Speakers

Every great conference needs great speakers. The following is a list of all the talents our conference has to offer over the course of both days.

 

Quicklist

Vitaly Friedman />,  Rachel Andrew />,  Billy Hollis />,  Javier Bargas-Avila />,  Stoyan Stefanov />,  Sergei Lupashin />,  Karolina Szczur />,  Amit Kapadia />,  Denys Mishunov />,  Felipe Longé and Alisa Smerdova />,  Philipp Schroeder />,  Pierre Spring />,  Roger Dudler />,  Memi Beltrame />,  Andre Jay Meissner />,  Massimiliano Marcon />,  Dio Synodinos />,  Paloma Lopez />,  Rupert Breheny />,  John Moroney />,  Nellie LeMonier />,  Sascha Corti />,  Thomas Jaggi and Rosmarie Wysseier />,  Jakob Mattsson /> 

Vitaly Friedman  @smashingmag , Editor-in-chief, www.smashingmagazine.com

Vitaly Friedman

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Originally from Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany where he has discovered his passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelancing designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, one of the largest online magazines dedicated to Web design and development. Vitaly is writer, co-author and editor of both Smashing Books. He is now working as the editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine in the lovely city of Germany, Freiburg.

Responsive Redesign: Smashing Magazine's Case Study

You know it’s time to redesign when your design is becoming your own bottleneck — incapable of reflecting your changes, values and the new direction of your enterprise. If your list of necessary UX improvements is getting longer, yet you can’t meaningfuly integrate them in your current design, that’s a clear sign that something has to change. That’s exactly the issue Smashing Magazine's team faced before it decided to redesign Smashing Magazine back in July 2011. In this talk Vitaly Friedman, the founder and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, provides practical insights into the responsive redesign process and the decisions made (and rejected) during the process. Vitaly will share how the team transformed the new vision in the new design, explain technical difficulties and problems in the responsive design process as well as things to keep in mind when dealing with legacy content.

Rachel Andrew  @rachelandrew , Web developer, www.rachelandrew.co.uk

Rachel Andrew

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker. Her books include the bestselling CSS Anthology for Sitepoint and she is a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline. She writes about business and technology on her own site at rachelandrew.co.uk.

In addition to offering consultancy services through the company she founded in 2001 – edgeofmyseat.com – Rachel is also one of the developers of the content management system, Perch.

Pushing the boundaries without breaking the web

This is an exciting time for front-end development. The support of modern browsers for CSS3 and HTML5 is excellent and improving all the time. Before we get too excited about all the new shiny features we have to play with, we need to remember that in many ways the future of the open web is in our hands. We want to take advantage of new features. We need to push the boundaries of what is possible and what ought to be possible. However we need to do this without storing up problems for ourselves as web developers in the future, and without disadvantaging users who may be using older browsers through no fault of their own.

Billy Hollis  @billyhollis , Troublemaker, www.billyhollis.com

Billy Hollis

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Billy is an internationally known author and speaker on user experience and client technologies. His consulting team, based in Nashville, Tennessee, has created applications widely recognized for user experience innovation. His client list includes organizations such as GE, 3M, Xerox, Disney, Royal Bank of Canada, and the US Army. In addition to consulting for user experience design and construction, Billy offers team training on user experience design, and technical classes on XAML technologies. He also authors user experience video training for the online training company Pluralsight.

Creating User Experiences: Unlocking the Invisible Cage

Despite new and powerful UI technology stacks, most developers are creating applications that look and feel the same as ten years ago, except for pretty colors and gratuitous animations. Like zoo animals when their cage is removed, they pace inside bars that no longer exist. This session is a kick-in-the-pants challenge to do better. It begins with an analysis of the higher expectations of new users coming into the work force, because of their dependence on touch-based, intuitive UI in their personal technology. Then the session shows innovative business application examples and explains the design principles that make them work. Finally, attendees will receive a suggested strategy for transcending their past inertia on user experience development and breaking free into the possibilities inherent in new technologies such as HTML5 and XAML.

Javier Bargas-Avila  @javierbargas , Senior User Experience Researcher

Javier Bargas-Avila

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Javier Bargas-Avila holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Before joining Google he was the manager of the HCI lab at the University of Basel (Switzerland) from 2004 to 2011. He published over 20 peer reviewed papers in HCI journals and conferences covering topics such as user satisfaction, mental models in website perception, first visual impression of websites or webform usability. Since 2011 he is part of the YouTube UX research team, where he currently focuses on internationalization, monetization and analytics.

