User Experiences After Dark: Covert Coercion

Dark isn't just a trendy UI mode, it's a deceitful design scheme we all encounter from time to time, against our will. As consumers, most of us can't escape the overbearing influence that corporations have on our lives. This is particularly true when it comes to how companies use various experience design tricks, traps and persuasive tactics in their software & technology in order to take advantage of customers and coerce them into doing things like spending more money than intended.

In this session, you'll learn about the unethical psychology behind these dark design patterns that digital organizations covertly deploy in order to manipulate their users. You may even discover that some of your favorite apps are using these shady techniques on you without you even knowing it.

You'll also walk away with the skills to ensure that your team does not fall prey to such ploys, including negotiation with challenging stakeholders, so y'all can build better products together that positively impact customers' lives.

Peak Throughput: 7 Design Thinking Games to Eradicate Waste, Annihilate Impediments & Maximize Flow

Despite what they may believe, your teams have immense problem-solving abilities that can smash through bureaucracy, cut through red tape and obliterate obstacles that they perceive to slow them down. It's time to bring these abilities to light to empower them to take ownership of their processes, unleash their creativity, and shift their ability to deliver more value than ever before into overdrive.

In a world where productivity often feels like it's slipping into a black hole, it's easy to feel stuck. But your team is far from powerless. In this session, I'll show you how I flipped the script on conventional team dynamics at a major automotive titan with over 2000 teams.

We won't talk theories here, but use real, actionable game-based techniques that fit into the complex rhythm of your teams' everyday work life to help teams drive out the solutions to their toughest blockers.

These aren't just games though. They're practical tools to help your team immediately identify and prioritize the hidden impediments, delivery-dampening dependencies, and bottlenecks that are throttling their flow by helping them discover unseen forces they can leverage to speed up their ability to deliver higher value work faster, more frequently and iterate towards their peak throughput.

Your team has the power to solve problems they haven't even identified yet. Let's uncover these hidden talents and turn your team into agile champions, ready to conquer challenges and drive change. Are you ready to empower them and transform the way you work? Let's start this journey together.

Driving Change in the Fast Lane: Re-engineering the Agility of Tomorrow for an Automotive Titan

In the fast-paced world of automotive innovation, agility is not just about software development. It's about reshaping the very DNA of an iconic company to be nimble, responsive, and ahead of the curve. Enter "Agile NEXT" - a pioneering initiative to reimagine both agility and product coaching for a new era. This session dives deep into the successes, challenges, and the unforeseen roadblocks encountered during this monumental rollout of agile's new wave at a major player in the auto industry.

Join Scott for an immersive experience as we shift gears, challenge the status quo, and set the pace for transformations in the automotive world and beyond. Buckle up for a journey from the production line to transforming the system of delivery in over 2000 product teams, as we share our roadmap for creating a more agile, responsive, and innovative automotive tech company.

Agile Ain't Dead: Just Knocked Unconscious

In a world rapidly succumbing to agile fatigue, this workshop serves as a wake-up call. This is not your typical agile pep talk. Instead, it delves deep into the roots of agile practices, challenging the rosy narratives we've come to adore and exposing the gritty realities often swept under the rug by execs at the top of the organizations we aim to enrich.

Attendees will embark on a journey through the business agility landscape, confronting its identity crisis, grappling with its unintended human costs, and navigating the maze of executive misunderstandings.

As we dissect myths such as agile's seemly unending pursuit of scalability and the illusion of speed as a misguided yet still highly desirable measure of success, participants will be forced to confront uncomfortable truths.

We'll explore how agile, once a beacon of innovation and efficiency, now risks becoming a victim of its own success – diluted, misunderstood, and often misapplied.

This workshop is a call to reboot agile for the sake of our organizations' and our products' health, stripping away the hype and commercialization to rediscover its original spirit and purpose.

But be warned: this is not for the faint-hearted. Expect lively debates, eye-opening insights, and uncomfortable questions.

The goal is to ignite a firestorm of critical thinking, leading to a reinvigorated approach to business agility – one that is sustainable, ethical, and truly desired down to its roots.

