Thunder Nerds

We are LIVE at the 2018 UX+DEV SUMMIT https://uxdsummit.com. South Florida’s largest User Experience and Developers conference! Four days of workshops and one day filled with immersive talks, all in areas of User Experience, Product Management, and Development.

We had the honor to talk with the following speakers and presenters:

* Rachel Parsons

* Bermon Painter

* Jacqueline Stetson Pastore

* Martina Mitz

* David Okun

* Ignacio Garcia-Huidobro & Michael Vargas

* Sarrah Vesselov

* Pedro Marques

* Marcelo Paiva

* Shane Doyle

* Michael Prentice

* Ivan Corchado Ruiz

* Alex Redondo

* Mike Donahue

 

I am a Lead UX Architect at Citrix in South Florida where I live with my wife Nikki and our dogs (we call them our daughters) Layla and Cassidy. When I’m not designing, I’m trying to learn how the human mind works by reading books on psychology and behavior, or I’m talking someone’s ear off about the importance of designing for emotions. When I need a break from all that I like to grab my camera and get out in nature to get my ” Zen on” taking photos. Nature and wildlife photography is my artistic outlet and mental salvation.

Mike’s talk: A Brief History of Cupholders

“From discovering unmet needs to creating meaningful experiences. | No one today is loyal to products, services, or brands just because it provides a useful, usable, and desirable experience. People expect those qualities. Hell, they demand them. The question you need to ask is, “What do I need to provide if useful, usable, and desirable isn’t enough anymore?” I’m glad you asked. The short answer is meaning. People crave meaningful experiences in their lives. Whether it’s a smartphone, an e-commerce site, or a binge-worthy television series, we’re looking for things that we believe will provide meaning. Experiences we hope will bring feelings of deep and lasting satisfaction. Experiences that resonate within us. When we don’t get that deep feeling of satisfaction, when things don’t resonate, we try again. We move on to the next thing that looks like it might provide the meaning we seek. In this talk I’ll share two methods that will help us uncover unmet user needs and craft them into meaningful experiences. Kano analysis will help us not only identify the right things to work on (useful), it will also help you understand what role they fulfill for the user. With Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) we’ll see how we can move beyond just building the experience right (usable and desirable) to making the experience meaningful. Combined, Kano and JTBD Focusing on meaning for your end user brings with it benefits for the designer and business alike. Spend less time debating design, and focus on what will provide impact using data to drive decisions. Reduce the risk of wasting time and resources on things your end user doesn’t care about. Improve prioritization feature development. reduce customer churn as you build loyal end-users. A real win-win. All we’ll need to do is a little time travel to uncover how it all works. Don’t worry, I’ll being the time machines and have us back before happy hour.”

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/mdonahue37

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/mike-donahue/

Alex Redondo is a conceptual thinker with a highly developed analytical skill set, specializing in user experience architecture, direction, research, and design with 20 years of leading, strategizing, and building projects for fortune 500 brands and startups on multi-million dollar initiatives.

Alex’s unique skill set and business acumen has helped him grow from humble beginnings to earn the trust to work on projects for well-known organizations such as Home Land Security, Walt Disney, Discovery Channel, Sony, Samsung, Copa Airlines, Mozilla Firefox, A&E, ABC Studios, Carnival Cruise, Pedigree, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus and many more.

His design principles, philosophy, and ethics provide him with an effective framework for efficiently articulating his creativity, as well as his highly resourceful aptitude for analyzing, discovering and simplifying complex problems into intelligently hand-crafted approaches using data-driven and proven marketing methodologies in consumer behavior, cognitive psychology, and predictive analytics.

• Mastery of the latest practices, design tools, analytics platforms, and applicable software programs relevant to his expertise.

• Exceptionally level-headed, has a solid command of his interpersonal communication skills, is sociable, friendly and mindful of his environment and his colleagues.

• His love for knowledge continuously leads him to explore countless philosophical concepts and psychology studies, with thousands of hours devoted to the sciences — all which inspire and lends further refinement toward his work.

Alex’s talk: Anthology of UX

The title of the talk is Anthology of UX, and delivers key insights into 3 areas of interest within User Experience. The first part provides an understanding of how UX can be used to influence and manipulate actions, and how to avoid key signs of bad practices. The second part explores the myths of UX vs the actual process of UX in the real-world, and how to leverage the right approach. And the third part sheds light on what UX could become, taking into consideration advancements that the industry is working on today. The goal of the talk is to inspire curiosity, provide value, and encourage real interest towards advancements in the field of UX.

