Speaker Spotlight: Dan Willis and How to Not Design

Dan Willis is Marriott’s Director of Mobile Experience Design. He has been launching robust web sites and apps since the mid-1990s. He is a co-author and illustrator of Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation (Peachpit), founder of Cranky Talk Workshops for New Speakers and creator of the UX Crank blog (www.uxcrank.com), a resource for UX professionals.

How to Not Design

Can we finally let go of the Designer/Wizard Myth? Not that it wasn’t an enchanting tale: The socially awkward genius all in black, working vampire hours, wearing headphones and horn rims and cranking out magical solutions to transform mediocre ideas and questionable product management into gazillion-dollar success.

In reality, jumping straight to design intensifies any organization’s pre-existing dysfunction and guarantees half-assed solutions and endless cycles of equally ineffective redesign.

Design isn’t magic and it doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Like it or not, organizations create successful user experiences, not designers. This talk will outline what an effective UX professional should be doing long before a single pixel has been designed. Participants will walk away with specific “bottom-up” tactics to more accurately define the organization, adjust team structure and tweak process.