Join us if you dare to peel back the layers of agile's facade and are ready to be part of the movement to bring about its true revival.

Become Your Industry's Stark Industries: How the Most Profitable Products are Prototyped & Perfected

What's the difference between your organization and Stark Industries? Less than you might think, if you approach product engineering the right way. Stark Industries, while rooted in the realm of superheroes, embodies a spirit of groundbreaking innovation and a relentless pursuit of perfection that today's most formidable real-world companies share.

Imagine a world where every company functions with the audacity of Tony Stark, treating every challenge as a new blueprint for tomorrow's breakthrough. Do you dare to adapt, prototype, and perfect? Or will you watch from the sidelines as the future is forged without you?

The age of slow iteration and caution is over. Today's market doesn't reward the timid. It seeks disruptors, pioneers, and those unafraid of trial, error, and transformation.

In this session, we unravel the rapid, agile, and often audacious approaches that drive product innovation at breakneck speeds. We're diving deep into the gritty, rapid-fire world of prototyping and product innovation, drawing lessons from the real titans of industry and innovation. We'll uncover the alchemy of turning radical ideas into tangible, market-ready, gold-standard products, blending audacity, technology, and design thinking to become the Stark Industries of your industry.

This session isn't for those content with mediocre products that deliver minimal value to the marketplace. The future is being written now, with or without your input, even as we layer in technological advances including AI. If your product isn't delivering real value, it will be left in the dust. Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and discover your inner Tony Stark?

Supercharge Your Product with These 20 UX Superpowers to Make People Feel Superhuman

It's 2022. We live in a world full of diverse people who have a multitude of different needs, emotions, behaviors and environments. These can be difficult to understand and even more challenging to address for us mere mortals when engineering world-class products for the masses.

In the past, good enough was often good enough, but now, the race to build better products faster has never been so fiercely competitive. To give our users a richer, more engaging and delightful experience, we need to understand how they think, feel and what they need at any given point in time in a variety of contexts and a wide gamut of possible states of being, especially in context with the problems our products are aiming to help them solve in those moments of need.

There's an okay way to do that. Then there's an exceptional way—by leveraging some emerging UX strategies.

Join Scott as he dives into the neuroscience, psychology and physiology of humankind and what you can do to give your product super-powerful abilities to help users feel superhuman, growing their love and loyalty of your product, by employing a diverse set of new-age UX capabilities informed by behavioral, emotional and contextual understandings, so you can make your customer's lives not simply better, easier and happier but also richer, fuller and all around more incredible.

Along the way, you'll learn about 20 phenomenal new UX concepts that you can leverage right away to increase brand and product loyalty, grow your customer base, pull in more revenue and leave your competition wondering where you've been hiding all your superpowers.

Making Reality Virtual: Simulating Experiences with VR Prototyping

Take the Red Pill, and let's dive into the mind-bending Matrix that is Virtual Reality prototyping. Not just for gaming (though that's cool too), a new dimension of experience simulation is now open to designers of software as well as physical products, to observe customer interaction and gather feedback without ever having to create a real product. In this session, explore the hardware and software tools, and the varying techniques we can leverage to put potential customers into a world unlike anything they're used to, or even places they're already familiar with. Learn how to observe their interactions with those experiences, empathize with them in specific contexts and better understand their behaviors. Discover how we can help solve problems or create new engaging content that fits their needs with this new virtual realm. Finally, learn how to validate physical product ideas, not just software and games. Walk away with everything you need to get started prototyping VR experiences (except the hardware itself).

Make More Money 💰 With Less Effort 🛠️: Experimentation Before Implementation

Developing software products is time consuming, with little guarantee of success. The Web, App Store, Google Play and beyond are littered with apps making low or no revenue because they don't solve problems people actually care about. Before you build your “killer” app, you can truly know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there’s actual demand for it. Learn how to discern whether people will actually buy, use and love your product before you put in all that effort! This amusing, fast-paced workshop teaches several product prototyping and experimentation techniques that you can use right away to prove whether your product or feature ideas have worth, or to help you transform non-valuable ideas to valuable ones.

