{ The Secrets to Great User Experience Shouldn't be Kept Behind Closed Doors }

The UX Speakeasy Conference is a one-day event that pairs the best speakers in the UX field with the best information about our Southern California and San Diego UX communities. Mark your calendar for Saturday March 31^st 2012 and join us in San Diego.

The UX Speakeasy program features speakers on many aspects of the design process, from research to development, along with workshops and breakout sessions on the latest UX tools. A panel of local and national experts will also be on hand to answer questions about building and connecting the San Diego and Southern California UX and tech communities.

Who should come?

Developers should come too! There will (probably) be no code, but we will address many of the UX issues you are dealing with on a day to day basis. If you are a mythical Designer/Developer we will be putting you on a pedestal on the main stage to be worshipped.

Our Goals are Simple:

• Share Information: This is a broad and often misunderstood field…but it is also an incredibly open and accessible field. The best way to develop, educate, and inspire each other is to share our knowledge.
• Build Community: Everybody benefits from a strong community. We have a large number of UX professionals in the area – the UX Speakeasy Conference connects our community and provides business, social, employment, and educational opportunities.

The UX Speakeasy Conference is run by a not-for-profit association made up of local volunteers from community UX groups like UX Speakeasy and SandCHI, and local business partners like User First.

Our Sponsors:

Interested in sponsoring the UX Speakeasy Conference? We're interested in talking to you. Email us for the Sponsorship Information Packet: sponsors@uxsconf.com.

Local Partners:

{ This is no Back Alley Gin Mill & You Don’t Need a Password...Just a Registration }

San Diego in March is not such a bad place to be…and the world-famous San Diego Zoo is not a bad place to have a conference. The Conference, Workshops and Vendors will be located at the Zoofari Pavilion, just inside the gates of the zoo.

You will be greeted at the entrance to the zoo at the UX Speakeasy Conference Registration table where you will be given your conference pass and information.

Your UX Speakeasy Conference Registration includes a free pass to the zoo and you are free to run wild with the animals on the breaks and after the conference. If you would like to bring your family or friends to visit the zoo while you are at the conference, discount zoo passes are available to registered conference attendees. Contact the UX Speakeasy Conference staff for more details: info@uxsconf.com

Getting Here:

View Larger Map

The San Diego Zoo is located at 2920 Zoo Drive in Balboa Park, just north of downtown San Diego. For general information call 619-231-1515.

Driving
The San Diego Zoo and Balboa Park has plenty of free parking for those driving to the conference

• Directions from the NORTH: From Interstate 5 (Los Angeles and Orange County), take the Pershing Drive exit and follow the signs. From Interstate 15 (Escondido and Riverside), take State Route 163 south to the Park Blvd./I-5 South exit. Exit at Park Blvd. Turn left on Park Blvd. and head north; Zoo entrance is off Park Blvd. at Zoo Place.
• Directions from the SOUTH: From Interstate 5 (Mexico), take the State Route 163 north exit, then the Zoo/Museums (Richmond Street) exit and follow the signs.
• Directions from the EAST: From Interstate 8 (Imperial County and Arizona), take State Route 163 south to the Park Blvd./I-5 South exit. Exit at Park Blvd. Turn left on Park Blvd. and head north; Zoo entrance is off Park Blvd at Zoo Place. From State Route 94, proceed into downtown San Diego to 12th Avenue. Turn right on 12th Avenue (which turns into Park Blvd.) and proceed north. Zoo entrance is off Park Blvd at Zoo Place.

Public transportation
The San Diego Zoo stop is located on MTS Bus Route 7

For more information about bus and train schedules, please call 511 (San Diego’s traffic and transit information service) or visit sdmts.com.

Staying Here:

For those of you coming from out of town and/or wishing to spend the night in America’s Finest City, we’d love to have you. The San Diego Zoo provides discounted hotel rates here

{ Bringing the Best Local & National UX Expertise to the Shindig }

The UX Speakeasy Conference promotes speakers with a wide variety expertise in the UX Design Process. Our main speakers will cover areas from concept, to research, to implementation.  Our group of panelists will include local leaders of tech, education, and design paired with regional and national UX community leaders. And last but not least, our workshops will be run by recognized speakers and trainers on the latest UX tools.

