Dan Willis convincing an audience that the earth is flat. Photo by Mike Lee.
The Great IxDA Debate
Interaction12, February 2012
(Creator, organizer and MC) UX heavyweights went head-to-head to tackle some of the biggest interaction design questions of our time ... or at least three of them. Panelists included Abby Covert, Andrea Resmini, Dave Malouf, Giles Colborne, Jason Mesut, Jeff Gothelf, Kieron Leppard and Pete Trainor.
What Makes VizThink Work
UXCamp DC, January 2012
Humans are wired to respond to visual stimuli emotionally, it helped keep us alive early in our evolution. Now combine that response with the effective use of words and you've got an amazing cocktail for communication. To fully investigate this interaction, we studied the master of the craft: Dr. Seuss.
The UX Umbrella
DC Startup Weekend, November 2011
User experience is what it does and what it does is solve problems.
Design Secrets of Winnie-the-Pooh
Philly Barcamp, October 2011
An intense study of "I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me" (in other words, be a humble designer) and other gems offered by A.A. Milne's famously simple bear and applied directly to designing user experiences.
Mapping the Unknown: Diagramming 21st Century Experiences
WebVisions, May 2011; UX Sketchcamp SF, May 2011
Driven by a hunger for wealth and enabled by emergent technology, the Age of Exploration that started six centuries ago connected Europeans to the rest of the world's population on an unprecedented scale. It's a model that should sound familiar to us now in an age defined by the Internet and its potential for connecting anyone to everyone. Our efforts to holistically model today's user experiences are similar to 15th century mapmakers' struggles to locate newly discovered lands within a global view. The simple process flows, Visio documents and conceptual diagrams of the 20th century aren't useful when experiences transcend individual interfaces and devices.
All You Really Need to Know About Users You Learned In High School
Midwest UX, April 2011
(Keynote) User research? A fad! Personas? Like I don't know enough real people and have to make some up. Usability? Hey, if that shopping cart was good enough for Amazon, I'm sure it'll work just fine for us. Not everything requires user testing, okay? We learned plenty long before we read any of those fancy books or paid for conferences just to have late-night drunken conversations about taxonomies.
UX Authors Trivia Smackdown
IA Summit, April 2011
(Creator and host) Teams led by the biggest names in UX publishing went toe-to-toe in a tourney designed to determine our community’s kings and queens of user experience-related trivia.
The User Experience of Disruption
IA Summit, April 2011
(Co-presented with Russ Unger) Internet downloads disrupt the CD industry; DVRs disrupt the broadcast television advertising industry; online classifieds disrupt the print newspaper industry. We’re user experience professionals, we GET disruption, right? We’re the folks who teach other people how to use disruptive technologies to their advantage. But how well do we handle disruption when it happens to us?
Designing Stuff Kids Will Use and Love
South by Southwest Interactive Festival, March 2011
(Panel moderator) PBS KIDS has been designing non-commercial Web sites and interactive games for kids for over 10 years. Making an interactive product that appeals, engages and is usable by a child is not as simple as using Comic Sans and replacing an “S” with a “Z”. Children's abilities change rapidly and producers need to ensure that products are developmentally accessible.
Listen to the podcast
This Is Your Brain on UX
UXCamp DC, January 2011
Equal parts group discussion and performance art, I led a wild exploration of research and its practical application that included audience members playing various parts of the human brain.
View video of the entire session
Cranky Conversations About Users
UPA's UserFocus Conference, October 2010
A lively conversation with the audience around key user experience issues based on my blog, uxcrank.com. Topics included: The Cherry Blossom Effect (satisfying users by expecting less from them); Your Inner Lumper (the impact of our wiring on our work); and How People Choose (the practical ramifications of dealing with the human brain.)
View video highlights from the conversation
Visual Thinkers' Pictionary
IxDA DC, May 2010
A second attempt to explore the practical application of visual thinking in a totally impractical activity. (The original activity took place at the national IxDA conference earlier in the year.)
