Schedule

Wednesday

workshops

April 26, 2017

grapevine convention center
1209 S. Main St.
Grapevine, TX 76051

lunch provided*

Work is life, but life is not your work. Be purposeful with your time. You have one life.

– drew wilson,
founder of Valiocon
#squares2017

08:00
am

Registration & Coffee

08:30
am

Track I - 1.5 hrs

kelly harrop

lead ui/ux designer at Web Loft Designs

Reinventing Experiences

Outdated designs don’t just hurt people’s eyes — they hurt a company’s bottom line and reputation. Updating a website or app isn’t just about choosing a new UI kit, but actually trying to understand the underlying problems that exist when a product has stagnated.

In this workshop, you’ll learn best practices on how to improve both the UX and UI for the end user. We will walk through creating a proper sitemap, harmonizing UX logic with modern visual design trends, working with development, and the best way to scale up your projects.

Track II - 3.5 hrs

joshua cook

front-end developer at Red Ventures

Getting Started with Vue.js

Vue.js has emerged as one of the fastest growing and most exciting Javascript libraries out right now. Learn why large companies are choosing it over React or Angular, and start building websites with this progressive Javascript framework today!

10:30
am

Track I - 1.5 hrs

steven ray

chief creative officer at Dialexa

Lean Design Research

A discovery phase is essential to a product's success and is much more than just getting up to speed with stakeholders and documenting requirements. Before building anything you need to evaluate the strategy, create shared understanding, and build strong lines of communication. Dialexa has created a battle-tested discovery process that strikes the perfect balance between research and planning vs. designing and building. In this workshop, you will learn various techniques to quickly extract data and synthesize it into meaningful information for business stakeholders, design teams, and development teams.

12:00
pm

Lunch

01:30
pm

Track I - 1.5 hrs

noah labhart

founder at Touchtap

Building Custom iOS Animations

In this workshop, we will teach you hands on how to build custom animations for iOS Apps, including controller transitions, view animatiable properties, transforming objects and and grouping animations.

Track II - 3.5 hrs

william m. riley

front-end engineer at Flywheel

Designing a Web API: Best Practices

With a central place for your API, it’s helpful to make satellite app. In this workshop, we’ll draft an API with authentication, tokens, and best security practices, as well as making the API extremely communicative about what it offers for the people who will consume it.

07:00
pm

Parties

Opening Mixer

Grapevine Craft Brewery

906 Jean St
Grapevine, TX 76501

Thursday

Day I

April 27, 2017

palace arts center
300 S. Main St.
Grapevine, TX 76051

Look for common patterns of design + immerse yourself in research.

– phil coffman,
design lead at PCPartPicker
#squares2017

08:00
am

Registration & Coffee

09:00
am

Kickoff Day I

09:15
am

Session I

Greyson Sofia

product designer at UENO

By the People, for the People: Designing for Real Life

A designer at San Francisco-based agency Ueno, Greyson shares key principles she lives and works by that constructively influence her design. With a passion for people and experiences, she also explores the role of compassion in design culture and how she humanizes her design process.

10:15
am

Session II

Anne Grundhoefer

senior ux designer at Projekt202

Design Systems: Enterprise UX Evolution

A design system is a framework of practices that bring designers and products together. It is a platform to identify, and document what to share, whether a visual style, design patterns, front-end UI components, and practices like accessibility, research, content strategy.

The role of design with enterprise organizations is expanding, spreading across product teams and influencing decision-making at higher and higher levels. This scale, paired with the array of devices, browsers, screen sizes, locales, and environments, makes it increasingly challenging to align designers and developers to deliver cohesive user experiences.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the lessons learned, the challenges faced, and best practices for creating and maintaining an effective interface design system.

10:55
am

30 minute break

11:25
am

Session III

Aaron Irizarry

director of ux at Nasdaq

Hold Fast: Managing Design Teams When Projects Go Sideways

How do we work through these scenarios as leaders, while managing the expectations of our teams and business partners and keeping things moving forward despite the various challenges that we face? In this talk you will learn tips and techniques for managing through the ups and downs of the design process, including: Managing stakeholders, Managing your team, and Managing the process.

