UX design and usability conference

5-7 June 2012 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Radisson Blu Hotel

June 5, 6^th - Four interactive workshops
June 7^th - Seminar: presentations and panel discussion, after party
June 8-10^th - An optional 3-day tour around Bulgaria

Registrations are open, book a place before February 29th to get up to 55% discount.

БЪЛГАРСКИENGLISH

WORKSHOPS, JUNE 5 AND 6

JUNE 5, 09:00-13:00
To tame a tool: piece of mind with Axure
Dimiter Simov - Jimmy, Usability Consultant and User Interface Designer
Dimiter works in the fields of usability, interaction design, quality assurance, and user documentation since 1997. He is an experienced usability analyst and interaction designer.

Axure is a tool for prototyping interfaces and interactions. I use it since 2007. It allows me to simulate almost everything you can imagine. I even designed my house. My goal in this workshop is to show you how I use Axure and to pass my knowledge to you.
We will go through:
- Reuse: styles, masters, libraries, and import from other projects
- Interactions: dynamic panels, states, movement, tabs
- Conditions: variables and functions, passing content from one shape to another
- Sharing: generating, regenerating, partial builds, AxShare, notes
This workshop is for you if your job title contains a combination of the words:
Creative
Business
Experience
GraphicAnalyst
InformationArchitect
InteractionDesigner
InterfaceDirector
ProjectEngineer
ProductManager
Usability
Website
Visual

This is not a beginner class. If you think you are a beginner with Axure, or if you have never heard of Axure, download, install, and play with the tool for 45 minutes. Now you have the experience required to attend the workshop. I'll meet you at UX Sofia.
Register for this workshop
@dsimov
JUNE 5, 14:00-18:00
Usability Testing for Mobile Devices

Belén Barros Pena, Interaction Designer at Intel

Belén is an interaction designer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center in London. She works on interfaces for mobile phones and portable devices like tablets and netbooks.

Bernard Tyers, Engineer at Nokia Siemens Networks

Bernard Tyers is a mobile packet core engineer with Nokia Siemens Networks. He has a knack for human factors in technology, and for building things.

Usability testing is an interaction designer’s bread and butter, but applying it to the study of mobile applications and websites brings considerable challenges.
- Which device should we use for testing?
- Can we use an emulator?
- How do we prototype for mobile?
- Can we just recycle the tasks we use for desktop software tests?
- Do we test in the lab or in the wild?
- How do we record screen, fingers and facial expressions?
During this workshop, we will answer these questions together. You’ll leave the room knowing how to plan and run usability tests with mobile devices.
Register for this workshop
@belenpena
@bernardtyers
JUNE 6, 09:00-13:00

HTML5 and CSS3: Future facing, compatible with today

Bruce Lawson, Open Web Standards Evangelist for Opera

Bruce evangelises open web standards for Opera. He co-wrote Introducing HTML5 with Remy Sharp. He blogs at brucelawson.co.uk.

Chris Mills, Developer Relationship Manager at Opera

Chris is an open standards evangelist developer relationship manager at Opera. He edits dev.opera.com, writes articles on open web technologies, and speaks at web conferences worldwide. He also plays the drums really loud.

In this workshop, Opera open standards advocates Bruce and Chris will take you in detail through the markup and design of an HTML5 web site, styled using the new features of CSS3. They'll look at features such as HTML5 strutural element, forms, multimedia, subtitles and transcripts and CSS 3 gradients, shadows, transparency, transitions, fonts and media queries. the focus will be how they work across modern browsers, but also how to provide fallbacks and alternatives so that older, less capable browsers are also given an acceptable user experience.
Register for this workshop

@brucel
@chrisdavidmills
JUNE 6, 14:00-18:00
Agile UX design techniques: Proving design hypotheses with prototypes

Jeff Gothelf, UX Director at TheLadders.com

Jeff Gothelf is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book (2012), Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business. He is an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. In addition Jeff is an international public speaker having presented at EuroIA, SXSW, IA Summit, Interaction (IxDA), London IA, the Agile conference and Startup Lessons Learned. Jeff is currently the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com in New York City where he leads a team of interaction designers, visual designers and copywriters in pursuit of reinventing the online jobs industry.

Regardless of how much experience or subject matter expertise your team possesses, the initial attempts to solve a business problem are hypotheses. When practicing Agile UX, these hypotheses manifest in the lightweight designs the team creates. In an effort to minimize waste and point your team to a more accurate solution path it is critical to prove the validity of those hypotheses. One of the fastest way to prove design ideas is prototyping. Prototyping allows your teammates, stakeholders and most importantly, customers to experience your product designs and provide directional feedback. With the variety of tools available today, teams have many options available to them when it comes to rapid prototyping. In this workshop, Jeff will discuss the various prototyping tools available today, their uses and the benefits and drawbacks of each tool. In addition Jeff will teach you how to create rapid prototypes that bring the experience to light much earlier in the process than ever before.
In this workshop you will learn:
- What prototyping tools are available and where they excel
- When to use each type of prototype and what kind of feedback to expect from each
- What parts of the experience to prototype
- How to test prototypes with actual customers
- How to create rapid prototypes within an Agile sprint timeframe
Register for this workshop
@jboogie

SEMINAR, JUNE 7

The mobile fragmentation myth: busted or confirmed?
Belén Barros Pena, Interaction Designer at Intel
Belén is an interaction designer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center in London. She works on interfaces for mobile phones and portable devices like tablets and netbooks.
Fragmentation is the curse of the mobile software world. 7 operating systems or so (we've lost track), plus cross-platform development environments like Java and HTML5, make mobile a nightmare for developers. But what about design?
In this section we'll dissect the basic interaction elements of the main mobile software platforms to bust, or confirm, the myth of mobile fragmentation.

