Keynote speaker, Midwest UX, 2011, Columbus, OH

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.

Workshop, Information Architecture Summit, 2013 and 2014

A workshop I designed and ran with Jared Spool, founder of UIE.

Workshop, Information Architecture Summit, 2014, San Diego, CA

Mobile 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.

Speaker, WebVisions, 2010, Portland, OR

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.

Speaker, UPA's UserFocus Conference, 2010, Washington, DC

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.)

Founder

Independent day-long workshops I created and ran across the country, with a rotating faculty: Washington, DC (2010); Chicago (2011); Dallas (2013); L.A. (2014).

Panelist, Web 3.0 Conference, 2009, New York City

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.

Panel facilitator, South by Southwest Interactive Festival, 2011, Austin, TX

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.

Speaker, UX Australia, 2013, Melbourne, Australia

As 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.

Speaker, Philly Barcamp, 2011, Philadelphia, PA

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.

Keynote speaker, ProductCamp DC, 2014, Washington, D.C.

How do we open the design process to everybody, while protecting the expertise of each team member?

Keynote speaker, Giant Conference, 2014, Charleston, SC

You’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.

Curator, Enterprise UX, 2015-0000

Selected and coached five to seven speakers at each conference, helping them shape five-minute talks and emceeing the Storytellers’ sessions.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2005, Montreal

Frequently, an information architect needs to be as effective as an evangelist as they are skilled as a practitioner.

Speaker, MobileUX Camp DC, 2013, Washington, DC

Those 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?

Speaker, South by Southwest Interactive Festival, 2009, Austin, TX

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.

Speaker, User Focus (UXPA DC chapter), 2014, Washington, DC

The 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.

Creator, emcee, Interaction 12, 2012, Dublin, Ireland

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.

Workshop, Information Architecture Summit, 2015, Minneapolis, MN

Great 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.

Workshop, EuroIA 2014, Brussels, Belgium

The 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 break down your personal bad habits.

Speaker, IxDA Interaction 09, 2009, Vancouver

This session will explore the effect on interaction design when content can tell you how it should be managed.

Speaker, Big Design Conference, 2013, Dallas, TX

Design 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.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2010, Phoenix, AZ

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.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2015, Minneapolis, MN

We’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.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2008, Miami

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.

Speaker, WebVisions, 2011, Portland, OR

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.

Speaker, Mobile UXCamp DC, 2012, Washington, DC

It'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.

Workshop, Information Architecture Summit, 2005, Montreal

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 marshaling the diverse skills of others.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2004, Austin, TX

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.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2009, Memphis, TN

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.

Speaker, Barcamp Philly, 2009, Philadelphia, PA

Experimental group discussion where participants argue the suck/not-suckishness of a variety of interactive issues.

Speaker, UXCamp DC, 2011, Washington, DC

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.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2011, Denver, CO

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?

Speaker, DC Startup Weekend, 2011, Washington, DC

User experience is what it does and what it does is solve problems.

Speaker, Information Architecture Summit, 2010, Phoenix, AZ

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.