Is beautiful really usable? Understanding the interplay between usability, aesthetics and affect

Ever come across a product that looked beautiful but was awful to use? Or stumbled over a something that was ugly as hell but just did exactly what you wanted? Ever wondered how these factors work together, and how they influence the experiences we create? Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not identical. In this talk I will give you an overview over existing research in this field and present the latest findings that show how usability, aesthetics and affect work together to create great - or not so great - experiences.

Stoyan Stefanov  @stoyanstefanov , Frontend Engineer, www.phpied.com

Stoyan Stefanov

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 15:30 – 16:30
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Stoyan Stefanov is a Facebook engineer (a former Yahoo!) and an author, contributor, and tech reviewer of various O'Reilly books. He speaks regularly about web development topics at conferences and on his blog at www.phpied.com. Stoyan is the creator of the smush.it image optimization tool, YUI contributor and architect of Yahoo's performance optimization tool YSlow 2.0.

Javascript Performance

Today JavaScript is the second largest contributor to the page load size (after images, source). But while images only affect first impressions, JavaScript can make your app slow for as long as the user interacts with it. It’s therefore critical to understand and tame JavaScript performance.
This session looks at both page delivery and user interaction to highlight patterns and areas of improvement starting with proper benchmarking and profiling. Understanding what to improve (e.g. DOM manipulation) is as valuable as understanding what not to bother with (e.g. unrolling loops) We’ll also look at some of the new and shiny in HTML5 and ECMAScript5 and how certain features affect performance, e.g. data-* attributes, localStorage and various "shims".

Sergei Lupashin  @UntitledTitles , Researcher, www.FlyingMachineArena.org

Sergei Lupashin

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 09:15 – 10:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Sergei Lupashin (born 1984 in Russia, lived in Russia, USA, Switzerland) is a systems engineer, student and researcher at ETH Zurich. Sergei studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at Cornell University, USA. He is currently working on the Flying Machine Arena and the Balancing Cube projects, currently under development at ETH Zurich. Previously he has worked on research-oriented initiatives ranging from robotic soccer
(RoboCup) to full-scale autonomous cars (on empty desert roads for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and on busy city roads with other human/robot cars for the 2007 Urban Challenge).

Interacting with Flying Robots

The Flying Machine Arena is an aerial robotics test-bed built up for at ETH Zurich. It’s a sophisticated system that mixes many different commercial and custom-developed components. The Arena is both a research system undergoing everyday deep-system changes and a platform for showing controls research to thousands of visitors. We use interactive demonstrations to give our visitors a sense of better connectedness to the flying robots: for example, they can control them via pointer, via their body using the Kinect, or by playing ball games with quadrocopters. We’ll look at some of the user interaction challenges we face as researchers working with a complex system of many fast-changing parts.

Karolina Szczur  @karolinaszczur , Designer and Developer, www.dribbble.com/karolinaszczur

Karolina Szczur

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Designer and developer, open web enthusiast and web standards aficionado. If not working at nodejitsu, she's probably busy coaching women in web technologies at Webmuses or organizing Javascript barcamps in her hometown - Kraków. Spreading web tech knowledge by being core contributor of Otwarta Sieć project aimed towards Polish developers.

The Pursuit of Simplicity

Nowadays developers are flooded with various libraries which are supposed to help and speed up the development process but often proove to be counterproductive. Same with design processes - designers are trapped with styles and hypes which they use without thinking. This talk is more inspirational, and it's aim is to show good practices within processes, emphasize the importance of decisions made within them and how they impact whole projects. It will also compare some frameworks and libraries available and point out which one of them are useful in which use cases.

Amit Kapadia  @a_kapadia , Citizen Science Developer

Amit Kapadia

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Amit Kapadia develops astronomical web applications. He is a citizen science developer for the crowd-sourcing based platform Zooniverse. New to the world of JavaScript he spends his days dreaming of conducting in-browser analyses on astronomical data sets. On occasion he flexes his modest sway to advocate for more modern solutions to data access in astronomy. He believes the scientific world needs to speak more closely with the tech world, and constantly strives to learn more from the latter. Amit is often found at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Citizen Science

The Zooniverse is a citizen science platform utilizing the web to conduct real science. The various projects use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them. The web has proven to be a valuable medium to conduct research, therefore the Zooniverse is entering into a more sustainable existence by utilizing new technologies and development methodologies. Fast forwarding, the web will become the de facto application for scientists to conduct preliminary analyses with big data. This will require a new paradigm of development.

