Chris Griffith
Email: chris.griffith@gmail.com
Blog: chrisgriffith.wordpress.com
Twitter: @chrisgriffith
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Aaron Pedersen is the co-founder of DevelopmentArc with James Polanco. He brings a over a decade of web application experience to the team from working with many startup and Fortune 500 companies. Aaron currently focuses on user interface technologies such as the Adobe Flash Platform (Adobe Flex, AIR) and JavaScript. He believes that up-front planning and team cooperation is key to the success of any web application for today’s web environment.
Aaron is a regular speaker at Adobe Max, FATC, D2WC, and FITC. His topics range from Flex components to Designer and Developer workflow best practices.
Aaron has been a lead, planner and architect on projects that include many private and public web applications. Among the public sites that he is excited to highlight include: Lexus.com,Scion.com,Toyota’s “Build Your Toyota” configurator, the Yahoo Mail Flickr application, Adobe WorkflowLab, and DevelopmentArc Maque. Maque is a cross-platform, technology application that allows you to rapidly create temporary data solutions so you can confidently test your application while staying focused on your development goals.
Ben Bishop first started working with Flash in 1999 and has been a professional Flash and Flex developer for the past 8 years. He has had the luxury and good fortune of working with some of the greatest minds of the Flash community. Recently, Ben has used the freedom of being a freelancer to take on jobs that help broaden his view and experiences with all the great things Flash can do. While he is passionate about improving his proficiency with Flash, he's even more passionate about trying to get to the day that both developers and clients are happy with the grand majority work that is being done in the Flash world. Ben has built Facebook games, eLearning applications, dashboards, desktop publishing applications, and eCommerce sites. He has done work for Wachovia, IndyCar, Humana, Conviva, Elsevier Health Sciences, Blue Shell Games, Guardian, Brown Shoe, PrintNow, and Adobe.
Ben Stucki is the Founder and Chief Architect at Digital Analog LLC, where he creates some of the world’s most advanced Rich Internet Applications. His ability to fuse powerful server-side technologies with advanced client-side rendering have made him a critical asset to projects such as Universal Mind’s SpatialKey and B-Line Medical’s SimCapture, and his contributions to open-source projects such as Degrafa, FlexLib and Reflex have earned him recognition as one of the industry’s best minds. Today, Ben continues to explore the boundaries of what’s possible online at benstucki.net.
Brad has been practicing the craft of User Experience for the past 4 years. During that time he has helped clients in the financial, health care management, public utilities, and pharmaceutical management industries. He's provided them with deep insight into their customers and users needs, and designed engaging experiences that were catered directly for those needs.
As a Senior User Experience Consultant at Perficient, he's performed a variety of UX activities that allows him to build an empathic link to a variety of people that directly informs the designs he creates. These activities cover the full spectrum of research, modeling, design, and testing.
Brad's passion in User Experience Design is centered around the modeling of data gained from user research and the creation of interactive prototypes and wireframes. He's mentored and presented on these two aspects of User Experience Design to people around St. Louis, MO and across the country.
When he's not writing and presenting on User Experience Design, he spends his free time playing with his toddler son, Tristan. Tristan constantly reminds him not to take too much for granted and the best way to learn anything new is to get down and dirty with it.
Christina York manages a team of 6 user experience designers, researchers, and architects. Christina has worked in corporate, not-for-profit, and academic settings and has been architecting experiences for 10 years. When not serving as the poster girl for lessons learned meetings, Christina is busy supporting students in the IA/IxD/UX field, rooting (against all odds) for the Detroit Pistons, and seeking a horror film that will finally scare her.
Danielle has over 12 years of experience in a multitude of user research and usability analysis methods utilized on a wide variety of applications, including hardware, Windows, web, telephone, and mobile. Her successful designs have been implemented at both large and small, public and private companies in many industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to car rental to financial services.
Now working as an independent consultant, Danielle is a frequent speaker at local and national conferences. She was the founding Vice President of the Boston chapter of the Usability Professionals Association and served as Panels chair and Experienced Practitioner co-chair for the 2007 and 2008 Usability Professionals' Association Annual Conferences, respectively. She has a BE in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and a MS in Human Factors in Information Design from the Elkin B. McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University in Waltham, MA.
David Ortinau is a freelance web developer relying on the kindness of many friends to deliver his projects on time with minimal blood-loss. He has been developing web applications for 15 years with internet startups, advertising agencies, and enterprise healthcare vendors. While list of technologies he admits to knowing is rapidly shrinking, he does continue to work with Flash, .NET, Rails, and mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows).
Dee Sadler is an Adobe geek girl and designer who codes. She is an Adobe Certified Expert & Instructor and CTT+ Technical Trainer, founder of KCCoreGroups (KC's Adobe UG community) and Adobe Community Professional for the Creative Suite. She is a frequent speaker at conferences including Adobe MAX in 2010, St. Louis Flash Camp, FATC, NCDevCon and many more.
Dee is the conference organizer for D2W, a designer/developer/mobile workflow conference that just happened in July of 2011 in Kansas City, MO. D2W will also be online, and maybe it will be on the road next year.
Her favorite topics to speak on are CSS, wireframing, Design for devs, Fireworks and anything workflow related within the Creative Suite. Dee also did a few videos for Total Training on Dreamweaver CS5 and Fireworks CS5 (http://www.totaltraining.com/bios/deesadler.asp). She also has a workflow podcast on iTunes called D2WPodcast and just had an article in the Adobe Edge newsletter come out. Design 101 for Developers (http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/january2011/articles/article6/index.html). Blog at macwebdiva.wordpress.com, website www.aboxofpixels.com.
