Building Great Design Teams

Want to make great products? You'll have to build a great team first. Great teams are comprised of people with complimentary skills, but more importantly, complimentary personalities. Savvy leaders select the right personalities and skills knowing that their strength is greater together than apart. Once the team is assembled, the challenge of orchestrating diverse skills begins.

Building a great design team is an art not easily mastered. After nearly a decade of leading design teams at MailChimp, Aarron Walter has wisdom to share that will help you navigate these murky waters. In this talk, Aarron tackles the skill seeking, personality sussing, and crystal ball gazing that are part and parcel of building a killer design team.

The Hidden Plot Device

“Storytelling" appears to be a magic word when it comes to creating user experience—we use it to evoke design ideals, to summon the creative spirit, or to cry out for a narrative link across the complex world of devices and short attention span. But is this all there is?

Unconvinced that storytelling could be so superficial, Steph spent a few years learning from the art of making documentaries, crime fiction, novels and the shortest of stories. As she uncovered the parallels in the making of stories and the research/design processes of UX, she began to formulate a framework where these two worlds meet, unearthing a different angle on what do in order to take our skills to greater heights.

In this session, Steph will show how understanding the essence and practice of story opens a world of possibilities and adds another dimension to your UX toolset. Better still, it’s less of a mystery than what you might think.

In Letters We Trust

This talk will present ongoing research into the use of letterforms as a means of security for citizens and governments alike, thwarting forgery in plain sight and in secret. Some strategies have relied on high-profile collaborations, and others on home-grown cunning. Interwoven is a story of war and peace, technology, culture and economics. The narrative will focus on American banknotes from the Colonial period to the present day, with additional examples of government permits and lottery tickets.

Punctus Contra Punctum

If there’s one thing that the web industry loves to do, it’s pontificate. And if there’s one thing that Jay Fanelli and Nathan Peretic (co-founders of Full Stop, United Pixelworkers, and Cotton Bureau) love to do, it’s argue. Jay and Nate take opposite sides of some of our industry’s favorite debates and show you that there’s really no wrong way—or is it no right way?—to build a business on the internet.

Modern Progressive Enhancement

Just because it requires JavaScript, doesn't make it wrong, but we often use JavaScript to engineer-away the parts of the web that are already better than native. Let's take a look at some real-world JavaScript-heavy applications, and how they can regain the performance of the web without losing features. Then, let's tackle the area progressive enhancement has largely ignored: Connectivity.

Imagining the Physical Web

Some people say the web is dying, but I believe it’s just getting started. And what will kick it into overdrive is the Physical Web: the ability to discover, engage, and interact with smart devices (or that “dumb” tree over there) using nothing more than a browser.

In this (highly speculative) presentation, I’ll explore the impact these new capabilities will have on the way we design and think about this (increasingly near) future web.

Update: if you are interested in the topic “Physical Web”, you should follow the medium blog of Steph aswell, where she continues to blog about Physical Web and IoT.