UX Week 2014 Workshops Preview

There’s nothing like a good workshop for amping up a skill or gaining a new one. Workshops are also great opportunities to meet and exchange ideas with people who do the same kind of work or face similar challenges.

That’s why UX Week workshops in particular really stand out. We carefully select topics and workshop leaders in direct response to what we see in the discipline and the problems our clients ask us to solve. In short, we look for topics and activities that will arm experience designers with what they need to be better at what they do.

NEW FOR UX WEEK 2014

A big challenge at any conference is selecting the workshops to attend. Too often, two (or more!) sessions you want to sign up for are scheduled at exactly the same time!

Well, for 2014 we’re doing something about that very issue. Through the magic of logistics, we’re offering each workshop twice, on different days, so there’s a lot of selection flexibility. We’re also offering a mix of half-day and full-day workshops, so you can pack in a broader range of learning opportunities.

AN AWESOME LINEUP

It’s a good thing the new schedule is more flexible, because this year we have an especially great lineup of workshop leaders and topics, covering everything from mobile and responsive design, prototyping, sketching, storytelling, and service design to building great teams. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the lineup:

• Designer, developer, author –– and now UX Week 2014 keynote speaker — Josh Clark will cover everything you need to know for effective touchscreen design in his full-day Designing for Touch workshop.
• In addition to his main stage talk, author, designer, and educator Andy Polaine will introduce experience designers to a method for designing and multi-channel experiences through Developing Services with Service Blueprinting.
• Sophia Voychehovski did a popular main stage talk at UX Week last year and returns in 2014 to run A Responsive Redesign in a Day, an intense full day session on getting design work done in a responsive world.
• Designer, speaker, and co-author of Gamestorming, Sunni Brown shares ways to unlock visual thinking for problem solving in her workshop: I Think, Therefore I Infodoodle: Applied Visual Language for Innovation and Problem-Solving.
• Andrew Mayfield and Kathryn Reeves bring us Designing and Managing Great Products for a Global Audience, a session on building effective, flexible, and user-centered teams capable of creating and delivering successful products.
• Mariya Yao‘s Rapid Iteration on Mobile workshop focuses on identifying success (and failure) factors you can use to guide design and prototyping decision-making for mobile.
• In Explore, Persuade, Destroy: An Introduction to Storyboarding Techniques, Google’s Abi Jones shares techniques for expressing product ideas in ways that successfully bridge organizational silos.
• Chris Sams and Rebecca Stockley teach skills for improving team dynamics and building trust with engaging activities in their fun and very insightful Building Communication and Collaboration Through Improv session.
• In Developer-Centered UX Design, consultant and coach Anders Ramsay helps us to better understand developer practices, build relationships, and ultimately understand how to leverage that to be better UX practitioners.

RESERVE YOUR WORKSHOP SPOTS SOON!

The UX Week 2014 workshop selector will be available very soon! If you’ve already registered, we’ll let you know the moment it’s time to pick.

If you’ve been dragging your feet and haven’t registered yet for UX Week 2014, there’s still time to save! Until June 30, 2014, enjoy an early bird price of $2,595 for the entire conference, including the workshops, of course. Go here to register.

I look forward to seeing you there!