Aaron Irizarry, Host Speaker

Experience Designer, HP | @aaroni268
Aaron is an Experience Designer for HP in Rancho Bernardo, CA, where it is always right around 70 degrees and sunny. Aaron has a background in visual design and has been handcrafting pixels since 1998. Over time Aaron grew increasingly interested in the overall experiences that users were having with the sites and applications that he was working on. He now focuses on creating well-rounded experiences and trying to save the world one user at a time. He shares his thoughts and experiences along the way on his blog.

Alfonso de la Nuez

Co-Founder and CEO, UserZoom | @delanuez23
Alfonso has 14-years experience in the field of Online Marketing, Web Design and User Experience, having worked for companies such as Dell Computers, Icon Medialab (now LBi) and Proxicom (now iCrossing). He’s also co-founded Xperience Consulting, one of Europe’s most experienced usability consultancies. He teaches usability and web design courses at various universities and academic institutions, and is a frequent speaker at conferences.

When he’s not working he enjoys playing basketball. Back in his younger days (when he was in way better shape) he was included in San Diego’s All-Time High School List Best all-time guards. He ended up playing NCAA Div I Baketball for San José State University, where he played on an athletic scholarship and shared the court with various NBA players. He holds a BA in International Business from San José State University.

UserZoom develops web-based remote research solution to cost-effectively design, test and deliver great User Experiences over Websites and Mobile Apps. Som of its clients are Google, Paypal, IBM, Amazon, Walmart, Continental Airlines, eBay, among others.

Workshop: Remote Testing Methods, Tools & Best Practices

Andrew Mayfield

CEO, Optimal Workshop | @andrewfantastic
Andrew is a recognized usability testing innovator and technologist. Andrew is the creator of OptimalSort, the web-based card sorting tool that changed the way usability consultants operate. He is keeping the usability industry on the cutting edge with better visualisation techniques, analytical methods and data management.

Workshop: Optimal Information Architecture

Angel Anderson

Experience Director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky | @angel
Angel Anderson has 10+ years of experience humanizing digital products and services for clients such as Old Navy, Best Buy, Microsoft, Fox, Pepsi, and Mattel. Much of her work has flourished as part of the social web and has helped her formulate clear guidelines for creating rich social frameworks. Angel is active in the Los Angeles design community as the founding IxDA Los Angeles local leader and as a guest lecturer at USC, UCLA, and The Arts Institute of California.

Topic: Why We Share: Motivations at the Heart of Sharing

Darrell Benatar

CEO, usertesting.com | @DarrellBenatar
Darrell is a serial entrepreneur who founded Surprise.com in 1999. Darrell was not a believer in usability testing and was shocked at the problems people were having with things that he’d always assumed worked fine. So he began doing user testing for all Surprise.com redesigns. Since then, Surprise.com was selected by Time magazine as one of the “50 Best Websites.” Seeing its effectiveness on his site, he’s decided to make it easy for other website owners to do user testing.

Workshop: Find Your Biggest Usability Problems

David Horn

Sr Manager Analytics, Disney Interactive Labs | @Madrox
David Horn is a statistician who's spent five years analyzing the social web. Right now, he works in Los Angeles helping Disney measure and act on conversations about the thousands of brands and products they have. Along the way, he's done his part to help make Disney one of the most respected brands in social. He's recently focused on figuring out how to measure the interaction between the social experience to disney.com. He's learned lot about what experiences work and do not work in social, as well as how passionate Disney fans can be.

In addition to his work as a statistician, David has developed web apps large and small. He enjoys thinking about how to build tools that can help people make more data-driven decisions in their lives. This had naturally led him into the realms of machine learning, data mining, and Quantified Self.

Workshop: Techniques for Measuring the Role of Social Networks in the User Experience

Dennis Wixon

Senior User Researcher at Startup Business Group, Microsoft
Over the last 30 years Dennis Wixon has co-developed a wide variety of innovative research methods for applied user research. Most recently Dennis has managed user research for at Microsoft Games Studios and Microsoft Surface. Both of these teams are noted for their innovative and impactful research. Dennis previously worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he co-developed some of the earliest data logging methods, the usability engineering approach, and a number of field research methods. He has authored over 50 publications and two books. His latest book, coauthored with Dr. Daniel Widgor is Brave NUI World on Natural User Interfaces. In addition, Dennis has been professionally active for many years. He is one of the founding members of the Greater Boston SIGCHI, one of the oldest SIGCHI chapters. He also co-chaired the SIGCHI conference in 2002. Dennis holds a PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.

