The 9 Pillars of Successful Web Teams
Jesse James Garrett

Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. The best teams we've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success. Jesse James Garrett will teach you how to quickly and clearly identify which of the competencies you possess and which you're lacking in the design and development processes.

Executive Advocacy: Design as Business Strategy
Scott Hirsch

In this session you will learn how to:

• Identify the user behavior metrics that link to long-term business value
• Reposition Web design as a corporate investment, rather than an expense
• Determine the value of user experience investments
• Convince senior managers that a user-centered approach to solving business problems

Team Advocacy: Managing the Politics
Janice Fraser

• simplify internal politics,
• increase the resources available to you,
• help you deliver your best designs.
Too many corporations believe that the benefits of user-centered development are intangible and far off. If your management team thinks that user-centered processes are "nice to have" but not critical, this session will teach you how to shift the corporate mindset. We'll offer practical tactics for:
• creating a user-centered organizational culture,
• presenting user-focused customer experience as a vital, short-term process,
• demonstrating its immediate value,
• developing lasting support among stakeholders.

Personal Advocacy: People Skills for Designers
Christina Wodtke

In art school, you're lucky if they teach you how to put together a portfolio. But getting your designs into the world takes more than a mastery of color and font -- it takes an understanding of what motivates the humans who can help you or shoot you down. If you've ever heard "make it bigger" or "make it red" and not known how to deal with it, then this talk is for you.

Christina will discuss how to:

• present your design effectively,
• collect valuable feedback -- and handle the useless feedback,
• keep your design alive in those scary last-minute-before-launch moments when everyone suddenly second-guesses every choice you made.

The Elements of User Experience
Jesse James Garrett

Designing a sound user experience can be overwhelmingly complex. With so many issues involved -- usability, brand identity, information architecture, interaction design -- it can seem as if the only way to build a successful site is to spend a fortune on specialists who understand all the details. This presentation will impose order on the chaotic array of terms and concepts currently being used to describe user experience development.

We'll review the big picture -- from strategy and requirements to information architecture and visual design -- and explain how each element of user-experience design can help you develop a process. We'll also look at some behind-the-scenes examples of how these ideas have been put into practice in the real world.

Interaction Design
Lane Becker

When your website matches people’s expectations, visitors can:

• use it more efficiently
• remember it more easily, and
• focus on accomplishing their goals instead of wasting time figuring out how the system works.

Interaction design is the process of designing an interface that meets users’ expectations in this way, by making certain that the right tools are available to the right people in the right place at the right time. But on the Web, good interaction design is particularly challenging, since the types of interactions possible are much more limited than in traditional software.

This workshop will simplify the process of interaction design into four general principles and will provide you with a set of questions you can ask during the design process, to ensure that your site works as seamlessly, usefully, and intuitively as possible.

Interface Design Tips: The Three Little Things
Jason Fried, 37 Signals

1. Context and Perspective -- helping people relate to physical objects online (what does "3.3 x 1.1 x .8" really mean?)
2. Setting Expectations -- helping people know what comes next (what does this button do, how long will this process take, what will this feature do for me?)
3. Contingency Design -- helping people get back on track when something goes wrong (hint: offer suggestions, not dead ends). Covers topics from the new book: Defensive Design for the Web.

Managing Your Web Site Content: Dodging CMS Disasters
Jeffrey Veen

Content management systems are billed as solutions to all of your Web site woes. They can also cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. So why do so many CMS projects fail? Because companies often don't do the necessary prep work. Expensive technological solutions are ignored when they don't meet your organization's expectations.

After working with several companies, and talking to people at dozens more, we've come up with the steps that will help you to use your CMS efficiently. In this session, Jeffrey Veen will teach you how to inventory your content, analyze your current workflow, and deconstruct your current pages into templates. We'll help you use your existing CMS or move your site to a new CMS without all the costly mistakes.

CMS, Part 2
Jeffrey Veen

The Benefit, Beauty, and Business of Standards, Part 1
Douglas Bowman, Stop Design

Web standards are no longer limited to early-adopting Web geeks, bloggers, and evangelists. The practical benefits of using standards have never been more evident. The experience users have on your site can drastically improve when you begin to embrace the power and flexibility that simple markup and robust style sheets can provide.

The Benefit, Beauty, and Business of Standards, Part 2
Douglas Bowman, Stop Design

The 9 Steps to Whipping Your Web Site into Shape
Jeffrey Veen and Peter Merholz

Jeff and Peter will give you the big picture. Where does user experience fit in to organizations? What steps can you take to ensure that your hard work will be successful? This session will include lively discussion with all the presenters, offering years of experience from the trenches. Don't miss this chance to relate your experiences as well.

Field Trip!

You can't possibly spend an entire week sitting in a workshop. That's why we've made arrangements for a very special private tour of the National Building Museum. We'll see first-hand how design and architecture are put into practice in the real world. This will be the perfect end to your week of user experience training, and will help put everything into perspective. (And to top it off, transportation and museum entry are on us!)