, including healthcare, education, financial, and software. She received her Master’s in Human Factors from Bentley University in 2007, serves as President of UXPA Boston, and is a repeat presenter at local and national conferences.

Designing with Empathy You’re under the gun. You have deadlines, developers are waiting on you, and even though you know you should probably talk to your intended users at some point, it just doesn’t feel possible to fit into your workflow. And hey, if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse,’ right? Ouch! There are a lot of misunderstandings about what user research actually is, how to do it, its cost, and the value it brings to the product design process. In this talk, Katie covers these basics and presents some specific, interface-level examples of how up-front user research and mid-project usability testing have helped improve designs and create products that people love. You’ll walk away with tips for advocating for and incorporating user research into your next project in a cost-effective way, and you’ll understand the powerful difference between building empathy with your users, and ‘doing what they say.’

About Katie McCurdy

Katie is a User Experience (UX) Designer and Researcher focusing on healthcare. She uses visualization and empathy to empower patients and improve the healthcare experience, and she advocates for user research on all of her projects. She has worked with diverse clients and collaborators including Open mHealth, Medivo, LabCorp, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, WaterAid, and the awesome local Burlington start-up Notabli. Her recent work includes the design of a platform for visualizing and making sense of digital health data, a mobile app and responsive web app for presenting lab results to patients and doctors, a responsive website for eye doctors, a tablet app for viewing lab test results, and helping build the internal design practice at Notabli. Katie holds a Masters of Science in Information with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan School of Information. She lives, skis, hikes, and organizes local healthcare events in Burlington, VT.

Designing for the enterprise is really, really hard. The reason it’s hard is that in most cases the people who buy the software and the people who use the software are completely different, and therefore have completely different needs. The people who buy enterprise software — IT managers, HR managers, etc. — care about things like configurability, control, more features than a competitor, and most of all: the ability to customize the thing just so, so that it fits in with whatever systems already exist. End users care about none of those things. They care about getting a job done as quickly and with as little pain as possible. So how do you design in this kind of hostile environment? How do you provide a good end user experience while also catering to the needs of the business of selling to a different audience? That’s what this talk is about. You’ll learn: How to balance the needs of different product audiences effectively. How to bring user-centered design and Lean UX principles to the slow-moving machine that is the enterprise market. How to turn a sales-driven organization into a product-driven organization (or at least how to co-exist peacefully) Enterprise software has never been this fun.

About Rian van der Merwe

Rian is passionate about designing and building software that people love to use. After spending several years working in Silicon Valley and Cape Town, South Africa, he is now based in Portland, OR. He also blogs and tweets regularly about design, technology, and software development.

In this presentation, we will take a deep look into the meaning of color. We’ll address it from three perspectives: The meaning of colors changed throughout art history. We’ll review a few surprising examples that make for a good conversation starter at a bar or at the museum. Colors’ meaning is deeply rooted in culture. Colors we call “basic” don’t even have a name in some historical contexts. Any color can have a different meaning once you change its context. We’ll look into some culturally charged colors and how they could cause problems for UX design. Color use in branding and UX design for web applications. When to use color conventions like red for “error” and green for “success” – and when to go around these best practices to accommodate other considerations. We’ll look at Facebook, Dribble, Netflix and Spotify and analyze their use of color. This talk will give you an appreciation of the many ways you can think about selecting a color, plus a few art historical anecdotes to share with colleagues.

About Maria Matveeva

Maria Matveeva is a UX Designer at DockYard.com, a design driven software consultancy in Boston. After 5+ years managing design for a nonprofit organization, Maria took a year off to study in Montreal, and then moved into a specialized role as UX designer. (Before that, she just called it thinking). She helps organize the meetups and camp for UX East.

Picking up a pencil or whiteboard marker can be daunting, but sketching can be one of the best tools in a designer’s arsenal. Through this session, we’ll review the positive impact sketching can have on the UX process. We’ll work through sketching methods for different screen sizes to allow for rapid paper prototyping. We’ll also review how to organize and run a collaborative sketching session with colleagues and clients. You’ll learn… how to sketch effectively; how to design and lead a collaborative sketching session; how to engage your team to draw out their ideas; and how to use paper prototypes to test quickly.

About Michael Tedeschi

Mike is a UI/UX designer and developer with eight years experience in the industry. He specializes in art direction, front-end development, and user interface and experience design for digital projects. Prior to founding Interactive Mechanics, he spent several years designing award-winning interactives and applications for Azavea (Lead UI/UX Designer) and Night Kitchen Interactive (Interactive Designer).

Let’s close the day by talking about our responsibilities and opportunities as designers. Let’s talk about the pace of fashion and the promise of infrastructure. Let’s talk about systematic failure — failure without malice. Let’s talk about the ways to engage in this messy and complex world. Let’s throw shade on fame and shine light on the hard quiet work we call design.

About Sha Wang

Hi, my name is Sha. I’m an information designer and technologist based mostly in Brooklyn. For the past year I’ve been working with a team brought in to redesign Healthcare.gov. My background is in architecture, but my work over the last seven years has been in design, data visualization, and entrepreneurship. I’ve worked at the amazing Stamen Design building projects for CNN, MTV, Flickr, and Adobe, and have also built work for the New York Times, CUP, and the Harvard Library. I’ve also started a few companies: a startup called Movity with my friends Eric Wu and Vaughn Koch that was later acquired by Trulia, and more recently a generative jewelry company Meshu and an animated gif printing company Gifpop with my friend Rachel Binx. I enjoy speaking about design, technology, and entrepreneurship, and have given talks at the wonderful Eyeo Festival, Visualized, Webstock, and the White House Datapalooza. I also enjoy mentoring designers pursuing entrepreneurship, or architects looking to escape. You can find more of my work online here, or say hello on Twitter here.