Whether you work solo or on a team, this workshop will engage you in activities you can take with you back to work and immediately employ to significantly increase the odds of a bigger pay day by building only the parts people would actually use and find value in.

You’ll learn how to:
* discover your early adopters and first paying customers, even before you launch the app
* divine whether or not your idea solves a problem people care about, in ways that they need if they are to use the app
* what to avoid when engaging in user research
* the three key questions that will lead to early money and early adoption
* tools to develop codeless prototypes
* ways to scale these validation concepts to desktop software, Web apps/sites and beyond…

Love You 10000: Build Your Own J.A.R.V.I.S. Assistant Using Next-Gen Tech From Elon Musk's AI Team

"Good morning. It's 7 AM. The weather in Malibu is 72 degrees with scattered clouds. The surf conditions are fair with waist to shoulder highlines, high tide will be at 10:52 AM. Shall I confirm your surf session with Mr. Musk for this afternoon?"

If you're like most people, you've probably dreamed of having your own personal AI assistant like J.A.R.V.I.S. from the Iron Man movies to take care of the mundane tasks in your life so that you can focus on more important things. Well, now there's a way to make that dream a reality using the latest artificial intelligence technology from Elon's OpenAI team.

In this workshop, you will learn how to build your own AI that works just like J.A.R.V.I.S. using the new GPT-3 Davinci model from OpenAI. We'll start with a brief overview of AI and machine learning concepts, then move on to a hands-on walkthrough where you'll rapidly build and train your own AI model. You'll have him communicating to your likeness within the first hour. By the end of this session, you'll have your own AI assistant that you can take home with you to help with your daily tasks (or take over the world, if that's what you're into).

Aside from world domination, J.A.R.V.I.S. can be used for a variety of things. He can report today's weather to you just the way you like it, give you a rundown of your day's schedule in your own words, handle your email replies with the most genius responses, manage your social media with the kind of pizzaz that makes people see you as a hero, write thought-provoking articles for your blog, script YouTube videos or podcast episodes, help out with the homework, take care of your reports, write that 10-page research paper, hunt down higher-paying job opportunities for you, sell your consulting services in irresistible ways, solve tough challenges in ways you never thought possible, make witty observations about your current reality, tell better jokes than Alexa or help you craft some original jokes you can claim full IP on, and he can even make small talk in the most delightful and enlightening way.

Your life will never be the same.

Double Your Income as a Knowledge Worker

Do you feel stuck in a low-paying rut? Or perhaps you already earn great pay, yet you know that you're more valuable and that there's always a next level. Or maybe you wonder if you're more valuable than your peers, and you want to explore the possibilities.

If so, this workshop is for you! Find out how to break free from the chains of income limitations and start earning what you're truly worth.

In this game-changing workshop, you'll learn:
- How to discover your value as a knowledge worker
- How to position yourself as a high-value knowledge worker in your ideal IT role
- How to find the right opportunities to increase your income
- How to attract dream gigs with dream companies or clients that meet every wish on your perfect-gig wishlist
- A newer, more powerful method for networking and building relationships than you've ever used before
- Strategies for charging what you're actually worth, regardless of what others in your role are paid
- How to negotiate higher pay or salary increases
- Implement what you'll learn immediately for fast feedback from Scott

If you're ready to take your earnings to the next level, you simply cannot afford to miss this workshop!

Join "first name" for an enlightening and empowering experience as you learn how to make more money while doing what you love.

Dock Your Stage in the Metaverse of Masses: Simulating, Validating and Investing in our VR/AR Future

The metaverse is officially here to stay, no longer an experimental fad. It's officially the future. If you take the time to understand how to launch virtual experiences within it right now, you'll have what's called the first (virtual) mover's advantage, and you'll reap meaningful rewards through novel revenue models, superior customer engagement strategies, and a unique opportunity to design a virtual future that's just as much your own as it is that of the emerging metaverse itself.

Put simply, if you know how to design, engineer and fund successful virtual experiences today, you'll be able to use them to transform the virtual world around us (and your revenue).

