Abby Covert is an independent information architect working and living in New York City. With a proven track record in establishing user-centric practices in a variety of creative environments, Abby also has a reputation for stellar information architecture work in a variety of consulting contexts. Abby prides herself on being an active organizer and mentor within the IA community. She served as Executive Producer for the IDEA conference in 2010 and the Information Architecture Summit in 2010 and 2012. She currently serves as Co Chair for the 15th annual Summit to be held in March 2014. Abby also serves as an adviser for and holds credit for inventing World Information Architecture Day, which held an inaugural event in 2012 with 14 locations globally serving over 1600 attendees. World IA Day 2014, now in its third year, looks to serve 20+ locations globally. Abby consults, speaks and writes under the pseudonym Abby the IA, and currently serves as faculty for Parsons, The School of Visual Arts, General Assembly and Hyper Island.

Making. Better. Meaning. We have all had that moment when someone we are trying to communicate with is misunderstanding what we mean. These moments can be frustrating and lead to upsets of the heart as well as the mind. When we make physical or digital things, our intended meaning has to project to the user without us being there to show the way or shine the light. For this session, Abby Covert will provoke us about the topic of meaning, daring us to ask ourselves: What do we mean when we say what we say?

Sean Dougherty serves as Creative Director and Director, helping guide the visual direction of Brand New School’s digital, design, and live-action projects. His extensive background includes campaigns for Google, Target, McDonald’s, Starwood Hotels, Bloomberg, MTV, and Virgin Media to name a few. Sean’s experience also extends to long form content, having directed a segment of “A Liar’s Autobiography,” the stereoscopic 3D feature film on the life of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman. As an integral part of the creative team, Sean helps translate Brand New School’s signature style across platforms, providing a seamless user experience. His singular but inclusive sense of humor shines through in his work and is central to Brand New School’s collaborative creative efforts.

Pitching Experiences What's the difference between a winning pitch and a winning pitch that's chosen?

Bryan is a geek with a fine arts degree, born in Trinidad & Tobago and raised in Toronto. He has held roles as creative director, interactive producer, interaction designer and information architect. Besides his family, his great love is to connect technology and content to people's lives in helpful and unexpected ways. He contributed to the customer experience of brands like UNIQLO, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and HBO. Bryan is currently Vice President, User Experience at Razorfish and leads a group of about 50 UX professionals for the New York and Atlanta offices.

Better Companies Successful companies make a difference by being better. Over the last 100 years we have seen this happen across spectrums of quality, price and experience as a means to prove they are better than their competitors. Today we are seeing a new breed of companies that pick established customer experiences, imagine a simpler way, and build a business around delivering it. These are new ideas that form new types of companies rather than just new products. Lets explore some of these revolutionary experiences across banking, transportation, shopping and hypothesize what we currently experience that is ripe for a new type of company.

Randy Hunt is Creative Director at Etsy, where he leads a team of designers creating the end-to-end experience, both online and off. Hunt feels strongly that designers must be able to build what they design, a perspective that fits naturally with Etsy’s culture of making and the love of craftsmanship. Hunt co-founded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace. Previously, he founded Citizen Scholar Inc. and worked at Milton Glaser Inc. and Number 17. He writes and lectures about design and has been a visiting designer and critic at many colleges and universities. His first book, Product Design for the Web will be published in November.

Data-Informed Design It's not a destination. It's a journey. Making informed design decisions is hard work. Harder still is fast-moving, always changing environments. Do you listen to the numbers? Do you listen to the people? If you want to listen, how do you do it? How do you get started?

Peter has been making important ideas irresistible for more than a decade — as an Onion editor, a viral video producer, and now, as a co-founder of Upworthy. At 24, he became managing editor of The Onion, where he co-created the company's break-out Onion News Network video series, staffed and oversaw digital strategy, and wrote YOUR all-time-favorite Onion headline. Peter joined MoveOn.org in 2007 to work on video strategy and youth vote initiatives. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he led a team that helped raise $10 million dollars, and added 2 million members to the organization. In early 2012, Peter co-founded Upworthy with longtime collaborator Eli Pariser. The pair set out to prove once and for all that what’s important can be incredibly popular, even if what’s popular isn’t usually important. To date, the Upworthy community has logged more than 1.5 billion minutes of attention on topics ranging from the criminal justice system to advertising’s adverse effects on body image to clean energy. A Madison, Wisconsin native, Peter is based in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, toddler son, and dog. You should follow him on Twitter here.

