Designing for Context
As designers take on new problems of convergence and ubiquity, we find ourselves facing new challenges. The products we create are accessed through multiple devices, different channels and a wide audience. How do we accommodate the context of use?
Whether you design mobile apps, services or web experiences, you know that people have different needs and desires. Those issues are complicated further by a landscape of technology.
This discussion will highlight these new challenges and offer solutions based on years of design experience. Topics include:
• What should you be aware of when designing a product or service for use in various locations and environments?
• How does motion and distraction affect interaction and content design decisions?
• Do you provide for casual use vs. urgent need?
• How does the form factor or input method of your device steer your design efforts?
• What happens in an ecosystem of products?
• How does social and cultural context play into the strategy of your design?
Presenters
Design Director at GE. Speaker, designer, strategist. Past lives include VP at Razorfish and designer at Adaptive Path. I like to poke things with sticks.
Ben helps to lead Method’s interaction design team in San Francisco. His twelve years of experience span working within teams large and small, both in-house and within client services, from startups to corporate behemoths. Ben has worked on projects with many different areas of focus, beginning on the web but expanding to include mobile, brand, application, strategy, product and service.
Prior to joining Method, Ben has spent time at Adaptive Path, IDEO, Twitter, Samsung, UK-based service design pioneers live|work, and a massive web agency you'd only remember if you still have the scars from the first dot bomb.
Leah Buley is a design strategist at Intuit, where she works on the future of business and personal finance.
Prior to Intuit, Leah was an experience designer at Adaptive Path, working for clients in financial services, media, consumer products, and the non-profit world.
Leah writes and speaks regularly on tactics for inviting colleagues and skeptics into the user-centered design process. Her workshops and presentations have a reputation for being quirky, information-packed, and always fun.
She is currently at work on a book to be published with Rosenfeld Media in 2012.
Nate is the president of Bolt | Peters User Experience, co-author of the book Remote Research, host of the annual User Research Friday conference, and creator of Ethnio - a web app for on-demand research recruiting.
Working with the rad team at Bolt | Peters, he helps clients like Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Greenpeace, Levi's, Sony, Volkswagen, Rdio, Zynga, and others get the most accurate interaction research and design. They work on web apps, video games, and even vehicle interfaces, which Nate gives talks about all over the freaking place. He was the keynote for the Urban Library Council, and has recently spoke at UX Week, IA Summit, CHI, IxD10, and UPA.
Ryan Freitas is the co-founder and product lead of about.me, now an AOL property. He is a long-serving practitioner, consultant and speaker within the interaction design and UX communities. As an advisor and seed investor, he's an outspoken speaker on how startups approach product design. He lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Kristen and their baby boy, Dashiell.
Friday, March 9