Join Scott for this wild ride, as he explains how to become a virtual experience architect and investor in the metaverse. He'll show you how to use VR storytelling, prototype and validate demand for your experiences, and even raise millions in seed funding for your metaverse developments, along with a savvy long-term strategy to become a leading force in the metaverse's explosive future!

Caring for the Human Condition: Product Superpowers to Make Users Feel Superhuman

You're human.

We know that life is tough and there are a lot of challenges out there. A lot of them are mental or biological, but our environments and the products we use don't support them very well.

Yet, we know we can overcome any challenge with the right tools, support, and guidance.

The same is true in every facet of the apps and digital technology we develop.

This session teaches designers and software artisans how to care for the often-unseen mental and physical challenges faced by the humans who use our products in ways we never thought possible.

It's 2021. It's time to provide digital experiences that help people live their best digital lives by caring for the human condition through products and services crafted with thoughtful intention!

If you're ready to go beyond accessibility, and help your customers feel superhuman, you'll want to be here for this session.

Five Remarkably Easy Opportunities to Boost Design Sprint Creativity

Do your team members feel their ideas aren't that valuable, or that they're not creative enough to participate in ideation, valuation or experimentation? Nonsense! They just need a creative boost! We all have creativity within us, we just need help exercising that creative muscle that will cultivate the grand ideas within us all. Come learn four games and activities that foster creativity within our teams and trigger their higher-level thinking that will help them dig deeper for those elusively good high-quality ideas.

There's Still No App For That: The Science of Solving Problems People Actually Care About

Life's too short to solve problems that people don't care about. Besides, when you choose the wrong problem and work hard solving it only for yourself or a small group of people, your efforts are potentially wasted on the product since no one will use what you have made if they do not find value in it. Your efforts should be spent trying to make people's lives better by developing apps that help with their deepest needs.

This session shows you how to leverage elements of neuroscience combined with the scientific method to explore the problem space on a deeper level, generate a wider gamut of possibilities for your mobile app, and experiment towards the most optimal solution so that your app not only changes lives, but has staying power in a world that constantly changes direction as if it is in a pinball machine. The result will be an app that makes a big impact on the lives of your customers, and can last beyond the next big thing.

Whose Time is it Anyway? Lightning Fast Hacks That Add Real Value to Meetings No One Wants to Attend

Too many meetings. Let's face it, we all have them. Meetings are a necessarily evil, but they don't necessarily have to be so evil. Regardless of whether we're leading a meeting, or merely attending, whether it's in person or remote, the value extracted from collaboration can be amplified by how we conduct our gatherings.

This session reveals 7 simple yet powerful tactics almost no one is using, even in 2022, that will add instant value to nearly any meeting, any time, anywhere. Because time is precious, and it's non-renewable. Expect to walk away from the session feeling empowered and ready to implement these methods in your very next meeting.

Peak Throughput: 11 Design Thinking Games to Remedy Waste, Remove Impediments & Improve Flow

To bring our teams to the next level, we must help them identify and remove waste and bottlenecks that cause productivity to escape into a black hole, impeding their flow and affecting their delivery. How do we do that effectively though, when our teams feel they have little control over the things that are slowing them down? Activate their higher-level thinking by boosting their creative confidence and providing some tactical ways to unveil hidden possibilities to optimize their value streams in ways they can't exactly see otherwise. Come discover eleven 15-minute games or activities that help do just that, and try a few, hands-on. Along the way, we'll explore methods to identify and prioritize these impediments, along with methods to strategize their removal by helping teams surface unseen opportunities to tackle them. Our teams have a hidden ability to solve problems they don't feel they can touch. Let's help them embrace the right mindset so they can take control and act on them.

Icebox Zero: Agile UX and the Lean Backlog

One of the most disregarded principles of the Agile Manifesto is perhaps one of the most important: Simplicity—the art of optimizing the amount of work that’s not necessary. Frankly, simplicity seems simple enough, but in reality it’s as complicated as the work we are so often asked to deliver on—work that we may ultimately find was not worth doing. This session explores the complexities of this sort of counterintuitive workstream optimization, with low-effort tactical approaches to preventing such waste in software and product development. The session attempts to codify the things teams need to do to truly execute on simplicity, and as a bonus, fulfill what is likely the most important principle of the Agile Manifesto: satisfying the customer. Short of applying Monte Carlo methods to our backlog, we’ll explore how to apply the concepts of thoughtful lean metrics to improve our abilities to deliver value.