Topic: Creating Emotionally Compelling Products: Examples of the Collaboration of Research and Design

Dylan Campbell

Owner & Senior Partner, Highlander Solutions | @HighlanderSol
Dylan runs Highlander Solutions, an executive search firm based in Los Angeles, CA. For the past seven years, he has talked to more software engineers and UX professionals than he can remember. He is on the board of the LA Silverlight User Group, the LA .NET User Group Book Club, and is the volunteer coordinator for both the Orange County and the LA Southern California Code Camps.

In his spare time he writes plays and comic books. He will run a marathon one day. But probably not this year. He quietly hates job postings that use words like: Awesome, Ninja, or Rockstar.

Workshop: From Application To Interview: How To Get A Great UX Job

Eric Reiss

CEO, FatDUX | @elreiss
Eric Reiss has held a wide range of eclectic jobs including: piano player (in a house of ill-repute), senior copywriter (in an ad-house of ill-repute), player-piano repairman, jukebox restorer, pinball wizard, pool hustler, playwright, composer, school-bus driver, cartoonist, magician, adventure-game creator, starving student (Washington University in St. Louis) showboat actor (Goldenrod Showboat), and stage director (Danish Royal Theatre). The breadth and depth of his experience have served him admirably as an information architect, although he is generally unable to explain exactly how.

In other past lives, Eric has been a two-term president of the Information Architecture Institute, a professor of Usability and Design at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain, and a leading collector of late 20th century parking tickets.

Today, Eric is CEO of the FatDUX Group in Copenhagen, Denmark, an international user-experience design company with offices and associates in over a dozen cities worldwide. He also has a couple of books to his credit.

Topic: Web Dogma - Killer Content or Content that Kills?

Katie Buettner

Senior User Experience Researcher, Intuit
Katie has a B.S. in Cognitive Science specializing in Human Computer Interaction and a minor in Anthropology from UC San Diego. An unanticipated side effect of this academic endeavor was falling in love with America’s Finest City. So, after a stint at Intuit’s headquarters in the Bay Area, Katie was fortunate enough to relocate to the San Diego office, where she is subjected to copious amounts of sunshine and craft beer while working tirelessly to help teams gain customer empathy, uncover critical insights, and create delightful product experiences. Lately, her work is focused primarily on mobile and tablet endeavors, and she is always on the lookout for interesting ways to effectively study and test this “new” context-critical modality.

Workshop: A Walk on the Wild Side: How You Can Use Rapid Experiments with Customers to Evolve Your Offering

Knut Graf

Principal Designer, frog design | @knutopia
Knut is a Principal Designer at frog, an innovation consultancy. Since joining frog in 1997, Knut has done development, prototyping and design work for large and small clients in the US, in Europe and in Asia. Recently, Knut has been focusing on shaping designs for software implementation, where the interactions that occur between design and development teams present enormous challenges and opportunities to set up projects for success.

Knut is a citizen of Germany, holding an EB-I greencard. Before joining frog in Austin, TX, he worked as a consultant in Germany, serving at one point as the lead developer for a monthly cd-rom publication with an edition of 500,000. Knut holds a degree in Communication Design for Electronic Media from Merz Academy, Stuttgart, and has conducted graduate work at the Advanced Design Research Center in the School of Architecture at UT Austin. Knut has been writing software on a variety of platforms since age 12.

Topic: Design for Software Development

Larry Marine

User Experience Architect, Intuitive Design | @uxstrategy
Larry graduated from Don Norman’s first CogSci class at UCSD in 1990. Given his previous years as a computer expert in the Navy and at Univac and a demonstrated passion for usability principles, Dr. Norman suggested that Larry embark on a consulting career and help promote usability in product design. In that evangelical vein, Larry created the first ever VP of Usability in the San Diego Software Industry Council and launched the monthly UX meeting now know as the UX SIG.