Designing A Better World

Meredith is a UX generalist who is passionate about community building, educating the next generation of UXers, and tea. She is currently exploring places where the personal meets the professional, from mentorship, to leadership and coaching, to handling stress at work.

How to Better Handle the Stress of UX Work Working as a UX designer can be incredibly stressful. Our work is constantly subject to intense scrutiny and debate from clients and colleagues. If we're consultants, we have the added pressure of constantly proving our worth to clients. Even the fast pace and ill-defined nature of the field itself can lead to stress: we can suffer from impostor syndrome and general insecurity about where we fit in our own profession. I've suffered from all of the above, and I suspect many others have as well. I’ll discuss the design process, identify common stressful situations and thoughts, and present concrete techniques for coping with that stress.

Ajay Revels is a strategic design researcher with 14 years expertise in planning and leading fieldwork to uncover business & customer insights and to translate those insights into actionable, multi-channel digital strategies and on-screen designs that connect handheld devices, kiosks, web and service touch points into holistic experiences. She has carried out design & customer studies within settings as diverse as hedge funds, universities, hospitals, trading floors, consumer trade shows, news rooms and private homes in the US, Britain and Japan. The genuine curiosity, humor and empathy she brings to each interaction allows her to work easily with a wide range of study participants; from high school students, hedge fund traders to heart surgeons. To integrate customer insights into the product design process, she collaborates with designers, product owners, developers, data analysts, market researchers and other stakeholders. Ajay’s toolkit includes in-person observations, interviews, workflow analysis, process mapping, sketching, games, online panels, experience modeling, participatory design, iterative LeanUX/Agile experiments and design validation. As a consultant for Razorfish, HUGE, Adaptive Path and Flow Interactive, she has developed user insights for CNN, Boston Scientific, Merrill Lynch, MTV, Lionsgate Films, Center for Foreign Relations and TD Ameritrade. Educated in biological systems, anthropology and product design she integrates systems thinking, design thinking, change management and ethnographic techniques to uncover and visualize how people create, connect to and consume information to meet their business, social and decision-making needs. She has presented at EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) and SXSW, taught a Lean UX workshop for NPower and published articles for the Society for the Anthropology of Work and Japan Inc. Ajay is a member of BayCHI and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. Her other research interests include serious games, play, comics as a strategic planning tool, science literacy, insect natural histories and ecosystem-centric design.

Do Better: Designing for Transformation Objects could be better if they were designed for transformation instead of for obsolescence. User-centered design is too narrow and too focused only on human beings. We need ecosystem-centric mental models, methods and design tools. Here's why: from one point of view the Earth is seen as an inert resource to be used until depleted. This is a parasitic perspective in which energy & materials flow in one direction, toward the extractor and away from the source. Another view is the symbiotic orientation which assumes that the energy & materials we use to create new products flow in multiple directions, are useful to several user types, and will transform over time before returning to a fundamental organic state again. This applies to many products like clothing, furniture, vehicles, construction materials, food containers, digital hardware among others. What would we need to do in order to begin designing for transformation instead of obsolescence?

Nick Whitmoyer is the founder and principal of Whitmoyer, a user experience and design agency based in Falls Church, Virginia. For more than 10 years, Nick and his team have helped clients such as NPR, Capital One, PBS, Global Entrepreneurship Week, and The Nature Conservancy build award-winning microsites, interactive tools, apps, and more. He is the force behind his company’s mission to collaborate with the best and brightest companies in the U.S. and abroad on innovative, user-centered interactive design projects.

Designing a Better Process for UX Whether you’re working in-house or in client services, there are a number of great processes and methodologies at your disposal. In this session we’ll discuss ways to customize a better process for UX teams.