@belenpena
How to Destroy the Web
Bruce Lawson, Open Web Standards Evangelist for Opera
Bruce evangelises open web standards for Opera. He co-wrote Introducing HTML5 with Remy Sharp. He blogs at brucelawson.co.uk.
The future of the Web is a dangerous Babylon: people talking to each other to do business, organise revolutions, express their feelings, meet their friends, transcend their disabilities and economically empower themselves. Obviously, this must be stopped. Bruce will show you his top tips and tricks that you can employ to destroy the web.

@brucel
HTML5 and CSS3 - does now really mean now?
Chris Mills, Developer Relationship Manager at Opera
Chris is an open standards evangelist developer relationship manager at Opera. He edits dev.opera.com, writes articles on open web technologies, and speaks at web conferences worldwide. He also plays the drums really loud.
HTML5 and CSS3 contain some remarkable features that allow us to create innovative new apps, but what do they mean in terms of real world development, which often requires IE6 support and isn't just about Webkit. In this talk, Chris Mills will have a look at some of the new features of HTML5 and CSS3 — new semantics, video, media queries, rounded corners and more. He will show real world examples, and then look at how they actually perform on those shady older browsers we are often called on to support. He will then look at strategies for providing support and/or alternatives for those older browsers.

@chrisdavidmills
User Experience for (future) startup?
Franco Papeschi, Service Design Expert at Web Foundation
Franco is Service Design Expert at the Web Foundation, working on the creation of a series of Mobile Innovation Labs in Africa. Currently active in Kenya, Ghana, Senegal - the labs aspire to be community catalysts, training centres and incubation hotspots for transforming ideas into start-ups able to generate useful, sustainable services to local communities.
Prior to joining the Web Foundation, Franco was User Experience manager in Vodafone Group, working on the development of new concepts that could become impactful products in the following 3-5 years.
In his spare time, Franco is one of the crew behind the Design Jams initiative: one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people team up and collaborate to tackle engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. The sessions champion open-source thinking & design.
Franco is available on twitter (@bobbywatson), flickr (themepap), and – often – at a meet-up / conference near you.
Maybe you are a front-end developer, working in a garage with a couple of friends, trying to launch a new connected device. Or maybe you are in a tiny team, with 2 developers and a ‘business’ guy, trying to inject some UX love into a new application destined to revolutionise the market. Or you have managed to convince your boss – and the boss of your boss – to work on a new concept that could save your company (or the company your agency works for) from being killed in few years. In all these cases, you are working in a startup: “a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty”. So, what’s the first thing you do when you start the project? What approach to take? How can you try and put users at the centre of everything, without scaring everyone with a 4-month timeline?
Starting from what I am seeing every day as responsible for the Mobile Entrepreneurship initiative at the Web Foundation, the talk will show some example of good UX “à la startup”. I’ll extract tips and advices on how to include User Experience in this kind of uncertain environments, and I’ll try to show a direction on how to make the whole team aware (and even responsible?) for the User Experience of your (future?) product or service

@bobbywatson
The Death of Usability
Georgi Varzonovtzev, User Interface Designer at Telerik
Designs user interfaces at Telerik. Has been working with the web for the last 10 years. Participates in the development of some of the biggest and most interesting web sites in Bulgaria, recently he has been working on desktop applications.
What does it mean to be a usability professional when everybody claims to be an expert in usability.

@georgivar
Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business
Jeff Gothelf, UX Director at TheLadders.com
Jeff Gothelf is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book (2012), Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business. He is an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. In addition Jeff is an international public speaker having presented at EuroIA, SXSW, IA Summit, Interaction (IxDA), London IA, the Agile conference and Startup Lessons Learned. Jeff is currently the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com in New York City where he leads a team of interaction designers, visual designers and copywriters in pursuit of reinventing the online jobs industry.
Traditionally UX Design has been a deliverables practice. Wireframes, sitemaps, etc defined the practice of UX Design (IA, IxD, UI Design etc). While this work has helped define what a UX Designer does and their value, it has also put designers in the deliverables business – measured & compensated for the quality of their deliverables (instead of the success of the experiences they design). Enter Lean UX - the practice of bringing the experience to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
Lean UX is a methodology of marrying Agile and User Experience design in a way that can work in any size company and any development environment. Attendees will take away clear, tactical ways to incorporate this way of working that will have them delivering better designs, faster in a more collaborative manner.

@jboogie
Online News – who pays and how this affects usability
Vladimir Petkov — Kaladan, CTO at AII Data Processing
Vladimir is a Chief Technology Officer at AII Data Processing. He is responsible for the development of the company products from a technological and user experience perspective and for the IT infrastructure of the company. Vladimir has more than 10 years of experience in the field of new media development. He was responsible for the business and product development of all products of Economedia (publisher of Dnevnik.bg and Capital.bg) - the largest publisher of business media in Bulgaria.
What is the difference between the classic news site with a business model based on ads, and paid news service, that offers a different experience to the user.

@koledan

CULTURAL TOUR AROUND BULGARIA, 8-10 JUNE

Three-day tour around the Eastern Rhodopes

Description:

Thracian Sanctuaries - the ancient cities of Perperikon and Tatul, considered to be the temple of the mythological singer Orpheus.
Natural Phenomena - visits to the rock formations Stone Mushrooms, the famous Womb cave and the rock phenomenon Chudnite Mostove (the Wonderful Bridges).
Cultural Tourism - visit to the village of Shiroka Laka, famous for its old authentic Rhodopian houses, and the open-air museum Zlatograd Ethnographic Areal Complex.