Like a Pro(totyper): Prototyping for Lean UX

Happy October, UXers! We hope you're keeping your cool during summer's last stand, and maybe vacationing someplace where the leaves do that thing that leaves are supposed to do this time of year.

This month, we're proud to offer up a panel of professional prototypers. These designers do prototyping in their daily work, either as their primary role or a fundamental part of their process. They often work within lean UX teams to design and test in collaboration with more traditional UXers. You'll get to pick their brains, learn more about prototyping as a methodology and deliverable, and get advice on how to incorporate the practice into your own work.

This idea came from our Intuit lab tour event — which hey, by the way, thanks for attending! — where we heard a lot of feedback from folks who wanted to know more about the UX prototyper role that Intuit hires for. You're smart cookies to be curious: prototyping is a hot topic these days, steadily gaining traction in design circles, and sometimes even replacing wireframes and mockups as a main deliverable. And since caring for our community is the name of our game, we wanted to throw together a little something to help you learn more about it.

We rounded up an awesome group of designers to make this possible:

Hooman Anvar
Principal, Hooman Anvar User Experience Design and Strategy

Adam Armstead
Senior Interaction Designer, Intuit, former Design Manager at TakeLessons

Elina Kim
Experience Design Prototyper, Intuit

Heather Daggett
Senior Experience Design Prototyper, Intuit

Chris Griffith
Staff Engineer, Qualcomm UX

And our shiny new president, Paul Hong, as moderator.

Beverages and light appetizers will be served.

RSVP now to ensure you get to attend!

Our Host

Special thanks to our host, The Creative Group, for providing our meeting venue and refreshments.

The Creative Group is a leader among creative and marketing staffing agencies. We specialize in connecting talented, creative professionals with companies looking to hire interactive, design, marketing, advertising and public relations talent. As the creative, and design staffing division of Robert Half, we offer flexible solutions to meet companies' project, contract-to-hire and full-time employment needs. Through our parent company, we also have the resources to support organizations' temporary and full-time staffing needs in the areas of technology, accounting, finance, administrative and legal.

Panelist Bios

Hooman Anvar

Hooman is a User Experience Architect, speaker, and endeavoring inventor. Trained in cognitive sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, he learned his craft of User Experience Design in the Bay Area tech scene. Millions of people and transactions have used his designs. Always open to new engagements, feel free to contact him any time.

Adam Armstead

Adam is currently working as an Interaction Designer on TurboTax at Intuit. Prior to this role, as Design Manager at TakeLessons he led user research and design for a number of products including the takelessons.com (http://takelessons.com/) mobile site, fully responsive teacher and student accounts, and the TakeLessons iPhone app. In his 7 years in the UX field he has also worked on products including genetic analysis instruments, mobile phones, and self-service kiosks.

Elina Kim

Elina is a prototyper at Intuit. She has a background in Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. Before joining Intuit, she was a interaction designer and front-end engineer at a startup company based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Heather Daggett

Heather is the lead XD prototyper for TurboTax at Intuit. With an undergrad in Computer Science and masters in Human-Computer Interaction, she combines engineering and user-centered design to deliver high-fidelity prototypes for design exploration, user testing, motion design, and more. Prior to Intuit, she was also a UX prototyper at Nokia and Northrop Grumman.

Chris Griffith

Chris is a staff engineer in the User Experience group at Qualcomm and an author for http://lynda.com . He is also an instructor at University of California, San Diego Extension teaching mobile application development. He is also an Adobe Community Professional and is regularly invited to speak at conferences such as Adobe MAX and HTML5DevConf. He has developed several iPhone and Android applications. In addition, he has served as a technical reviewer for several publications, and written for http://uxmag.com . In his spare time, Chris spends time with his family and sea kayaking. You can follow him on twitter @chrisgriffith or at http://chrisgriffith.wordpress.com .