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexredondo/

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/aerchetype

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/alex-redondo/

Passionate about the intersection of the arts and sciences. From art and philosophy to DJ/Producer, to million dollar smart homes, to design, to engineering. Always pursuing technical challenges with a creative mind.

Currently working as an iOS developer at Chewy.com, always encouraging more collaboration with designers and building great products with awesome people.

Ivan’s talk: Designers and Engineers: How to Improve Trust, Collaboration and Fidelity

Designers and developers share the common goal of creating amazing products. We rely on each other to bring the best work to life, but far too often gaps in communication and collaboration get in the way of quality results. Come join me to talk about how a shared language can help bridge the gap between our two disciplines. We’ll explore both points of view to better understand each other, focusing on empathetic communication tools, system building, and concrete steps that build a strong working relationship and, ultimately, products we can all be proud of.

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/_ivancr

* Website: http://www.ivancr.com/

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/ivan-corchado-ruiz/

Michael Prentice is an international speaker and software consultant on Angular, Material Design, Firebase, Google Cloud, NodeJS, software architecture, and Agile project management. He is a founder of GDG Space Coast, DevIntent, and Market Amplified. Michael is an active open-source contributor and mentor. He recently joined the Angular team as the lead maintainer of the AngularJS Material project. He’s based in sunny Indian Habour Beach, FL where he surfs and enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter.

Michael’s workshop: Using Angular (v5+) Material and Firebase to Rapidly Build Your MVP

The goal of this workshop is to enable you to leverage the incredible productivity and prototyping capabilities that this suite of tools provides. You will hear about the basic concepts and then apply them with hands on coding exercises. By the end of the workshop, you will have a fully functional, responsive app that is a pleasure to use on desktop and mobile. Data from multiple users will synchronize in near real time. The app can be extended and converted to many different types of applications. This workshop is meant to give you a kickstart on your way to mastering these tools.

If you’ve heard about Material Design, but haven’t been able to get approval to use it at work, then this workshop will equip you with the tools to rapidly build a fully functional prototype that is sure to impress both your peers and your boss.

If you haven’t had time to learn Angular or Material design yet because you are busy fighting with REST APIs, servers, OAuth, DB schemas, Certificates, etc. This workshop will give you a way to avoid many of those issues. Then you can focus on building an app that your users love and your team loves building.

Are you a developer who wants to build slick proof of concept UI mockups without needing to learn one of the hundreds of design tools (Sketch, Photoshop, Balsamiq, InVision, FluidUI, etc.)? The combination of Material Design, SCSS, Flexbox, and Angular can take you from zero to a variety of themed, interactive mockups in just a couple of hours.

Michael’s talk: Create Enterprise UIs That Your Users Will LOVE

It’s no longer acceptable to have Enterprise apps that only work on desktop machines. Additionally, it’s no longer OK for Enterprise web apps to be just “functional” on mobile. The productivity of your mobile users is key to your company’s bottom line and your employee retention. In this talk, we’ll explore how to build productive Enterprise mobile web app experiences with Angular Material.

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/Splaktar

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/michael-prentice/

Shane is a Product Manager and UX Designer with experience in creating great products that empower, enhance and delight users. He’s passionate about design, technology and story-telling.

He was the Product Owner of DoneDeal’s mobile apps – Ireland’s largest online marketplace. During that time he turned 2-star apps into 5-star ones and downloaded by millions of users.

Shane spends most of his time cycling, reading, or relaxing with his wife and their cats (Taco and Gloria).

* Dribbble: https://dribbble.com/ElWexicano/

* Medium: https://medium.com/@ElWexicano

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElWexicano

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elwexicano/

* Website: https://shanedoyle.io/

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/shane-doyle/

Shane’s workshop: How To Run Lean Product Experiments

Lean encourages us to base products on user data rather than assumptions and to test ideas by deciding as late as possible. Experimentation is a key ingredient in discovery, it’s also an easy way to learn and test assumptions. This workshop will help you learn how to run, track and measure experiments in a lean environment. Giving you the knowledge to introduce experiments into your product and start to amplify learning. Go forth and experiment!

Shane’s talk: My UX guide to creating awesome apps

We all want to build great apps that our users love but too many apps don’t get the basics right. In this talk, I will present my guide to creating awesome apps that your users will love, and provide you with a base to build that next great app.

More than 15 years building productive design teams, solving complex systems challenges and developing thoughtful expertise to foster modern design practices in Agile development environments for mobile and web applications.

Extensive leadership with designers and front-end developers, while enabling a creative environment of success for colleagues and team members.

Marcelo’s workshop: From Sketch to React Effortlessly – Design Tokens for Design Systems

In this two-hour session, Marcelo Paiva (Designer) and Lucas Rosa (Developer) will be presenting a new workflow between design and development where all design decisions are made directly from a Sketch file and automatically translated into the React codebase without any effort from the developer’s side. This is a revolutionary approach, where the Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for design tokens are driven from design source files. This open-source project will be exclusively presented at UXDEV Summit!

Marcelo’s talk: Design Systems and the Future of the Design and Development Workflow

“Design System is the newly adopted name for Pattern Libraries or Living Style Guides, with the main difference: today we have the proper tooling in place to help us bridge the gap between design and development. During this presentation, Marcelo Paiva, a product designer, front-end developer, educator and founder of Cross.Team will demystify some of the most common questions about building Design Systems: – Is Design System right for your company? – Do you need a team to build a Design System? – How to properly design and develop a Design System? – How do Accessibility and Internationalization work into this effort? – How to build and lead a Design System Team where designers and developers pair, accelerate and learn together daily? – What is the future of Design Systems?”

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/@muqueca

* LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mtpaiva/

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/marcelo-paiva/

Designer with almost ten years of experience with the web and with a huge interest on technology.

I see design as a discipline under Software Engineering, and we all should have one common thing: empathy.

I like the end to end hands on experience, that’s why I don’t limit myself on a given skill-set or job profile, I like technology, development and data science.

My core abilities are based on multidisciplinarity, which means that I can comfortably flow through different kinds of workflows and technologies

In the past I have worked with huge and robust enterprise products for Petrobras, Metro Journal, Iveco, Mondaine Watches, Vale, IESB, Pfizer and many others.

I’m a web advocate, for the last years I’ve been speaking in universities, conferences and meetups about user experience design and client side performance.

Pedro’s talk: Predictive Design

Machine learning is a hot topic, but not everyone has had the chance to use it. In this talk I’ll talk about how we leverage on machine learning to predict what our users want/will do and how we can better serve them with predictive design.

* Booking.com http://www.booking.com/

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedromarks4/

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmarquees

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/pedro-marques/

Sarrah Vesselov is a UI/UX Developer with over 10 years of experience in web design and development. She currently works for GitLab as UX Manager, setting the overall direction of UX from both a design and application experience view. Prior to that, she was Senior UI Developer at Nitro Solutions and UI / UX Lead at Mad Mobile. She also serves as the Director for the Tampa chapter of Women Who Code.

Sarrah’s talk: Designing in the Open – How Gitlab Redefined the Way Users Navigate

Maintaining simple and intuitive navigation for products as they scale is a constant challenge. As features are added and the product becomes more complex, ensuring easy access to these features also increases in complexity. How do you show users what they need to see when they need to see it? How do you give access to ‘x’ number of features without overwhelming the user? Even more challenging, how do you make changes to an existing product without alienating your user base? This talk looks at how GitLab’s navigation needs to evolve to keep pace while implementing features to support “idea to production” and broaden its user base. We will cover the trials, tribulations, and pitfalls of completely redesigning a product’s navigation in an open source environment. We’ll examine how, through the creation of personas, prototypes, and rounds of user testing, we were able to redesign and reintroduce an entirely new way to navigate Gitlab.

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/SVesselov

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarrahvesselov/

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/sarrah-vesselov/

Ignacio Garcia-Huidobro

Director of Product Management & User Experience | Co-Founder UX+DEV SUMMIT

Talented, innovative and passionate creative professional with 14+ years of
 expertise in creating great user centered experiences in enterprise software, web apps, mobile apps, user interfaces, consumer UI concepts, information architecture, mobile solutions, web development, promotion, marketing and branding.

Diligent attention to design patterns and standards for mobile and web mediums. Experienced in creating the best user experience results and user interfaces. Highly motivated, creative and enthusiastic. Creative problem solver.

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/ignaciogh

* LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ignaciogh

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/ignacio-garcia-huidobro/

Michael Vargas

Architect | Entrepreneur | Full-Stack Developer & Co-Founder at UX+DEV SUMMIT | DEV Track

Architect, development and implement high performing, complex, mission critical systems using industry best practices and standards; Develop, mentor and transform existing programmers into top developers by providing highly specialized training in various areas of IT.

Communicate effectively a companies vision and deliver it.

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agentvargas2012r/

* Details: https://uxdsummit.com/speaker/michael-vargas/