View video highlights from the event
Citizen Experience Design
WebVisions, May 2010
An exploration of the basics and potential of Gov 2.0 without the hype and in a language tailored for Web professionals including guidance on how to get involved early in what may be the most significant U.S. movement of the early 21st century.
Innies vs. Outties, a UX Deathmatch
Information Architecture Summit, April 2010
Is it better to work inside an organization or as an outside consultant? Let's settle this age-old issue once and for all! Bring your wrestling tights and hidden foreign objects if ya got 'em for this knockdown, drag 'em out brawl where the winner takes all.
View video highlights from the talk
Words #Fail: Collaborating on the Unexplainable
Information Architecture Summit, April 2010
Visual thinkers Dave Gray and Dan Willis decided to explore the murky glory of the unexplainable with an interesting experiment. Over the course of a large scale challenge, they collaborated without the benefit of spoken words or written narrative to first identify and define their primary challenge; then create and winnow the list of potential solutions; before finally developing a single solution.
Listen to the podcast from the IA Summit
Imagineering a Fully Digitized and Connected Future
South by Southwest Interactive Festival, March 2010
Screw your laptop and the Internet connection it rode in on. It's 2015 and all hurdles to digital ubiquity are history. Our panel of professional visionaries will immerse you in a day of your fully digitized life, supported by every appliance you own and connected to your own personal infocloud.
View an interview with my panel
Visual Thinkers' Pictionary
IxDA's Interaction 10, February 2010
A practical application of visual thinking in a totally impractical activity.
The Earth is Flat
UXcamp DC, January 2010
The earth is flat and Washington, D.C. is the center of the universe. I admit that these two radical cosmological facts might seem a tad far-fetched at first, but I’ll walk you through such a compelling, powerful, and logical argument that you will have no choice but to believe it all. I believe I can convince you, but my beliefs aren’t the subject of this presentation. What do YOU believe?
Your Gov 2.0 Checklist
Government CIO Summit, December 2009
(Panel moderator) Helping senior level government leaders develop a strategic road map to successfully enable transparency, public participation and collaboration within their organization.
Things that Suck: A Group Exercise
Barcamp Philly, November 2009
Experimental group discussion where participants argue the suck/not suckishness of a variety of interactive issues.
Securing Web 2.0
Open Government and Innovations Conference, July 2009
(Panelist) Guidance on security issues inherent to social media.
Time to Spit on the Table
RedUX DC, May 2009
Information Architecture Summit, March 2009
Being inappropriate is a scary and powerful tool that user experience professionals should use more often, taking advantage of humor and non-traditional forms of communication.
Listen to the podcast from the IA Summit
Data and User Interfaces: The User Experience When Machines Talk to Machines
Web 3.0 Conference, May 2009
(Panelist) Data is empowering when presented well, but can be burdensome when presented poorly. This session will cover data management and visualization technologies that can greatly improve user experience and, as a result, customer satisfaction.
Everything You Know about Web Design is Wrong
Information Architecture Summit, March 2009
South by Southwest Interactive Festival, March 2009
Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after more than 10 years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design's print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.
View video highlights from SxSW
Listen to the podcast of the entire talk
How to Build Your First Spime Management System
IxDA Interaction 09, February 2009
This session will explore the effect on interaction design when content can tell you how it should be managed.
A Management Fable: The Little UX That Went a Long Way
Information Architecture Summit, April 2008
This presentation will deconstruct an illustrated fable about an intrepid little creature who introduces user goals to a development process that would have otherwise been dominated by royal business owners and technological black magic.
Evangelism 101
Information Architecture Summit, March 2005
Frequently, an information architect needs to be as effective as an evangelist as they are skilled as a practitioner.
Oxygen Meetings Workshop
Information Architecture Summit, March 2005
Ideas, like fires, get bigger the more oxygen you add to them. This tutorial will show IA professionals how to use "oxygen meetings" to turn good ideas into great solutions by marshalling the diverse skills of others.
Producing No-Duh Deliverables
Information Architecture Summit, February 2004
Whether you're preaching to the faithful or trying to convert the masses, one of the information architect's biggest challenges is to make necessarily complex solutions easily understood.