12:05
pm

2 hour lunch

02:15
pm

Panel 1

Panel I

Marcus Morrison, Chris Wallace, Greyson MacAlpine, Lauren Cutrell, Jonathan Cutrell, Michael Peters

03:15
pm

Session IV

Kitt Hodsden

formerly at Shopify & Twitter

Responsive Images: Beyond Resizing

We all know that website performance is important (way important!), did we mention important, because we meant important. And we all know that images and web-fonts are the two biggest contributors to a web page's size. So, we resize our images, and we're done! Wait, what, we're not done?

Not quite. Serving a well-sized image is important in reducing data waste, lowering bandwidth costs, and increasing both actual and perceived performance, but what about all the other ways we can improve?

Along with image sizes, image formats are important. So is how an image is included in the HTML. How the images are delivered over the network can also affect performance. And not loading an image at all can sometimes be the best choice. In all of this, workflow/tooling ease and developer/editor happiness with the entire process is also important.

All of these contribute to increasing image, and therefore website, performance. So let's explore the ways beyond resizing we can use responsive images.

03:55
pm

30 minute break

04:25
pm

Session V

Jonathan Snook

web designer, developer & writer

Responsive Web Applications with Container Queries

How do you take a complex web application, with a myriad of components and interactions, and make it fully responsive without pulling your hair out for a year?

With a focus on Container Queries, we’ll look at the approach the Shopify Admin team used, from design to development, to manage the intricate interactions between all the application’s components, pulling off a fully fluid responsive design in under a month.

We’ll also look at how this approach is currently being used at Xero to achieve unity between disparate tech stacks and to speed up the development process.

07:00
pm

Parties

After Party

Delaney Vineyards

2000 Champagne Blvd
Grapevine, TX 76501

* Beer & Wine at 7pm and Dinner at 7:30 pm

Friday

Day II

April 28, 2017

palace arts center
300 S. Main St.
Grapevine, TX 76051

UX design is everyone's responsibility.

– casey baggz,
developer
#squares2017

08:00
am

Coffee

09:00
am

Kickoff Day II

09:15
am

Session I

Austin Knight

senior ux designer at HubSpot

Design is not Art

This talk is not about design or art; it's about designers. It's about the things that we create and the ways in which we create them. It's about the processes that we use and how those processes define us. It's about the qualities that set us apart (and why they matter). What are the differences between design and art? What is the most important quality that a designer can possess? And how are the two so closely related? In this talk, we'll examine the ways in which design and art are fundamentally different, and how through those differences, we can extract the qualities that comprise great designers and leaders. Learn about the contrasting purposes, data sources, and creative processes that design and art hold. Gain a new perspective on what it means to be a designer, and how designers that possess one particular quality are prone to better feedback, accountability, innovation, collaboration, and outcomes. Finally, hear personal accounts from designers at companies like Google and Apple, sharing their approaches to design and the qualities that they value. You may or may not leave this talk convinced that design is not art, but no matter what, you will leave with a better understanding for what it means to be a designer.

10:15
am

Session II

Andrew Norcross

lead dev at Reaktiv Studios

Build Something Today

We are currently in a golden age of web development education. Between traditional college degree tracks, bootcamp-style programs, and online schools, there are tools for developers at any stage to learn new skills or build on their existing skill set. But all of the educational tools in the world can’t do the most important part: building something.

10:55
am

30 minute break

11:25
am

Session III

Una Kravets

ui engineer at DigitalOcean

The Power of CSS

I will be highlighting a few fun hacks, from generative pixel art to faux-toshoping

12:05
pm

2 hour lunch

02:15
pm

Panel 1I

Panel II

Joey Kirk, Kurt Cunningham, Lindsey Bradford, Austin Knight, Kelly Harrop, Jeremy Johnson

03:15
pm

Session IV

Jeff Broderick

senior product designer at Weebly

Frameworks in Everything

By creating repeatable and extendable solutions to specific problems we not only make executing and iterating faster, but we create a more cohesive product.

03:55
pm

30 minute break

04:25
pm

Session V

Dave Rupert

developer at Paravelinc

Vague but Exciting

These three words are etched into the history of the World Wide Web. I think these three words leave a legacy for the Web and can teach us a lot about how we design and build products. We’ll delve deep into the art of prototyping and learn how to do it well.