Kathryn Grayson Nanz
UI Designer & Front-end Developer
Asheville, North Carolina, United States
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In 2013, I graduated with a BFA and took my first job as a Junior Graphic Designer at a small, boutique ad agency. While there, my Creative Director warned me to never let anyone find out I could code, because if I did I'd be stuck doing it forever. I ignored his warning; it turns out he was completely right, but I've never been happier.
I currently work as a developer advocate on a wonderful team where I help people build web applications in React, design and maintain their UI component libraries, and desperately attempt to stop back-end devs from writing any more CSS.
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The UX of AI: Making AI-Powered Apps Your Users Don't Hate
As a developer, AI is fun, exciting, and full of potential – but users don't always feel the same way about it.
From a UX perspective, AI comes with a whole new set of considerations around user trust, privacy, and security. From a UI perspective, AI brings new interaction patterns, new icons, new visual cues, and so much more!
If we want people to get the most from what we build, we have to teach our users how to use AI. Let's look at ways to introduce new capabilities in our apps and guide our users through new patterns and processes – ideally without making them throw their phone out a window.
The Life-Changing Art of Being Wrong
Even if it’s not intentional, there are a lot of assumptions we make about our users – everything from which devices they use to access our applications to what kinds of characters are included in their names. And guess what: our assumptions are usually wrong. Like…really wrong. Sometimes this creates laughable situations, but other times it causes a lot of unintentional harm. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the most common (wrong) things that we, as developers, believe about our users and how we can shift our assumptions to create software that’s better for everyone.
Pitch Like a Designer (and Get Your Way More Often)
We all know how challenging it can be to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience, but there’s a group of people out there who have seriously mastered it: designers. Designers often pitch their work directly to the client, which means they have to translate advanced decisions about typography, grid structure, color theory, and more to people who (a) don’t know about any of those things, (b) don’t CARE about any of those things, and (c) are the ones who have the final say on whether or not the project moves forward, anyway. Sound familiar?
In this talk, we’ll take a look at the way designers present their work and steal some of their best tips and tricks for getting people to pick the option you like more, educating a non-technical without talking down to them, directing the conversation to ensure you get the feedback you actually need, and more.
Learn Enough UX to be Dangerous
Sure, you can build a technically impressive application, one that’s beautiful, performant, and cutting-edge…but do your users actually enjoy using it? As developers, we often see the User Experience kind of lumped together with the User Interface into “UX/UI” – but what is UX beyond the UI design? This crash course will introduce you to a variety of UX concepts and basics. You won’t get hired as a UX Researcher after this talk, but you will be able to create websites and apps that don’t make your users throw their phone at the wall.
I didn't know HTML / CSS could do THAT!
While the flashiest news of the web dev world is often focused on the big frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, etc.), good ol’ HTML and CSS have also been quietly – but steadily – upping their game. If you haven’t taken a look lately, this is the perfect time to catch up! We’ll look at recent (and slightly older but lesser-known) developments in HTML and CSS that may surprise you. Who knows: you might even be able to ditch a JS library or two that you didn’t even know you don’t need anymore!
How to Ruin a User Interface: Surprisingly Easy Ways to Screw Over Your Users
Sure, when your boss signed the expense form for you to attend this conference, they thought you’d be bringing back new ideas about BETTER ways to do stuff – but honestly, isn’t that a little boring? What if we mixed it up a bit and instead discussed all the ways to make your UIs WORSE?
From dark patterns to bad designs, there are tons of shockingly easy ways that you might be unknowingly making your website or app experience more difficult – or even painful – for your users. In this session, we’ll talk through some of the most common, so that you can avoid them in the future…or, you know, intentionally include them, if you’re evil. With great power comes great responsibility.
Ditch the Media Queries: Modern CSS Replacements for Better Responsive Code
In Ye Olden Days of Webbe Development, device-based breakpoints were the standard…then, best practices shifted to content-based breakpoints. Now, breakpoints are sooo 2010; the era of fluid design is here! Dive into the new CSS that empowers us to write responsive code – without the media queries.
AI Basics for Humans
In the famous words of Pink Floyd: "No one told you when to run, – you missed the starting gun." If you, like so many developers, were hesitant to jump on this whole "AI" fad and now find yourself playing a bit of catch-up, this talk is for you.
We'll take a peek into the "black box" of generative AI and explore how this stuff actually works. Why do hallucinations happen (and can they be avoided)? What happens when we change the temperature of a model? Why do LLMs work in tokens instead of words? What's the difference between pre-training and post-training (and are both necessary)? Why does the wording of a prompt change the output so drastically?
If you're a developer who has already been working extensively with building AI integrations, agents, and skills, this will likely be too low-level for you (but hey, never hurts to refresh on the basics!). However, if you “missed the on-ramp” or have been tentatively working with AI in your applications without truly understanding what’s happening behind the scenes: you’re in the right place! Let's de-mystify AI: it's not magic, it's just technology.
Case Study: Creating a Component Library in React JS
Building a component library from scratch may feel intimidating, but if you’re willing to put in the upfront time & effort, it pays off in spades.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve been the lead on a project to create and implement a robust Component Library. Our Component Library been a hugely beneficial effort that’s made our suite of React web applications more cohesive, more accessible, and more beautiful. The other (less-frontend-inclined) developers enjoy being able to build without having to worry about UI design decisions or touch any CSS. This talk will address each step of our process from a front-end development & design perspective, as well as some of the things we would have done differently had we known better.
Learn Enough Design to be Dangerous
I hear lots of developers say "Oh, I could never be a designer; I just don't have the eye" – and I'm here to tell you that's BS. Design is a skill that can be learned, just like anything else! A designer's full responsibilities are complex and multifaceted; this talk won't teach you everything you need to know to get a design job. However, it WILL go over design basics in a straightforward way, for developers who want to create UIs that don't look terrible.
Ditch the Media Queries: Modern CSS Replacements for Better Responsive Code
In Ye Olden Days of Webbe Development, device-based breakpoints were the standard…then, best practices shifted to content-based breakpoints. Now, breakpoints are sooo 2010; the era of fluid design is here! Dive into the new CSS that empowers us to write responsive code – without the media queries.
Getting Started with Accessibility in React
Many of us have heard the accessibility basics: use semantic HTML, include alt text, test with a screen reader, etc. However, when we're dealing with React – and JSX specifically – there are a few extra things we need to keep in mind. In this session, we'll discuss the React-specific adjustments we need to make in order to build accessible applications.
Usability Testing Without a UX Specialist
Ask nearly anyone about the process of developing software, and somewhere in the answer they’ll (hopefully) mention the users. User research, user testing, user feedback – the end user is at the heart of everything that we build. However, for many companies, making conversations with real users actually happen is a real challenge – especially if you don't have a UX specialist on your team! If this is all sounding familiar to you, then I have a recommendation: take it into your own hands. In this session, we'll talk through setting up a basic user testing program and growing it, so you – the developer – can feel empowered to start usability testing for your own product!
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Kathryn Grayson Nanz
UI Designer & Front-end Developer
Asheville, North Carolina, United States
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