Dee's day job is in R&D/Innovations at Sprint creating as a UI geek thinking up the next big thing and creating prototypes.
Jason Hanson brings over ten years of experience developing for the Flash platform to the work he does for Universal Mind. He is a front-end developer with a good grasp of both visual design and back-end concepts. Jason is proficient with ActionScript 3, and Flex. He has experience building a wide range of products including video games, eLearning applications, enterprise applications, charting components, dashboards, desktop publishing applications and video applications. Jason has contributed to projects for clients including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Adobe, FedEx, AT&T, DYMO, SuperSecret, and PrintNow. Most recently Jason has been building quick start apps for Adobe using the Flex 4.5 SDK targeting both AIR for Android and Web deployment. The 'Shopping Cart Application' he worked on is featured on Adobe Labs and was showcased in the Keynote at MAX 2010: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexsdk_hero/samples/.
Jacob works at XPLANE where he uses visual thinking to help clients solve communication problems. His animated work has been recognized by the AIGA and nationally by the AAF. As an developer, designer, and animator Jacob creates both linear and non-linear content that strives to be clever & clear communication. Currently, Jacob is working with brands such as Lowe's, Microsoft, Discover, and Colgate.
Jeff Roberts is currently a Flex Architect at Universal Mind. He’s been writing code for more than 25 years and got his start way back in the 1980′s when the music was good, memory and computing horsepower were scarce and most importantly, he had hair. He has written professionally in RPG, VB, Smalltalk, Java, Javascript/HTML/CSS/XML (aka AJAX) and now Flex/AIR and has been doing so since Flex 2.01. He once even taught a college class in DOS and is often affectionately referred to on his project engagements as "Grandpa".
Paul Trani is a passionate 15-year veteran of the interactive design and development scene. As an Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist, Paul has earned a reputation as a dynamic and respected speaker. He has years of experience as a driving force for award-winning agencies, and he draws on that experience as a presenter, Adobe Certified Instructor, courseware developer, and Lynda.com trainer. Prior to joining Adobe, Paul led a team of interactive designers and developers at Starz Entertainment producing multi-million dollar web and mobile campaigns.
Designers and Developers have long sought the holy grail: a seamless workflow between both disciplines that allow each to stretch their creative legs and at the same time, not step on each others toes. However, such a workflow does not yet exist and both disciplines have struggled to keep projects on time, under budget, and keep the other happy along the way. Software, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, can help alleviate many of the pain points by creating workflows between products. However, tools can only solve part of the problem. Designers and developers need to work together to create their own workflows that provide an environment that allows for parallel design and development. In this session we will examine one such workflow called the ‘Designer and Developer Contract’. This workflow will focus on wireframes as the contract between both disciplines and explore how a single document can be used by everyone on the project team.
Jeff Roberts is a veteran software developer with over 25 years of experience. He has condensed his entire career into a 10-point self help program to help you NOT suck as a Flex developer. Truth be told, several of the points apply to whatever language you choose to develop in. This session is aimed at those just starting in development or those that have been developing for a few years. Highly experienced developers may pick up a nugget or two as well. This session is intended to arm you with a list of things that you can go home and read more about and decide for yourselves which you want to immediately focus on. Whether you gain from the full list of 10 or find something valuable in just one, the goal is to expose you to at least one or more idea that will help you NOT suck and improve your game as a developer.
So you want to create mobile applications? This session will walk you through the ins and outs of creating graphics for mobile. Resolutions, tips and tricks to making the graphics as sharp as possible. Using Photoshop vs Fireworks, how device central can help you, wireframing, and much more
Rarely do the best ideas come first and from one person. Collaborative design is a great way to get a lot of good and bad ideas out there early and improve the quality of your software/product. This session will demonstrate techniques for two types of collaborative design: design studios with team members and stakeholders and participatory design activities with end users.
Over the past five years, the world of user experience and design has changed greatly. We've been able to adapt and grow as we faced down many challenges in the ever changing world of technology. But, are we ready for the next five years? If not, what can we do as design professionals to prepare ourselves for the "next big thing" that will rock the technological world. Come hear how we can use what we've learned to help prepare for the future, and get a glimpse at some of the technologies that we might be designing for before you know it.
You can have it all. Use your existing knowledge of Flash, Flex, and ActionScript to build mobile apps. Build once and deploy for iOS, Android, and Blackberry tablets. The recent and exciting updates to the Adobe AIR runtime and the new tooling in Flash Builder 4.5.x provide the tools you need to build your app and deliver it via the app markets for Android, iOS, and Blackberry tablet. Yes, build in Flash and deploy to an iPhone & iPad app you can sell in the market.
We will walk through what you need to get started building your own apps. I will show how to deploy to multiple platforms. I will also go over a sample starter projects that Adobe has provided, that you can use as a starting point so you can hit the ground running writing good code that will scale well.
We love the Flash platform for rapidly building awesome experiences. As our projects become more complex we look to frameworks like Flex for a boost with rich components and data support. The Flex framework is extremely powerful and often frustrating. Implementing expressive UX can seem near impossible at these times, but we need not settle for lesser UX.
In this session we'll talk briefly about the principles of Interaction Design models, and then take a practical look at common leverage points where we can inject our interactions to create better experiences.
