I solve problems.
Talks and workshops by Dan Willis, a UX consultant who spends entirely too much time talking and workshopping.
Just as the areas of expertise that support user experience design become fully realized, UX as a singular practice will cease to exist. Instead of Conquest, War, Famine and Death on horseback, it’ll be developers, marketers and stakeholders charging in. And we’ll be there inviting them over for drinks and fish tacos.
Read MoreThe Enterprise UX 2015 Conference is looking for storytellers: people who can skillfully bring to life their past adventures addressing the needs of their organizations’ internal users.
Read MoreWe’re going to spend the next decade trying to figure out how to design cross-channel, multi-device experiences that don’t suck, so it’s probably a good time to come clean and admit that the goal of making those experiences “seamless” is just plain silly.
Read MoreGreat talent and the work a great talent produces is wasted if that individual has not developed the skills to present their work to a critical audience, explain their thoughts to other team members, and push solutions through unforgiving (and often dysfunctional) organizations.
Read MoreThe future of UX is the user who begins a task on one device, continues through many more interfaces across many platforms and many more devices and completes their task with little recognition of, or interest in the complexity involved. To stay relevant in the development of digital products, we need think at a higher level than screens or sites or devices.
Read MoreHow do we open the design process to everybody, while protecting the expertise of each team member?
Read MoreThe greatest solutions are worthless if you can’t effectively explain them to your stakeholders, clients and peers. When you speak in front of others, do your arguments tend to sound soft, does your content feel flabby or does your delivery seem frail? Do people think you lack conceptual vim and intellectual vigor?
Listening to somebody else’s presentation for four hours won’t make you a better presenter; it’s time to get off your ass and put the work in necessary to transform yourself into one of the greats. In this raucous workshop, you will participate in increasingly demanding challenges led by Dan Willis, co-author of Designing the Conversation and founder of the Cranky Talk Workshop for New Speakers. You will learn how to attack the weaker aspects of your presentation style, strengthen the structure of your talks and breakdown your personal bad habits.
Read MoreYou’re back in the office for the first time since attending the GIANT Conference. You’re overloaded with intellectual momentum, inspired by all the exciting things you heard in Charleston and the fascinating peers you talked to. You stare at your jam-packed inbox, but you can’t seem to focus on any of the messages. The silly grin that’s been stretched across your face all morning fades, your cheeks relax. And you think to yourself: Amazing people are doing amazing things ... but not here.
What you’re going to need at that moment will not come from some Tony Robbins/Dr. Phil type motivational speech. Instead, seasoned UX consultant Dan Willis will explore five specific tactics for doing epic work despite in whose offices you might be sitting as post-conference ennui crashes over you.
Read MoreA workshop I run with Jared Spool, founder of UIE.
Read MoreMobile devices now stitch together segments of user experiences that had previously gone unconnected. People accomplish tasks with multiple devices across multiple platforms and using multiple digital and physical services. While this introduces amazing opportunities for UX professionals, the expanded scope also requires skillsets outside of traditional design teams. This workshop will define the areas of expertise required, describe the necessary tools, and explore processes teams can use to effectively map cross-channel experiences.
Read MoreDesign is not magic and it does not take place in a vacuum. Like it or not, organizations create successful user experiences, not designers. This talk will outline what an effective UX professional should be doing long before a single pixel has been designed. Participants will walk away with specific bottom-up tactics to more accurately define the organization, adjust team structure and tweak process.
Read MoreThose sweet days of delusion when we could act like our users’ experiences were contained within a single interface on a single device on a single platform are over. And don’t kid yourself, we’re not going to get away much longer with the comfortable (and just as delusional) concept of “cross-channel” design. There’s only one channel, the user’s, and everything we create is just content sliding into and out of their field of vision. So how the hell do we deal with all that?
Read MoreAs we squint into a bright future, let’s first glance back at the user experience industry’s well-meaning, but mostly murky past. UX’s foundation is a sordid mix of lies, shams and idiocy: We never designed experiences and things like mobile have always been adjectives, no matter how many times we sold them as nouns. Now we’re hyperventilating about designing responsively across channels, like that will change everything. We’re still talking about users and those bald apes haven’t changed in thousands of generations.
Read MoreIt's not a platform, it's not a kind of design, it's not a strategy - in fact, it's just a fad. But that doesn't mean it's not important.
Read MoreUX 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.
Read MoreHumans 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.
Read MoreUser experience is what it does and what it does is solve problems.
Read MoreAn 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.
Read MoreDriven 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.
Read Moredan [at] dswillis [dotcom]
