Skip to content.

Skip to main menu.

James Mathewson

James Mathewson is the Program Director, Content Strategy and Platforms. His job is to build the ecosystem for enterprise content management, including taxonomy, ontology, content planning, publishing, and optimization. He has 20 years of experience in web editorial, content strategy, and SEO for large and small companies. A frequent speaker, lecturer and blogger, James has published more than 1600 articles and two books on how web technology and user experience change the nature of effective content. James has two advanced degrees on related subjects from the University of Minnesota.

Kamran Ayub

Kamran Ayub is a full-stack engineer living in Minneapolis, MN. He has been in the industry since 2006 in roles spanning front-end design to infrastructure support. He is well-versed in web technologies and loves to work with both JavaScript and .NET stacks. His passion for impeccable UX, clean code, maintainable software architecture, and his range of ability have allowed him to wear many different hats throughout his career. He loves speaking at conferences and teaching others through his Pluralsight courses. He is a core contributor on the Excalibur.js team, a hobbyist game developer, the creator of Keep Track of My Games, and a maintainer on several open source projects. Besides coding, Kamran is an avid gamer and loves to spend time with his family. You can keep up with him on https://kamranicus.com.

Amy Grace Wells

Amy Grace is a content strategist and UX designer with nearly 15 years of experience in higher ed, publishing, and nonprofit. She holds master’s degress in higher education and user experience design.

Her experiences include leading content strategy at University of South Carolina and Texas A&M AgriLife, where she directed content strategy, information architecture, and social media for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and five state agencies. She served as an expert reviewer for “Content Strategy for WordPress,” published in 2015. Bragging rights include holding a sensei rank in karate and singing happy birthday to Muhammad Ali.

Terrance Schubring

Terrance Schubring’s interest in innovation and creating the future began when he saw the movie, 2001 – A Space Odyssey. It inspired him to program adventure games on an Atari 800. Much later, he continued working with technology as an interactive media producer at University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education. Next he developed mobile apps. His many app projects included original games such as Railroad Train and client titles such as Sketch-By-Step in the Apple and Android app stores.

Keita Broadwater

Operations and Finance Leader with Data Science, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning Specialization.

Colin McFadden

Colin McFadden is a Technology Architect for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. His work primarily focuses on media processing and advanced imaging, an in particular the ways those technologies can benefit education and research. Away from the computer, he is passionate about travel, cooking, and rock climbing. Preferably all at the same time.

Getting Started with Sass

Sass is a CSS preprocessor that enables designers and developers to write DRY (don’t repeat yourself) code. Leveraging data structures like variables, if/else statements, functions, and loops, Sass allows CSS designers to create code that’s easier to follow and less repetitive. In this workshop, attendees will learn about Sass’s advantages and disadvantages; how to write and compile Sass to CSS; and how to work with mixins, variables, extends, and more to create a real-world web page.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Set up a typical file structure for working with Sass
  • Work with a Sass compiler to create CSS that the browser can understand
  • Create variables, mixins, extends, and more
  • Work with Sass’s built-in functions to manipulate color, make calculations, and more

Attendee skill level: Attendees should have working knowledge of HTML5 and CSS. Ideally, you should be able to hand-code both. However, all files are provided for the workshop, so you can follow along by copying and pasting the code provided.

Sass workshop files

Scout CSS pre-processor

Silo-busting Innovation

So, you’ve got a problem worth solving or an insightful solution, but your efforts are plagued with constant starts and stops, completely stall out, or you’re even shut down before you start. Innovating across roles and departments is often marred with miscommunication, disconnection, and frustration, resulting in “moving targets”, project teams not knowing who’s doing what, and, ultimately, abandonment.

What if you could turn this essential innovation collaboration from a pain to a strength? Join us for Silo-busting Innovation, a collaborative session where you will learn by doing. We invite you to bring an issue or idea to work on.

This is an interactive session that aims to not only introduce or reinforce the concepts of design thinking and human-centered design through a lens of cross-role, cross-departmental, and even cross-organizational collaboration, but gives participants a chance to try out and play with the techniques. The topics covered and participatory activities include: advice interviews, problem statement creation, ideation with diverse perspectives, and solution statement creation.

Attendee Skill Level: Attendees would be best suited if they came with an open mind, open to new ideas and processes. Some basic familiarization with innovation processes (design-thinking, human-centered design, etc) could be helpful, but not necessary.

View the workbook

View the workshop slides

Separating the Users from the Brand: Editorial Brand Experience Without Strategy

We strive to learn from organizations such as MailChimp and Slack, who seamlessly combine editorial brand personality with exceptional user experience. But we experience many more examples of popups and call-to-actions trying to be cheeky while alienating users with forced and offensive choices such as “No, I prefer to pay full price” or “No, I’ll just wing it.”

When what you want to be is in contrast with users, everyone suffers. Learn how to bridge the gap with a strong content strategy that begins with user experience to build an editorial brand that leaves all delighted.

In this workshop we’ll work to identify top user tasks. With this information, build a usable persona based on tasks and motivations and complete a user journey. Finally, exercises such as cardsorts will allow development of a rough message architecture.

Learning Outcomes:

You’ll walk away from this workshop with:

  • Identify user tasks and goals through user research.
  • Prioritize user journeys to highlight key editorial needs.
  • Find common ground between user needs and brand desires.
  • Develop a content strategy to lead editorial brand development.

Attendee skill level: Best for intermediate skill levels. Those who have been attempting to advocate for the user with stakeholders already. Beginners are welcome, but it is recommended that they have some basic familiarity with the terms used in the descriptions as the workshop will be move rather quickly.

Attendees do not need to have previously performed any of the tasks listed in the description.

Paper Prototyping for Mixed Reality Experiences

Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality: emerging technologies like Google Cardboard and Microsoft HoloLens offer exciting new opportunities to create immersive experiences. But how do you validate your mixed reality concept quickly before committing costly development resources? We’ll start with an overview of current mixed reality (MR) platforms and best-in-class projects for inspiration. Thus inspired, we’ll take a step back from shiny demo videos and expensive dev kits to return to our design roots: the humble cardboard. Though a series of rapid prototyping exercises, we’ll ideate, design, and test our ideas. By creating low-fidelity prototypes and observing key interactions, we’ll focus on understanding the core of any design idea: the user experience.

Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of this workshop, attendees will be able to test concepts that involve physical touchpoints and emerging technologies before committing to development.

Attendee Skill Level:

Attendees should have an interest in emerging technologies and be open to new experiences. Suitable for introverts or extroverts alike; theatricality encouraged. Be ready to create!

Page Navigation

Viewing page 3. Page Links: