UX STRAT USA 2014 Program

Schedule of Events

Sunday, September 7th: Boulderado:

8:30 AM

Registration & Coffee

9:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Half-Day Workshop 1

9:00 AM - 5:30 PM

Full-Day Workshop 1

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Lunch

2:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Half-Day Workshop 2

Attendees will receive a link to specify workshop preferences.
Workshop preferences will be honored on a first come first serve basis, in order of registration.

Half-Day Workshop: "UX Strategy Fundamentals: Experience Visioning & Roadmapping"

In this workshop, we'll discuss the purpose of vision and roadmap in the experience strategy and the importance of working together with both business stakeholders and customers in the planning process. We'll cover practical definitions, skills and techniques:

  • What is an experience vision?
  • What are the ingredients for a great experience visions?
  • Running visioning workshops with stakeholders
  • Communicating experience vision through storytelling
  • What is an experience roadmap?
  • Creating a delivery roadmap

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Tim Loo

Tim Loo

Strategy Director, Foolproof

Tim is Strategy Director at Foolproof, one of Europe's largest experience design companies. He leads Foolproof's Experience Strategy practice, deploying their strategy planning framework, methodologies and expertise across a range of global clients including Sony, Skype, Eli Lilly & Company, Shell and HSBC. Tim has written and spoken extensively on the emerging practice of experience strategy and the role of the experience strategist in creating business culture change to support experience design.

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Half-Day Workshop: "Customer Journey Mapping"

Defining a clear vision for the experience you want customers to have can make all the difference.

When designing for cross-channel ecosystems, where customers engage through different channels at different times, organizations often focus quickly on scenarios and use-cases that can sometimes lead to experiences that feel disjointed.

Additionally, throughout the design process its not uncommon to encounter:

  • A lack of empathy for customers and their situations
  • Difficulty communicating the future vision for a product or service
  • Organizational siloes where disparate departments are unaware of what each is doing and how it impacts the end users

Journey maps are a powerful tool in tackling these challenges. Using them to define a vision, a story of the ultimate "blue sky" experience you'd like users to have across all of their interactions with your organization, you can provide guidance in the design of a consistent, cohesive service, regardless of channels and touch points.

With journey maps your team can:

  • Identify inconsistencies and rough patches in customers' current experiences
  • Build empathy for customers and identify opportunities to consider their environments and emotions when making design decisions
  • Set a clear vision that is easily understood by stakeholders and team members and use it to explore new design ideas
  • Establish a strong foundation for prototyping and crafting an experience strategy
  • Make design decisions that help ensure optimal experiences for consumers/patients across channels

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Megan Grocki

Megan Grocki

Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow

Megan is a senior member of Mad*Pow's experience design team. She is the ultimate user advocate, and helps create experiences that ring true with the audience(s) while exceeding clients' business goals. Her forte is illustrating the relationship between a customer and an organization over time and across channels.

She has worked with clients including Bank of America, Aetna, Constant Contact and McKesson to sharpen their understanding of their audiences and design new experiences founded on rigorous research, with an eye for future opportunities.

Her speaking engagements include IA Summit (2010), Usability Professionals' Association International (2010), IxDA's Interaction11, and the 2012 and 2013 Healthcare Experience Design (HxD) conference. In addition she served as IxDA's Interaction12 conference program director.

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Half-Day Workshop: "UX Metrics 101: How to Measure and Have it Mean Something"

There is so much data available for sites and apps that amazing insights seem sure to surface, and yet that does not happen without smart decisions. Data available from off-the-shelf analytics, A/B tests, and even follow-up surveys does not always offer insights that will inform the user experience. Data can only help drive decisions when you are tuning in to the right signals.

Metrics are the signals that show whether your strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time, benchmarking against iterations of your own site or competitors, and setting targets.Although most organizations are tracking metrics like conversion rate or engagement time, these metrics are often not tied back to design decisions. The reason? They are too high-level. Conversion rate could be related to design, or a promotion, or it something your competitor did. Time on the site could mean anything.

Measuring is great, if you are measuring the right thing, the thing that is going to change the relationship your organization has with its customers. UX strategists need to walk the line between business strategy, data science, and user experience when it comes to measurement. This workshop focuses on just that problem.

Participants in the workshop will come away with:

  1. Knowledge of metrics basics
  2. Commonly used metrics
  3. Strategies for choosing the right metrics for the user experience
  4. Tactics for identifying and tuning in to the right signals
  5. Frameworks for aligning UX metrics with other measure in the organization

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Pamela Pavliscak

Pamela Pavliscak

Founder, Change Sciences

Pamela is founder of Change Sciences, a user experience research and strategy firm for Fortune 500s, startups, and other smart companies. She's got some credentials (MS in Information Science from University of Michigan) and has worked with the big brands (Ally, Corcoran, Digitas, eMusic, NBC Universal, McGarry Bowen, NYPL, Prudential, VEVO, Verizon, Wiley). Plus, she's logged thousands of hours in the field trying to better understand how people use technology. When she's not talking to strangers about their experiences online or sifting through messy data for patterns, she's busy writing and speaking about how to create better user experiences using data of all shapes and sizes.

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Full-Day Workshop: "Customer Insight-Driven Design: Really Getting There"

Using our fictitious company, Z-Cycle, we'll work through an entire user-centered design process in just one day. We'll be using our framework for arriving at a great user experience through immersive research, rapid prototyping and testing of mobile app ideas. It's not just our framework-this is the Design Thinking process that many organizations are using to innovate and solve hard problems.

This day is hands on (even feet on! you'll be riding bikes at one point), collaborative fun and hard work mixed together. We'll wrap up the day by working with participants to identify those aspects of the framework they can bring into their own work the very next day, in spite of the cultural, process or budget constraints they are working within. Whether you are newer to this process, or an experienced practitioner, we've found that this fast-paced, hands-on day brings new insights, techniques and inspiration to all types of attendees.

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Dan Saltzman

Dan Saltzman

Director of User Experience, EffectiveUI

Dan Saltzman is the Director of User Experience at EffectiveUI. Dan wakes up (early!) in the morning excited to solve hard problems and to enrich people's lives through elegant software design.

With more than 10 years of experience in software design and development, Dan has collaborated to build products like QuarkXPress 8.0 and Fuser.com. He has worked for clients including Comcast Media Center, The Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee, Sun Microsystems, MySpace, Herff Jones and Road Runner Online (Time Warner).

Dan earned an individualized study degree in studio art, post-modern communications and computer science from New York University. He also holds a certificate in traditional French culinary technique from The French Culinary Institute.

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Beth Koloski

Beth Koloski

Lead Experience Architect, EffectiveUI

Beth Koloski is a Lead Experience Architect at EffectiveUI, where she also leads up the Education Services offering. She has more than 15 years of experience designing user interfaces for Web-based software and leading successful projects for clients such as Orbitz, Domino's, FedEx Office and Standard & Poor's.

Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Beth held senior interaction design roles at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, texturemedia, Foci and Semaphore Partners. Beth was the Experience Design Director for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Colorado Chapter Board of Directors from 2005-2006. Additionally, Beth is a contributor to UX Magazine (uxmag.com) and speaks at industry events such as IA Summit.

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Half-Day Workshop: "Building a Culture of Innovation: A UX Recipe for Success"

To compete in a time of unprecedented uncertainty, today's businesses must foster innovation effectively-whether the goal is to transform services, implement new processes, increase the impact of research, or launch a new product. Because UX practitioners are often tasked with solving problems with a validated toolkit of methods, they are uniquely positioned to serve as the catalyst that leads innovation process inside companies. In this workshop, we will present a validated "recipe" for corporate innovation programs. Drawing on best-in-class examples from industry, we will present a comprehensive set of innovation program components. This workshop is for practitioners who are interested in how UX can influence corporate innovation strategy. Attendees will gain insight and tangible ideas about how they can launch and develop innovation programs in a variety of corporate settings.

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Dr. Amaya Becvar Weddle

Dr. Amaya Becvar Weddle

UX Research Manager, Immersion Corporation

Amaya Becvar Weddle, Ph.D. has over 10 years of industry experience in UX, and has managed UX teams within software and technology companies. With a background in human-computer interaction, her work now focuses on innovation driven by a deep understanding of human relationships with technology. Most recently, she leads UX research and heads up the innovation facilitator program at Immersion Corporation, a haptic technology company. Amaya's interest in innovative thinking started early. She filed her first patent when she was 15, based on work she did for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She now holds several US patents on concepts ranging from environmental toxicity assays, to arts and craft kits, to haptic technologies.

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Curtis Lefrandt

Curtis Lefrandt

Vice President, Product & Training, Innovator's DNA

Curtis is a Principal and VP of Product & Training at the Innovator's DNA. He has been grappling with problems of innovation for the past decade--working with startups and Fortune 500 companies alike to design and build creative cultures. His responsibilities include overseeing the development of iDNA products, and most recently led the development of the Innovator's DNA Self-Assessment--a diagnostic tool described as a "Myers-Briggs for innovation". Innovator's DNA offers a suite of software tools and training curriculum designed to enable corporate innovation; notable clients include AT&T, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Salesforce.com, and United Technologies.

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Half-Day Workshop: "Converting to Cross-Device: A Painless Journey from Desktop-Only to Responsive"

This workshop will not lecture on the definition of responsive design, or why responsive design is a great strategy for many projects. This workshop will not dig into proper implementation of media queries or retina-quality images. These realms are well-covered elsewhere. Instead, we will focus on how RWD is shaping UX best-practices, strategy decisions, roles, responsibilities and team structure.

This is not your 2011 web design. Things have changed. And your strategy needs to change as well.

In this workshop, you will pick out a dated, desktop-only website and responsify it. Using a new toolkit, you will create a system that will be easy to build, easy to maintain and, most importantly, easy to use. Sophia will be your guide, but you will make it happen.

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Sophia Voychehovski

Sophia Voychehovski

Founder, ReWired UX Studio

Sophia is the founder of ReWired UX Studio, based in Atlanta, GA. Sophia places a premium on her efficient and effective process; a process that balances holistic strategy and feature-based iteration. The ReWired process not only produces great products, but also reduces overhead and headaches - which is especially useful when faced with the complexities of Responsive Web Design (RWD). Sophia founded ReWired after almost a decade of leading UX efforts for companies such as CNN, AT&T, the Australian Tax Office and Tracfone Wireless. After trailblazing RWD at CNN.com during the 2012 Elections, Sophia became a leading voice on the topic, speaking locally and nationally on the cross-device revolution.

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Half-Day Workshop: "Deciding Together: Three Tools for Realizing an Effective Information Architecture Strategy"

Deciding together is hard; especially when there are more deciders involved than you've got fingers to count on.  The bigger the pool of deciders becomes, the greater the challenge in developing the deep and durable "agreement behind the making" that's necessary for unlocking the permission to build and launch complex and costly products, services and experiences.

Dan Klyn and Bill Holsinger-Robinson from TUG teach you three tools for attaining that deep and durable agreement in a half-day workshop for UX STRAT.

  • Getting Systematic with Intentions: using Performance Continuums
  • Getting Particular with Meaning: using McLuhanian Tetrads
  • Getting Abstract with Structure: using Maquettes
Participants will get hands-on with each tool and walk away a little woozy from the awesomeness (or perhaps the altitude), equipped with some powerful new approaches for deciding together.

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Dan Klyn

Dan Klyn

Co-Founder, Information Architect, The Understanding Group

Dan is co-founder and leads structural design practice at The Understanding Group (TUG), and teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information.

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Bill Holsinger-Robinson

Bill Holsinger-Robinson

VP, The Understanding Group

Over the course of his career, Bill has been an entrepreneur, consultant, executive, scholar, chef and competitive cyclist. What’s the “red thread” that connects all of them together? Bill is a pattern recognizer with a love for new ideas, problem solving and story-telling. He excels at helping organizations - large and small, established and new - think big, be consistent and get moving.

Bill's most notable projects include Vice President of The Understanding Group, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Impact HUB Grand Rapids, Lead Organizer of TEDxGrandRapids 2013 and the Frederik Meijer Endowed Honors Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation with Grand Valley State University. Bill was also the founding Executive Director of ArtPrize while working as President of Pomegranate Studios.

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Half Day Workshop: "Mapping the User Experience: Locating Value with Alignment Diagram""

How do we locate business value when analyzing, planning, or modifying a complex system? Many theorists and practitioners in design and business management locate business value at the intersection of products or services and customer actions. These interactions are the places where the business and the customer meet: the touchpoints with a product or service offering. Planning, measuring, and improving these touchpoints are critical to UX strategy.

The use of visual representations exposes new opportunities for improvement and growth. The term “alignment diagrams” describes the class of diagrams that visualize touchpoints in a business process. Ultimately, alignment techniques let UX strategists use their expertise to help solve business problems. More than that, they help move business forward in creating shared value.

Through hands-on exercises, this workshop will show you had to turn customer observations actionable insight for the strategic design of products and services. We’ll review and discuss many examples of alignments, as well as create an experience map together in the class. Participants should leave with both theory and practical experience, as well as references where to find more information.

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Peter Merholz

Jim Kalbach

Principal User Experience Designer, Citrix

Jim is a Principal User Experience Designer at Citrix. He was previously UX Strategist at USEEDS°, User Experience Consultant at LexisNexis, and Head of Information Architecture at Razorfish, Germany. Jim received master's degrees in library and information science and in music theory and composition, both from Rutgers University.

Jim is an active speaker, writer, and instructor on user experience, usability, and information architecture. Before returning to the US from fifteen years in Germany, Jim was the co-founder of the European Information Architecture conferences. He also co-founded the IA Konferenz, a leading UX design event in Germany. In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007).

He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach

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Monday, September 8th: Boulder Theater

8:30 AM

Registration & Coffee

9:00 AM

Welcome / Opening Remarks

Paul Bryan

Paul Bryan

UX STRAT Organizer

Paul Bryan is a user experience strategist and researcher who started designing e-commerce web sites in 1995. He consults with large organizations on the strategy, direction, and design of their e-commerce web sites and mobile apps. Paul organizes the UX STRAT conference, and manages the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn. He's currently co-authoring a book on UX strategy for Morgan Kaufmann, and teaches user experience to graduate business students at the University of Georgia.

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9:15 AM

Keynote: "Winning a Seat at the Table: What it Takes to Shape the Direction of a High Profile Product"

Drawing from 10 years in User Experience at Google, Dr. Laura Granka will discuss how UX has evolved and moved to the forefront of product decisions—and how UX teams now effectively partner with stakeholders to frame the initial product conversations. Dr. Granka has built and led multidisciplinary UX teams across Google Search, Social, and Maps, and will share the most effective and practical methods she’s learned for workflow and team building. She’ll reveal tips like how to bake data into the design process, and how to reconcile data, opinion, and UX. Learn to identify opportunities in the UX process to drive strategy, inspire your team, and shape decisions made by leaders in your organization.

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Dr. Laura Granka

Dr. Laura Granka

Head of UX Research, Google Search

Dr. Laura Granka has been with Google for 10 years, leading UX Research. Laura spent the past three years establishing and growing a UX Research team for Google Social, cutting across mobile, photos, Hangouts, Google+ and more. Currently, Laura is leading a team of quantitative researchers and software engineers to build innovative research tools and conduct large-scale analysis across Google Search, Maps, Identity, and other new efforts. Laura is passionate about baking data into design-quickly and effectively using research to inform and inspire product, as well as to predict pertinent trends. Laura has her BS and MS from Cornell University, and her PhD from Stanford.

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10:15 AM

"Shaping Organizations to Deliver Great User Experiences"

As the field of User Experience evolves, it has gone through successive stages. The first focused on methodologies -- it was important to develop how to design for user experience. However, it was clear that was insufficient (because so many bad experiences continued to make it out into the world), and so the field shifted upstream to strategy. We felt that if we could inform strategy, we'd be setting up our designs to succeed. That, too, has fallen short. It turns out we need to pull back even further and think hard about the shape of our organizations, both with design and throughout the whole company. In this talk I'll draw from my experience as head of design for Groupon to show how organizational models and practices are crucial for delivering great user experiences.

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Peter Merholz

Peter Merholz

Co-Founder of Adaptive Path

Peter Merholz is a design executive. A co-founder of Adaptive Path, the design consultancy that helped popularize the notion of user experience strategy, he most recently was VP of Global Design for Groupon. Peter believes terms like "agile" and "lean" are crutches people use so they don't have to engage in critical thinking.

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11:00 AM

Networking Break

11:30 AM

"Validating UX Strategy Concepts Through Service Design"

So you've developed a UX strategy: now what? How can you feel confident that the strategies you have identified are truly targeted towards overcoming the challenges your users actually face? In this presentation, I will share a real case study that walks you through the process I used to develop UX strategies and then analyze how they mapped to my users' workflow. This process helped me validate my hypotheses, and feel confident evangelizing the strategies throughout my organization. You will leave this presentation will a new methodology that you can use in your own strategic UX process.

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Ashley Halsey Hemingway

Ashley Halsey Hemingway

Associate Director of User Experience, AppNexus

With over a decade of professional design experience, Ashley believes that "happiness is making the things you wish existed". She is currently Associate Director of User Experience at AppNexus, one of New York's fastest growing startups. Previously, she has designed tablet apps for the pharmaceutical industry, websites for large retail and banking brands, and packaging for consumer care and beauty products. She has also consulted for several startups, where she loves turning early concepts into established brands while advocating for customer-centric service design principles. Ashley is a graduate of DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. During the few minutes a day she is not online, she can be found indulging in too much television, nostalgia, curiosity and cheese.

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11:45 AM

"Lessons from UX STRAT 2013: Applied to the Real World"

Conference attendees may enjoy watching presentations, and attending workshops, but they may be wondering, "How can I apply this in the real world?" or "How can I integrate this into my current work?" This talk will explain how I took lessons from key presentations and workshops at UX STRAT 2013, and show how I have applied these lessons into my current work.

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Krispian Emert

Krispian Emert

Usability and IA Specialist, Microsoft

Krispian has over 10 years experience in UX. She has worked for award-winning agencies in Canada and Australia and has provided strategic UX consulting for some of the world's top brands, including Toyota, Thompson Reuters, and ING Bank. Krispian's latest gig is at Microsoft in Vancouver, where she is putting strategic UX into practice for interactive TV projects.

Krispian is keen to improve the discipline of UX in Vancouver. She co-founded Vancouver's UX Design Therapy group and is co-leader of the Service Design Thinking Vancouver group. Krispian has been a guest speaker on UX Strategy at the University of British Columbia, and is a UX industry guest and mentor at Vancouver Film School's Digital Design program.

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12:00 PM

"How to Avoid Losing Design Strategy to Business Strategists"

A few years back, I posed my peers the question ""Will designers lose design strategy to business strategists learning design thinking". Some said "Yes!" blaming complacency of design firms and contemporary design education. Others said "No", believing that our discipline is so unique that it can never be usurped. The answer probably lies somewhere in between. One way we can ensure the answer is "No!" is to develop strategic design techniques that provide value to business and bridge the often-wide communication gap between business and design professionals. I will share several that have been successful in my experience over the past few years at Isobar and Continuum.

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Brian Gillespie

Brian Gillespie

Strategy Consultant, Formerly Principal, Continuum

Brian Gillespie is currently an independent strategic design consultant. Previously Brian was a principal in the Service Design group and leader of the digital practice at global design and innovation consultancy Continuum. There he worked on digital/service design strategy projects with clients as diverse as Vanguard, Sprint, American Express, Samsung, and Audi. Prior to Continuum, Brian held leadership roles in the area of strategic design at MediaCatalyst (Amsterdam), Isobar and Molecular where he lead the creation of global digital experience strategy and design for JPMorganChase, Rentokil Initial, Yamaha, Fidelity and adidas, including the original user experience of the miCoach personal training system. Brian holds an MBA, Design Management from the University of Westminster, London, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Design Management Institute.

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12:30 PM

Lunch

2:00 PM

"UX as a Core Company Strategy"

As the notion of UX / Experience Planning / Interaction design / Visual Design / Motion Design / UX Research, drastically have changed from something that "we fix later" to an often pronounced expectation from executive leadership that UX should not only visualize but also guide and drive the actual user/consumer delivery, it requires us to constantly evolve in the way we work, they way we present, our output, how we organize ourselves, to be able to start from Experience Goals tied to target users AND business objectives to work with UX as a core company strategy.

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Martin Granstrom

Martin Granström

Head of UX, Nook Media

Martin has spent 15+ years to design, manage and plan various types of consumer experiences. Martin had the opportunity to work on and lead a number of different projects; everything from nuclear plant security systems to design and work on UX strategies for corporate websites and intranets to design drug design tools for medical industry.

Joining Sony Mobile Martin managed the end-to-end design teams for all Sony Mobile feature phone applications, and later created and led the Sony Mobile UX Strategy team called UX Planning.

Now at Nook Martin as Head of UX and Design is spearheading the creation of next generation reading experiences.The goal is always to deliver business benefits through the usage and smile from the consumer. Simply put: "take it from business to buttons".

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2:45 PM

"Putting UX and Strategy at the Heart of the Product Team"

Recently, IBM has embarked on a massive transformation focused on integrating design and user experience practice back into the core of everything the company does. This is the largest such transformation ever attempted and the very scale of IBM as an organization means that it can't help but have major impact in the world of design.
The session will give a brief background on the IBM Design initiative as a whole then cover the specifics around our new Product Management practice as well as the strategy we've taken to roll it out across all of IBM. We'll share our early successes as well as some lessons learned. You should leave with a lot of ideas about concrete steps you could take in your organization to embed UX and Design in your strategic activities.

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Todd Wilkens

Todd Wilkens

Design Principal, IBM

Todd Wilkens has a passion for building organizations that effectively use design and strategy to create great experiences. He is a Design Principal in IBM's new Design Division and a member of the leadership team for their flagship Design Center in Austin, TX. He is currently heavily involved in IBM's efforts to transform product management, design research, and facilitated workshopping at scale.

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3:30 PM

Coffee Break

3:45 PM

Keynote: "Design Your Strategy"

Some say that design is to strategy, what the Knight is to Chess, but its well understood to win the game you need to design a successful strategy. With organizations taking design more seriously, and viewing their design < both the people and artifacts, as a critical market differentiator, it is easy to image a seat at the table with your name on it. Design can play a dual role; both in the realization as well as the definition of strategy. Ideally this should make it even easier to promote the value of design‹unfortunately the difference is often lost on most people, most often on designers themselves. When you image sitting there with your CEO, what will you say? What will be your POV?

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Matthew Holloway

Matthew Holloway

Vice President, User Experience Design, Shutterfly

An industry leader in the area of design and innovation Matthew Holloway has worked a number of Fortune 100 companies to build and develop their in-house design capabilities, improve their innovation to execution pipeline. As Vice President of the SAP Design Service Team, Mr. Holloway worked jointly with Chairman and Founder, Hasso Plattner and SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, to drive an organizational transformation program integrating design thinking across the organization, redefining development processes, driving innovation from strategic planning through product definition & development. Mr. Holloway has also taught and lectured on design and its strategic role within business at a number of schools and universities, including Stanford, The Ohio State University and the Royal Academy of Art in London.

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4:30 PM

"Big Love: The Case for Conscious Coupling in UX Strategy"

As the first UXSTRAT conference revealed, existential issues remain surrounding who is practicing and owning this emerging UX Strategy discipline. Where did "Customer Experience" come from? Why does Experience Design differ from Service Design? Like Chimpanzees and Humans DNA, aren't we something like 98% the same? Such arguments are both exhausting and counterproductive. A veteran of the nomenclature wars, Ronnie believes there may be an answer. In this presentation, Ronnie will posit a future vision that is simple, satisfying and singularly salacious. Experience the power of Big Love: When it comes to what we do, Ronnie plans to leave no wiggle in the room

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Ronnie Battista

Ronnie Battista

UX Practice Lead, Slalom Consulting

Ronnie is a senior UX executive with over 18 years experience visioning and delivering creative and profitable cross-channel interactive experiences with bottom line impact. Ronnie has served in UX leadership positions at Accenture, Dun and Bradstreet, Gextech (Spain), MISI Company and Slalom Consulting. While at MISI / NTT Data, Ronnie co-developed their Strategic Experience Alignment methodology. He has provided customer experience design thought leadership to over 120 clients from C-suite strategic and team tactical level. Ronnie served on the Board of UXPA as Director of Certification from 2010 - 2012 and is a past-President of the New Jersey UXPA. Ronnie co-created the Rutgers Mini-Masters in User Experience Design, where he serves as Program Director and Lead Adjunct Professor.

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5:15 PM

Closing Comments, Day 1

Paul Bryan

Paul Bryan

UX STRAT Organizer

Paul Bryan is a user experience strategist and researcher who started designing e-commerce web sites in 1995. He consults with large organizations on the strategy, direction, and design of their e-commerce web sites and mobile apps. Paul organizes the UX STRAT conference, and manages the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn. He's currently co-authoring a book on UX strategy for Morgan Kaufmann, and teaches user experience to graduate business students at the University of Georgia.

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5:30 PM - 7:30 PM

Happy Hour, Boulder Theater


Tuesday, September 9th: Boulder Theater

8:30 AM

Registration & Coffee

9:00 AM

Opening Remarks

Paul Bryan

Paul Bryan

UX STRAT Organizer

Paul Bryan is a user experience strategist and researcher who started designing e-commerce web sites in 1995. He consults with large organizations on the strategy, direction, and design of their e-commerce web sites and mobile apps. Paul organizes the UX STRAT conference, and manages the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn. He's currently co-authoring a book on UX strategy for Morgan Kaufmann, and teaches user experience to graduate business students at the University of Georgia.

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9:15 AM

Keynote: "The Role of UX in Defining the Future of Products, Brands and Business Strategy"

Based on over 20 years of experience consulting on how best to align a company’s product roadmap with its business strategy, Theo will share a set of design guidelines that can be adopted to bolster brand equity and customer engagement using real world case studies. Theo will present a framework for understanding where UX designers need to innovate for the next generation of computing. He will then discuss opportunities for UX designers to influence how products and services can push the boundaries of how we interact with the world around us and how to make digital interactions more intuitive, frictionless and seamless with the physical world, to drive competitive advantages for businesses.

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Theo Forbath

Theo Forbath

Global VP, Innovation Strategy, Cognizant

Theo Forbath is the Global Vice President of Innovation Strategy at Cognizant. Theo is an expert in managing product innovation, business strategy and global collaboration. For the last 20 years, Theo has assisted leading technology vendors, service providers, multi-national corporations, early stage startups and NGOs in developing successful product and service strategies, transformative business models, and innovative go-to-market plans. Currently, much of Theo’s work focuses on the third wave of computing helping clients identify and capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the post-PC, post-TV world of the Internet of Everything.

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10:15 AM

"Designing Digital Strategies Based on Ecosystem Thinking"

Designing digital strategies used to be about optimizing one or some few company websites. However, as digital channels are evolving and more interaction with consumers is taking place online, companies have to focus on building strategic ecosystems with products and services that support each other. Nike, Apple and Google are renowned for having built such successful ecosystems. But ecosystem thinking is not only useful for large, global companies. In projects of any scale, design teams can benefit from this approach. In my presentation, I will explain practical tools for using ecosystem thinking to design strategies that can leverage business opportunities across various platforms.

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Dr. Sofia Hussain

Dr. Sofia Hussain

Interaction designer at Finn.no

Sofia Hussain is an interaction designer at Finn.no (the Norwegian equivalent of Craigslist) and a design researcher at the Oslo University Hospital. She a holds a Master's and PhD degree in product and UX design.

Sofia specializes in creating design solutions and strategies based on a holistic understanding of user needs. Gaining inn-depth knowledge about customers is essential for developing solutions that are not just easy to use but also fulfill emotional needs and preferences. Sofia works seamlessly across interaction design, service design and product design to create innovative solutions that make the most out of what she has learnt from the user research.

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11:00 AM

Networking Break

11:30 AM

"Design for Impact"

In many developing economies Community Health Workers deliver essential healthcare services to communities living in poverty. frog worked with UNICEF to improve the quality of the experience provided to these health workers by the organizations that support them, promising to increase their quality of service so that they can save more lives.

In this talk you'll learn how a human-centered innovation process, participatory design and a multi-partner engagement model led to the creation of a comprehensive toolkit, and how strategic experience frameworks and redesigned medical tools can hope to activate and empower health workers in emerging economies, together with the communities they serve.

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Fabio Sergio

Fabio Sergio

Vice President of Creative, frog

Fabio is Vice President of Creative at frog. He is the global head of frog's Social Impact practice, and one of the firm's experience strategy and healthcare leads. With over 15 years of experience at the intersection of design, technology and human aspirations he leads engagements with social innovators and global market leaders, and helps to evolve frog's creative methods and capabilities. Fabio often speaks at worldwide events, and is a visiting professor at the Politecnico di Milano.

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12:00 PM

"Using Behavioral Modeling to Engage Customers"

As retailers look to understand their customers, they often turn to tools like market segmentation and personas to better understand the different types of user groups within their target market. But this approach often overlooks the different stages a consumer goes through in making purchasing decisions. Behavioral Modeling seeks to construct a universal representation of behavior: information is collected on the context, social structure, previous experience and emotion of a behavior.

This session explores why this approach was invaluable for Cabela's, where - working together with EffectiveUI - the company uncovered the different stages its customers went through as they shopped. By understanding these various phases of decision-making, the company identified some new opportunities to provide meaningful engagement during the process to help guide customers' decisions.

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Rich Warnaka

Rich Warnaka

Manager of User Experience, Cabela's

Rich Warnaka is manager of user experience (UX) for Cabela's, the world's largest mail-order, retail and Internet outdoor outfitter, with expertise in UX, usability testing, user-centered design and Agile methodologies. He has a long and proven track record of driving revenue, reducing costs and increasing efficiency through strategic methodologies centered around user experience. As a Human Factors International (HFI) Certified Usability Analyst, Rich has a clear understanding of research-based principles of designing interfaces from the perspective of the end user. He performs data gathering, task analysis and usability testing to pinpoint usability problems and offer design solutions. Rich attended Penn State University, and also served as an adjunct professor of user experience and member of the Academic Advisory Board at Gannon University from 2007-2012. He is also a member of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA).

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12:30 PM

Lunch

2:00 PM

"Making Sense of the Madness: UX Strategy to Kick Off NCAA March Madness Live"

In the world of live sports, event-based digital products are developed on a cyclical basis. Soon after a National Champion is crowned, the March Madness Live team at Turner Sports must start all over to deliver a high-stakes suite of apps that is in market for 3 short weeks.

But the hardest part isn’t when we design or ship. It’s figuring out how to get started and sell our stakeholders on a strategy.

This case study will share how the March Madness Live team moved away from “business as usual” process and used UX strategy to get buy-in on what their products should achieve for fans (and the business) when the Madness starts all over again in March.

We’ll share some lessons learned when using UX strategy as a way to “show your work” in order to quickly focus a product team, make sense of a ton of data, and create a strategic, compelling case to stakeholders.

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Lisa Estrin

Lisa Estrin

UX Lead - March Madness Live, Turner Sports

As a diehard Tar Heel, Lisa is living the dream by bringing the ultimate March Madness experience to fans around the country. She believes UX is only as good as the team that crafts it and works with her team year-round to balance strong business priorities with fan needs.

Prior to joining the Madness at Turner Sports, Lisa was a UX Architect at Moxie, specializing in e-commerce and content strategy for Verizon, L’Oreal, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

A film school dropout, Lisa stumbled upon UX while earning her Ed.M. In Technology, Innovation, and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While she studied to create digital learning experiences for kids, she enjoys the challenge of building digital products for grownups.

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2:15 PM

"Strategy & Structure: Doing it Right, and How You’d Know"

Dan Klyn has had a hand in the development and design of structures made of information for 17 years. Approaches to the development of these structures and to aligning them with business and experience strategy are varied and plentiful: evidence of good alignment and quantification of results not so much. What're the key variables to control for in the attempt to create appropriate information structures to support our strategies? What's the process for inventing these structures, and for knowing if you're doing it right?

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Dan Klyn

Dan Klyn

Co-Founder, Information Architect, The Understanding Group

Dan is co-founder and leads structural design practice at The Understanding Group (TUG), and teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information.

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2:45 PM

"Creating a Long-Term, Unified Plan for Digital Customer Experience"

US-based gas and electricity utility Dominion has spent several years implementing digital experience enhancements across various business areas and functions such as IVR, mobile outage reporting and bill pay, power-outage maps, online customer service portals, text and email messaging, social media, and the like. Dominion had enhanced and sometimes increased the use of digital to engage with its 2.4 million customers, but the work was not linked by a long-term, unified plan for digital customer experience. Each area of the business had its own processes supported by its own software, and IT systems and staff. Dominion and CapTech defined several critical success factors the company should follow for successful digital experience outcomes, which in turn impact how technology professionals (and others) collaborate and do their jobs. This presentation is a case study describing this transformation, and will describe practical steps for creating a Digital Strategy as well as real-world examples with success and failures.

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Bill Rattner

Bill Rattner

Director of Digital Strategy, CapTech Ventures

Bill Rattner is Director, Digital Strategy at CapTech Ventures, Inc where he helps global organizations transition to digital businesses by helping senior executives to digitally transform their customer experiences, operations and business models.

A former Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather and DDB Needham and Creative Officer of Viant, a global professional services firm focused on digital business transformation, Bill brings a very human, customer-centric approach to technology.

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3:15 PM

Break

3:30 PM

"Applying 'Jobs to be Done' to UX Strategy"

A case study of how Turner Broadcasting approached creating a multichannel experience for March Madness Live that extended from Android and iPhones to iPads and desktops. The presentation will cover how the pillars of the cool project where implemented in the product, what worked and what did not work and how the UX design strategy set the team up for continued success.
The user-centered view of the interactions and experience led to the fulfillment of the business goals of improving the brand image which is expressed in the title of the presentation "March Madness is my BFF!" This is one of thousands of tweets expressing the joy fans felt while using the application.

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Jim Kalbach

Jim Kalbach

Principal User Experience Designer, Citrix

Jim is a Principal User Experience Designer at Citrix. He was previously UX Strategist at USEEDS°, User Experience Consultant at LexisNexis, and Head of Information Architecture at Razorfish, Germany. Jim received master's degrees in library and information science and in music theory and composition, both from Rutgers University.

Jim is an active speaker, writer, and instructor on user experience, usability, and information architecture. Before returning to the US from fifteen years in Germany, Jim was the co-founder of the European Information Architecture conferences. He also co-founded the IA Konferenz, a leading UX design event in Germany. In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007).

He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach

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4:00 PM

"Well Designed: Bringing Design Thinking to Product Management in Order to Create Products People Love"

Most companies consider strong product management to be the "glue" that holds together products as they are being conceived of and built, and most companies treat product management as either a marketing or an engineering activity. But modern startups like Airbnb and large corporations like JetBlue or Starbucks have proven that industry disruption is possible not by focusing on adding features or just improving sales, but instead by focusing on providing deep, meaningful engagement to the people that use their products or services. This engagement is achieved by designing products that seem as though they have a personality, or even a soul. These products feel less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends.

In this talk, you'll learn how to apply that process yourself using these four steps:

  • Identify product/market fit, by seeking signals from communities of users
  • Identify behavioral insights, by conducting ethnographic research
  • Sketch a product strategy, by synthesizing complex research data into simple insights
  • Define the product details, using visual representations to simplify complex ideas

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Jon Kolko

Jon Kolko

Director and Founder, Austin Center for Design

Jon Kolko is Vice President of Product, Innovation, and Design at MyEdu, and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design. His work focuses on bringing the power of design to social enterprises, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and large-scale industry disruption. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 clients, and he's most interested in humanizing educational technology.

Jon has previously held positions of Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. He is regularly asked to participate in high-profile conferences and judged design events, including the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, in Mexico, and Malmö University, in Sweden.

Jon is the author of three books: Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press, and Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design.

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4:45 PM

Closing Remarks

Paul Bryan

Paul Bryan

UX STRAT Organizer

Paul Bryan is a user experience strategist and researcher who started designing e-commerce web sites in 1995. He consults with large organizations on the strategy, direction, and design of their e-commerce web sites and mobile apps. Paul organizes the UX STRAT conference, and manages the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn. He's currently co-authoring a book on UX strategy for Morgan Kaufmann, and teaches user experience to graduate business students at the University of Georgia.

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