Denys Mishunov  @mishunov , Front-end Developer, www.mishunov.me

Denys Mishunov

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Denys is a front-end developer living in Norway. He has CSS for breakfast, lunch and dinner, spicing up with HTML and Javascript. Before getting a degree in Electronic Means Manufacturing, he was attending a drawing school where he studied composition, history of art, sculpture, etc.

Denys is a proud OpenSource contributor serving Plone CMS as a front-end developer and a member of Plone UI team. During his more than 10 years experience he spoke at a number of international conferences. If he is not spending time with his family and not cycling around taking photos, he is blogging at mishunov.me or just experimenting with CSS.

Science of Design

Design is not just for designers or aesthetics & beauty nerds. Design is for everybody. Design is everywhere. It is a communication layer; an adapter from information to perception that, though cosidered to be more of an art by some, in a lot of cases is based on scientific researches, theorems, rules. Psychology, Algebra, Geometry and their derivatives. All of these form design principles and design tools, that conduct perception of a user.

Front-end developer is a craftsman who takes the material and turns it into a product. To utilize the material wisely and effectively one should understanding material's properties and limitations. It is even more important in the times of responsive web when getting ready design for any possible screen width is close to impossible and it becomes developer's responsibility to make design-related decisions.

The talk will cover basics that every front-end developer needs to understand when working with a design. How to "read" design and how to make that information help you build consistent, attractive and solid products.

Felipe Longé and Alisa Smerdova  @felonge @smalice18 , User Experience (UX) Developer

Felipe Longé and Alisa Smerdova

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Felipe Longé is a Senior Consultant for Peanuts by brilliant people located in Stavanger, Norway. Lately Felipe has been focusing on designing user experiences while also contributing to development in different projects, ranging from Windows 8 metro style applications to custom solutions for the oil and gas sector.

Alisa is a Senior Consultant for Webstep (Stavanger, Norway). She develops software solutions mainly in Oil and Gas sector: drilling and lifting simulators, 2D and 3D visualization of data. She takes a great interest in natural user interfaces: multi–touch application development and touch free devices.

Interactive user experience: natural user interfaces

Exactly why can multi-touch technology make collaboration better?

This talk is about the nature of interaction, and the root of collaboration. On an evolutionary basis the very concept of user interfaces is evolving and presenting us with new possibilities. The rise of new user interfaces has been visible through Microsoft products. This talk will present examples where Microsoft products like Surface and Kinect could enhance productivity and decision making.

Today most of the greatest achievements are accomplished in teams with superior communication and advanced methods of collaboration. Consequently, new and refined interaction methods will introduce us to the new digital workspace, where natural interfaces will redefine the way we interact with each other and do teamwork.

Philipp Schroeder  @pips1 , Interaction Designer

Philipp Schroeder

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 15:30 – 16:30
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Philipp Schroeder is an Interaction Designer, Agile UX Practitioner &
Lecturer.

Philipp has been working in web development and digital media since
1994, in various roles. He currently works at the Zurich University of
the Arts as an interaction designer. Before that, he worked at the agile
web development agency Liip AG as a team leader (Scrum Master). For the
past five years, he also taught a course in web engineering at Zurich
University of Applied Sciences.

Through his work, Philipp has become interested in the intersection of
User-Centered Design and Agile Development. Philipp has a fundamental
passion for how people interact, not only by way of products and
services, but also how we interact in our everyday work.

Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping - How to Be Agile and Avoid Half-Baked User Experience

Compelling and powerful web applications such as Google Maps and Facebook have become mainstream and are setting a benchmark in terms of usability and design. Meanwhile, agile development is taking the software development world by storm. UX designers used to the traditional "waterfall" way of working - with lots of design documentation and big handovers - often struggle with the new development approach.

Without any claim to silver bullets, I will outline some practices and guiding principles for improving user interfaces by iterating on frontend design & code by way of sketching, wireframing and prototyping.

I intend to share some lessons learned from working in a agile development environment and talk about ways of collaborating effectively with stakeholders & team members.

