Design Essentials for Developers with RJ Owen and Michael Salamon

As a developer in the RIA and User Experience field, it’s important to understand some design basics in order to communicate effectively with designers, as well as give sound suggestions for UX improvements on the applications you design for. While many of us have an intuitive feel for what works and what doesn’t, developing a vocabulary to describe your issues and suggestions and understanding the techniques required to validate your hunches are the skills that will define the next generation of the best developers. This session goes in-depth on which design techniques and principles ought to be part of every developer’s vernacular. By the end of this session attendees will understand the basics of both high level interaction design and lower-level visual design in a way that maximizes energy and time in the development process, including: Basic design principles to help developers understand a design’s intent. This includes a basic understanding of layout, color theory, and typography. Design vocabulary, heuristics and analysis techniques, so developers can give expert analysis of their design decisions (understanding affordances, mental modeling, mapping, etc.) Techniques for validating expert analysis in the form of quick and dirty user testing and prototyping (with paper and programmatic prototypes) The difference between information architecture and interaction design, and how both have a critical yet often unseen influence on software architecture for developers We’ll share real-world examples of how we are implementing this process among our own teams, and will share the challenges and success we’ve seen so far.

RJ Owen is Lead Experience Planner at EffectiveUI, focusing on customer insight work including ethnographic research, design validation, co-creation exercises and expert design. In this role, he runs a variety of research methods to gain qualitative insight into a user’s needs and desires, and validates designs by performing user testing. He brainstorms with clients to invent new designs, and works with the interaction design team to actually design the application. RJ also plans the engagement, produces CI deliverables and presents them to clients. RJ started his career as a software developer and spent 10 years working in C++, Java, and Flex before moving to the design research and customer insight team at EffectiveUI. He truly loves good design and understanding what makes people tick. RJ holds an MBA and a bachelor’s in Physics and Computer Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry events such as Web 2.0, SXSW, Adobe MAX and 360|Flex.

Michael Salamon is a lead experience architect at EffectiveUI, an award-winning and recognized leader in the design and development of custom desktop, mobile and rich Internet applications. With more than 20 years’ experience, Michael’s work spans print, Web, mobile, interactive, motion, illustration and animation. With a thorough history in the printing industry, Michael made the move to the Web with the rest of the chunky-black-glasses crowd and helped define interaction methods still used today. His clients have ranged from huge multi-national companies to modest one-person shops, including: Qwest, Quark, Intuit, Cendant (CheapTickets), JCPenney, Home Depot, Cabela’s, Dish Network, Staz, Ci-Ci’s Pizza and Northrop Grumman. He is an adjunct professor for the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver.