In this workshop you will:

• Be introduced to design sketching
• Explore what design sketching is and how it is different from fine art drawing
• Learn quick and dirty techniques for representing people, things, places and ideas
• Familiarize yourself with scenario sketching
• Take part in a group drawing project

This workshop will provide clear and simple methodologies to empower interaction between designers and to help you learn how hand sketching techniques -- with pens and pencils -- can be a means of recording, sharing and presenting ideas to others. It will also serve as a primer on sketching to help you to become a more confident and better visual communicator, while also demonstrating quick methods for using drawing to enrich the collaborative design process.

Intended for interaction and user experience designers of all skill levels, this workshop will help you broaden your sketching skills to capture rapid visualization of thoughts, concepts, systems and scenarios. Will and Mark will guide you through a range of activities, introducing drawing and sketching techniques along with methods for including sketching as part of a generative design process.

The format for this fast-paced workshop will be a balanced combination of presentation and discussion, along with ample time for hands-on sketching and drawing. By the end of the workshop you will have a broader understanding of hand-generated sketching and will have also learned new methods to help you work more creatively. Expect to be engaged and challenged in an open, supportive and fun studio environment.

Top 3 key take-aways from this workshop:

1. An idea of how sketching may enrich your design process.
2. Techniques you can customize and build upon.
3. Simple methods you can share back at the office.

Even though touchscreen and gestural technologies have been around for decades, they are only now being widely adopted for public use. The launches of Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone, and Microsoft Surface have heralded a new era of interaction design where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking.

But how do you create products and design experiences for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design desktop and web applications, many are still wondering how to adequately design for interactive gestures.

In this workshop you will:

• Learn the key differences in designing for touch/gesture
• Learn how to design touch targets
• Explore the basics of ergonomics and kinesiology
• Create a paper prototype of a touchscreen/gestural interface
• Communicate presence and instruction
• Learn strategies for documenting a touch application

Learn the basics of designing for touchscreens and gestural interfaces in this hands-on workshop. Bill DeRouchey, Interaction Design Director at Ziba Design and Dan Saffer, Principal at Kicker Studio and author of the 2008 O'Reilly book Designing Gestural Interfaces, will lead this workshop.

This workshop is for designers of all levels who want to expand their knowledge of interaction design into the new territory of interactive gestures. Through activities and mini-lectures on relevant topics, Dan and Bill will guide you in understanding the benefits and limitations of this new medium.

• Tired of redesigning the same interactions over and over again?
• Interested in streamlining your design and development process without sacrificing quality?
• Wondering if you need to create a library of reusable design components and solutions?
• Heard about the Yahoo! Pattern Library and want to know the real story?

Erin, Christian, and Lucas will share insights and lessons learned from the 3+ year history of the Yahoo! pattern library. They will show how to identify patterns, write, review and rate patterns; build a pattern library; and then will discuss how to leverage the interaction guidelines codified in a pattern library to rapidly design websites and applications.

Topics covered include:

• Identifying patterns
• Writing patterns (and building consensus)
• Reviewing and rating patterns
• Organizing patterns into a library
• Attaching templates and code modules to patterns
• Rapid prototyping of web experiences
• Rapid development of production-ready web experiences

Wireframes wacky? Flows farkakt?

These and other interaction design documents can be difficult to create and use in the best of circumstances, not to mention the tight time frames and politicized organizations in which we work. Web sites and interactive products are becoming more complex and so, too, must the design documentation that describes them.

If you've spent any time pondering the ins and outs of any of these documents (or feel like you need to), this workshop is for you. Spend four hours with Dan Brown, author of Communicating Design--the only book on user experience design documentation--as he leads you through an exploration of wireframes and flows.

During the course of the workshop, you'll hone your skills with these two key documents, essential tools for communicating interaction design concepts. By the end of the workshop, you will have worked through these two deliverables and gathered best practices that you can extend to all your documentation.

Participating in this hands-on workshop, you will:

• Discuss success criteria for wireframes and flows
• Explore how different circumstances affect the content and format
• Define a process for creating documents, large and small
• Critique examples from Dan's portfolio and other sources
• Create different versions of these documents
• Practice presenting your documents

Interaction Design is a young field that spans many industries. Many of us learned the tools of the trade on the job. Because of this, there is a rich untapped number of approaches out there yet to be shared.

This workshop is intended to bring together conference participants who are interested in seeing how others practice the craft. At the end of the workshop, you will understand how different design approaches yield different solutions and be more conscious about how to think about a problem differently from what you do now.

This workshop will be highly collaborative. It is designed to foster exchange of ideas between people of all different backgrounds working in the industry. We will start with a short presentation on how we have done our work in different circumstances. Then we break into teams to design an experience. The exercise is intended to push boundaries of what it means to do IxD. At the end of the exercise, you will be asked to visually communicate to the group your method of solving the problem. The goals of this presentation are to share how different practices yield different results and to have a facilitated discussion to discover themes in our practice.

In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions.

In his full-day workshop, Luke Wroblewski, author of the Rosenfeld Mediabook Web Form Design Best Practices, will walk you through design considerations and best practices of form design culled from international site-tracking, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over eleven years of designing Web applications. He'll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not.

Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior. The workshop is structured to provide attendees with an understanding of the right "best" practices for their specific context, so they can quickly go from the quintessential design answer of "it depends" (on the business goals, user needs, and context of your forms) to actionable solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again.

Many designers and other people who "make stuff" agree that talking to people is essential at many points throughout the process. But even with that agreement it's not always clear what to do with the "data" that comes from those conversations.

Through exercises, examples, and discussion, Steve will share some best practices before going out in the field, while out in the field, and after being in the field that help transform questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.

This workshop is intended for interaction designers who have little to no experience with hardware/software design and are interested in expanding their practice into this rapidly-growing space. Interaction design practice changes as it moves off the desktop and beyond keyboard and mouse input. Designers face new considerations of physical and environmental context, as well as new opportunities and constraints based in the different technological platforms, physical forms and use paradigms.

In this practical, hands-on workshop, we'll share insights and principles from our own experiences and those of some leading practitioners in the field. We'll provide guidance on working effectively with industrial designers and electrical and mechanical engineers to create the best possible user experience. In addition, we'll discuss how a hardware/software interaction design perspective will help you navigate the new world of product ecosystems and service design.

The session will include a design exercise where small teams will try their hand at developing a hardware/software design. Come prepared to engage deeply, to provide constructive feedback, and to take home new skills and a new way of thinking about your work and future.

Ted Booth leads interaction design at Smart Design. His team focuses on designing new experiences for a wide range of consumer products and services. Interaction designers at Smart work closely with industrial designers, researchers and engineers to create enjoyable and satisfying consumer experiences.

This half-day seminar will provide a solid background in Interaction Design (IxD) for those who are coming to the practice of IxD from other areas, such as information architecture, software engineering, business analysis, project or product management, technical writing, architecture, industrial design, visual design, and interactive design.

The first part of the workshop will give participants a solid grasp of the history of IxD and the role it plays in the design of digital systems (mostly software). In reviewing the history of IxD, participants will gain an understanding of the foundational elements of interaction design and the language that connects them.

The next part of the workshop will give students one of many frameworks that interaction designers use to guide them towards designing an interactive solution. This framework spans the project lifecycle: from research to ideation, to frameworking and refinement of designs, and then to validation and deliverable documentation.

During the workshop, participants will perform hands-on exercises and engage in facilitated discussion. Throughout the session, resources will be provided to enable participants to continue to learn about the theory and practice of interaction design on their own, and to begin to incorporate its techniques and principles into their work.