In the past 20 years Larry has continually improved on the basic UCD processes and designed some of the most successful interfaces around, including Proflowers, Pyxis, FedEx Kinko’s, Novartis, Vanguard Mutual Funds, and many more. Larry has served on the boards of numerous UCD /UX groups and continues to evangelize the UCD perspective. Now if only he could finish his book…

Topic: The Strategic Side of UX

Ming Xia

User Experience Researcher, Blizzard Entertainment
Ming joined Blizzard Entertainment in 2010 and proceeded to build a better understanding of how consumers use Blizzard web sites and services. He uses methodologies such as usability testing, card sorting, and interviews to help Blizzard make data-driven design decisions. Prior to joining Blizzard, Ming spent three years at Warner Brother Games as a games researcher where he helped game designers figure out what makes their games “fun”, and how players learned to play the game. He worked on games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, F.E.A.R. 2, and Scribblenauts. Ming studied Psychology at University of Washington.

Workshop: Usability Testing for Web Sites and Gaming

Patrick Neeman

Director of User Experience, Jobvite | @usabilitycounts
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a Social Recruiting platform with hundreds of customers, including Twitter, Groupon, Living Social and LinkedIn. He lives in San Francisco, California. He's worked on the web for 17 years. Some of the companies he’s has worked with and for include Microsoft, MySpace, Move.com, Orbitz, Comcast, and Disney, in either a social media or user experience capacity. More importantly, he's the owner of the UX Drinking Game, contributing to speakeasies at agencies all over the world, and runs a blog, Usability Counts.

Workshop: From Application To Interview: How To Get A Great UX Job

Rachel Hinman

Senior Research Scientist, Nokia | @Hinman
Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer and a recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. Currently, she is a Senior Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets.

Prior to joining Nokia, Rachel was and experience design director at Adaptive Path, and a mobile researcher and strategist for Yahoo’s mobile group. Currently, Rachel is writing The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile User Experiences with Rosenfeld Media.

Topic: The Mobile Frontier

Russ Unger

UX Professional & Author | @russu
Russ Unger is a User Experience professional in the Chicago area. He is co-author of the book “A Project Guide to UX Design” for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter) and is co-authoring a book on guerilla research methods with Todd Zaki Warfel due out in 2012. Russ is also on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design.

Topic: It's A Good Time to Be You

{ All Top Shelf, All Day Long }

Talks
8:00 – 9:00 9:00 – 9:15 9:15 – 10:00 10:00 – 10:45 10:45 – 11:00 11:00 – 11:45 11:45 – 12:45 12:45 – 1:30 1:30 – 2:15 2:15 – 3:00 3:00 – 3:30 3:30 – 4:15 4:15 – 5:00	Registration & Morning Feed Introduction & Community Call to Arms | Aaron Irizarry It's a Good Time to be You | Russ Unger Web Dogma - Killer Content or Content that Kills? | Eric Reiss Joe Break Why We Share: Motivations at the Heart of Sharing | Angel Anderson Grub Break The Strategic Side of UX | Larry Marine Design for Software | Knut Graf The Mobile Frontier | Rachel Hinman Hooch Break Creating Emotionally Compelling Products | Dennis Wixon Panel: Inspiring and Creating Community | Host: Aaron Irizarry
Workshops
11:00 – 11:45 11:45 – 12:45 12:45 – 1:30 1:30 – 2:15 2:15 – 3:00 3:00 – 3:30 3:30 – 4:15 4:15 – 4:35 4:35 – 4:55	Optimal Information Architecture | Andrew Mayfield Grub Break How to get a Great UX Job | Patrick Neeman & Dylan Campbell Remote Testing Methods, Tools & Best Practices | Alfonso de la Nuez Usability Testing for Web Sites and Gaming | Ming Xia Hooch Break A Walk on the Wild Side...Rapid Experiments | Katie Buettner Find Your Biggest Usability Problems | Darrell Benatar Techniques for Measuring Social Networks in the UX | David Horn
schedule.pdf

Talks

Workshops

Optimal Information Architecture | Andrew Mayfield

Defining and refining an effective Information Architecture is fundamental to providing a great user experience. Optimal Workshop's IA tools have been used by many thousands of companies around the world to gather the research and insights required for creating great IAs. In this workshop we're going to run through a few pro tips for getting the best results from your research efforts with the Optimal tools and discuss a few high level insights we can glean from looking at the card sort and tree test study results from all the studies in the Optimal treasure trove.

Interested in sponsoring the UX Speakeasy Conference? email: sponsors@uxsconf.com.
Interested in volunteering for the UX Speakeasy Conference? email: vols@uxsconf.com.

If you have questions or comments about the UX Speakeasy Conference let us know.

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