It's Okay to F.A.I.L. - Fearless Adventures in Learning!

Kids will have a blast exploring several group activities that help them feel comfortable failing (and celebrating each time), transform failure to success and improve how they respond to change. Along the way they'll discover that the goal is not failure, but mindfulness, togetherness, learning and continuous improvement.

Caring for New Users: Adoption, Onboarding, Empty States, Feedback Herding, Friction, Hooks & More!

What does it take to craft a great experience for new users of our product? Once we're ready to move past MVP-stage, having learned what we needed to learn, there's still more to think about than merely what capability to give our earliest adopters and how that translates into functionality for the team to build and scale. Even if you're late to the game, there are always new users to care for with established products too.

Enter the concept of "New UX". It's a quintessential component of product design. This session explores the idea of transforming new users into power users. It'd be nice if we could all hone our intuition skills and create absolutely 100% intuitive products 100% of the time, but that's more fantasy than reality. So we must leverage techniques that help us make our new users feel awesome!

You'll learn:
* How to overcome the struggle to drive adoption
* Considerations for short attention spans, limited scratch memory, temporary disabilities, and avoiding subjecting new users to cognitive load & burnout.
* The many types of onboarding, and which method is optimal for our users' in learning how to use our app.
* Permission priming, permission pouncing and other concerns for user privacy when our apps need access beyond various device limitations.
* What empty states are, and how you need to think about them in the context of your product and your users' goals in order to make them useful as well as delightful.
* Sources of friction in the experience and in growing our user base.
* How we can keep new users coming back, through consideration of habit formation tactics

Notes to the reviewer:

Presented at CodeMash, MinneWebCon, Michigan DevFest and to Mobile Monday, A2UX & Columbus Experience Design meetups. It's one of the best attended sessions during its slot at the conferences I've presented it at. Always a packed house.

This session is mostly presentation style, but has some highly interactive components to keep the crowd lively. While the subject matter is quite serious, humor is always sprinkled in for good measure.

F.A.I.L.—Fearless Adventures in Learning! Improv+Collaboration Games Exploring the Value of Failure

This highly interactive session explores several engaging team-based improv & collaboration games that help teams embrace "successful failure." Rather than glorify the act of failing, we should understand that its power is not in failing alone, but rather the learning that emerges from it and the power that such learning has to unlock otherwise unforeseen opportunities. Our goal is to relinquish our fears of failure, break us out of our comfort zone and accept the prospect of failure with the ultimate goal of using it to better understand what success looks like, and how the struggle and pain of failure, and the learning that accompanies it, opens our mind to new possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise seen. These games create comfort with failure and build up our actionable learning muscle (insight synthesis, etc) that should accompany every unsuccessful attempt at success. Failure and learning for the win!

Living in a Material World: Everything Engineers+Designers Should Know About Google's Design System

Material is Google’s best attempt to distill the essence of how software, whether for smart phones, tablets, desktops or otherwise, should look, feel and behave. Now, in its most recent iteration, Material aims to help make such experiences easier to implement via software that’s built for a wide swath of devices across several software platforms and operating systems. The newly revamped Material brings with it a whole host of new tools and capabilities for both designers and developers to take advantage of. In this session, we'll explore all that Material has to offer, both from a design and an engineering perspective.

Discover customization options with "Theme Editor"—it goes beyond simply picking the color, shade, typography, and elements.
Use "Gallery" as a refreshing source of inspiration for any new or existing project.
Pair cross-functionally by using "Remixer"—it helps developers and designers configure and adjust an app's design in a collaborative way.
Explore rapid prototyping options with "Stage".
Take your work straight to code, in several languages and platforms, with "Components".
We'll also explore some of the core design principles of Material along the way.

Warning: Attendees may leave this session with a particular Madonna song stuck in their head. Sorry, not sorry!