The past 12 past months Minnesota has seen a number of significant hiring, reorganization, layoff and acquisition announcements.

If your CEO, Executive Director, VP or Manager came to your desk or sent an email right now and said:

• We want to promote you, let’s meet tomorrow at 9 am and talk about it.
• Your annual review is this month, fill out this form and have it back to me by the end of the week.
• Because of the upcoming acquisition your role is likely to change. Let’s talk about what you want to do next.
• The project we are working… the funding has been pulled. We only you need you for two more weeks.
• I’m sorry but as part of our “reorganization” we are letting you go.

… would you be ready? Are you maintaining your career?

What will be one past presentation and two parts active Q&A we are going to have a conversation around these topics:

• How to position yourself for the next step in your career.
• Negotiating salary/rates and how to ask for more money.
• Maintaining the skills your employer needs now and learning what they need next.
• The grass is not always greener on the other side.
• Networking – Are you sitting next to someone you know right now? If so, change seats.
• Building your portfolio for your next review, job search, or project.
• Specifically for the consultants/contractors: how to have an adequate pipeline of projects

These are exciting (and stressful) times and in many ways the future of the workplace is changing. Be ready.

If you consider yourself the only designer on your team, why should you expect anyone else to care about design?

In reality, your organization already has some of the best design thinkers you’ll ever meet nearby: your developers. In this talk, we’ll have an honest look at our shared tendency to be “Design Prophets” instead of “Design Facilitators”, and how this tendency can hurt our ultimate goals. We’ll also discuss the concept of a “Design Culture”, and the role of you and your team in building that culture in your organization.

This session will provide a basic foundation for designers who wish to foster a culture of design at their own organizations. We’ll discuss common misconceptions that prevent us from achieving that goal – ones we must overcome, and ones we are guilty of harboring ourselves. Well look at the work of influential design thinkers who have laid groundwork for us to take advantage of. Case studies will provide practical examples to apply these topics to.

The state of social sharing has moved from simply telling your story to creatively showing your audience your message. You’ve already matched your target audience preferences with the appropriate social channels. Now it’s time to show them the visuals and fill those channels with engaging content.

Let’s leverage your visual assets on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest using proven tips & techniques. We’ll also explore best practices and examples of businesses that stand out from the crowd by using visuals to successfully engage their fans.

Who needs to care about Google Analytics? EVERYONE. At the outset, analytics seem like something only marketers care about, right? Wrong.

Every organization on the face of this planet has one thing in common: growth. Growth is measurable. And with websites, we can attribute growth to a variety of attributes. Did we sell more product/receive more donations from our promoted Facebook posts, our promoted tweets, or from our e-newsletters? Even if a website can’t measure revenue, it should be doing something to grow the organization, or the website/app doesn’t need to exist.

Strategists and User Experience Architects should care about analytics and start thinking about how their proposed user flows will lead to conversions (i.e. what’s the path of least resistance?). Front-end developers should care because they way they write code will affect implementation of Universal Analytics or Google Tag Manager.

People attending this seminar will come away with a basic understanding of Google Analytics (and how Classic differs from Universal), how Google Tag Manager differs from Google Analytics, and some key reports that everyone should know about. Mostly because they’ll impress your boss.

Creating something that is easy to use is not the same as creating something valuable that people want to use. To create something people will keep coming back to, it is important to understand why they do what they do – their conscious and subconscious motivations – and the factors that can influence a choice, a preference, or an action.

Behavioral science offers answers to these questions and provides the foundation for any targeted research your company may undertake. A solid understanding of behavioral science can help us design better interfaces, build better products, and improve the overall experience of (and value to) our customers.

You’ll learn about universal aspects of human behavior and how they apply to the digital world. We will talk about steps other companies have taken to incorporate behavioral science into their own work, and give you tips on how you can do the same. In short, you will leave with actionable insights that will influence how you approach your work, and be provided with direction on where to go to learn more about the topic.

Steve, Trystan, and Emily are passionate about behavioral science and wanted to create a place where people could go to learn more about it. In May 2015, they started Behavior MN, a cross-functional meetup for people in the Twin Cities who want to build a practical understanding of behavioral science.

The moment we start creating a website, we’re setting ourselves up for failure later. Bad code creates middle of the night fire drills. Lack of thinking about accessibility gets our employer sued. Not thinking ahead on mobile generates rework. We accept this as the normal course of business – but is there any way we could prevent (or lower) this cost? Is there anything we can learn from the building codes that dictate how our built environment is constructed?

We will talk about the lessons of building codes and what we can do today to build more robust web applications and sites, including:

• The need for design patterns in websites
• The need for patterns in user stories so that we build websites consistently
• Baking accessibility into websites comes from putting accessibility into user stories
• Planning a web application is different from planning a building, but it does share similar aspects of work
• The better we can becoming at creating best practices (building codes) the better we will get at building sites, and the closer we will come to Berners-Lee’s “one web for all” dream

We’ve all heard the phrase “Too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the broth” and heard horror stories of the terrible things that result from design by committee. So when it comes to user experience design, the work is best left to the experts, right?

Wrong.

User experiences are complex, messy, and often have very specific needs and limitations – not unlike the people who use them and the needs they address. Learning how and when to collaborate with clients and end-users to co-create design solutions is a critical skill for anyone who designs and builds experiences – including UXers, visual designers, developers, and project managers. Collaboration doesn’t mean you give up control, or your role as the expert. But being an expert at design doesn’t make you the expert at every business, and it certainly doesn’t make you the end-user. A collaborative methodology is better than traditional methods where a team designs the solution and then gathers input. With a collaborative methodology, users and clients are co-creating the design from the outset, so you to get the right inputs, identify the faults in your thinking, and refine the solution – before you ruin the broth.

In this session we’ll talk what about it takes to be successful at co-creating a design solution, the difference between co-creating with a product team or an end-user, and how to plan, design, refine, and execute a solution successfully as a collaboration. We’ll also share tools and insights you’ll use to help collaboration go smoothly, from when to meet (or not to meet) and who to invite (or exclude).

A designer has been asked to mock up an example student profile page in Photoshop. It’s beautiful. The student’s name fits perfectly under the profile image. Their bio is split into two perfectly aligned columns. The design just feels… right. Approvals are given and the production of a website with many different profiles is started. As more profiles are added the design no longer seems to work. It’s starting to seem like the website itself will no longer work. The cold, hard reality of varied and inconsistent web content has hit the project hard. Do we make large design changes or just live with it?

To head off this question we should utilize real content as we develop mock-ups. But it shouldn’t just be one set of real content. Delivering the best possible and most robust websites requires us to design using the best-case, worst-case, and every-case-in-between content. By combining the skills of content specialists, designers, and even developers designs will be that much stronger.

Attendees will learn techniques and tools for evaluating Web pages for accessibility. We begin by identifying common categories of disabilities and potential barriers the Web presents for each category. We then briefly review the Web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA). Presentation will provide an overview of Web accessibility checking software and techniques. The majority of time will be spent learning about and using WAVE Firefox extension, AInspector Firefox extension, WCAG color contrast checker, Juicy Studio Firefox extension and ChromeVox screen reader. Participants will have an opportunity to evaluate Web pages for accessibility using their own computers.