Pierre Spring  @shvi , Web Developer, nelm.io

Pierre Spring

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 09:15 – 10:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Pierre is an entrepreneur by day and a web developer by night. Or the
other way around. He loves to write clean and maintainable code, come
up with crazy ideas for his clients and learn new things. He just
recently quit his day job to start a company with a friend, writing
some of the finest web applications for his clients!

Have you heard of Backbone.js?

In this session we’ll look at how the minimal Backbone.js framework
can help you with your new JS-only web application or with writing
maintainable widgets for your existing web projects.

Backbone.js is a minimal MVC framework that gives you just the
necessary tools to write maintainable and clean JavaScript code. If
you’re not using it yet, you most likely will after this session!

Roger Dudler  @rogerdudler , Senior Software Engineer, www.namics.com

Roger Dudler

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 13:30 – 14:30
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Roger Dudler is a Senior Software Engineer at Namics. Over the last eight years he has been passionate about the web and has strong knowledge in all areas of the web technology stack, especially in developing front-ends and backends with PHP and Java. Currently he is working on UX concepts & eye-catching user interfaces for future e-banking solutions. Before joining Namics he helped building software at Abraxas and the weather company Meteomedia. Roger is actively working on open source projects and is known as the author of Clarify, Eclipse Color Themes and the git simple guide.

Bridging the Gap between Design and Development

The development of sophisticated design is a challenging task and complexity is still rising. Requirements, budget, documentation, compatibility, efficiency… As frontends become more complex, we need to think even more about our workflow and techniques. This talk shows some of the biggest challenges that developers and designers experience in their daily collaboration and offers approaches to solve them.

* Which steps should be included in a frontend development workflow?
* Which tools and techniques are efficient for frequent tasks?
* What is a frontend styleguide?
* How to create, use and maintain a frontend styleguide?
* How do you use ideas & approaches from Bootstrap, Foundation & Co.?

Memi Beltrame  @bratwurstkomet , Experience Designer, liip.ch

Memi Beltrame

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Memi Beltrame likes magic and enjoys the enchanted smiles of users that experience well designed websites. Working for Liip as an Experience Designer he waves the magic wand called UX research, bewitching himself with hard work and brain bending challenges.
He can count on the experience of wide variety of stranded aspirations in spellbinding trades such as filmmaking or rockstardom, as well as on a background of web development and project management.
As a jack of all trades he excels at not being superb in anything but strives to be great in many things. Always trying to break down silos and connecting stakeholders by giving talks on collaborative design, on UX and agile or on bringing UX closer to developers.
He lives, loves and works in Zurich, where he is an active member of the local UX community.

UX: No Design without Research

Up-front research is what gives projects the opportunity to go beyond only following best practices of user interaction design: Research makes them become projects with serious UX design.
Getting to know users, their needs and their constraints is paramount a great user experience: Research is its foundation and point of reference.
Great research does not only look at users though. It also takes stakeholders into account and clarifies their goals, needs and possibilities.

This talk is about why research is important and features an illustrated variety of research techniques, looking at user and stakeholder research alike. It is targeted at designers and product owners that want to have insight in the possibilities of research in UX design.

Andre Jay Meissner  @klick_ass , BDM/Developer Relations, adobe.com

Andre Jay Meissner

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 13:00 – 14:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Jay is a passionate diving enthusiast, tech geek and code freak, entrepreneur and BDM/DevRel Web & Mobile at Adobe. He focuses on webstandards, responsive and multiplatform development as well as gaming.

Mobile Web Testing & Debugging Best Practices

Jay is going to cover a number of approaches to quality-check consistency and performance of your code in production across multiple mobile operating systems and browser engines. This is no one-way presentation, since Jay wants to hear about your experiences and discuss the latest best practices on this important topic with all session attendants. We'll nail down the best approach to select the right farm of devices as well as the right tools and tests for your job. At the end of the session you'll either walk away with an ideal starting point, important additions to your existing QA workflow - or as part of the glorious few that knew it all and shared their genius with others.

Massimiliano Marcon  @mmarcon , Senior Engineer, marcon.me

Massimiliano Marcon

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

After working for a few years as a R&D engineer on some obscure stuff like network protocols, service discovery and infrastructures for information sharing, Massimiliano decided to try something different and became a full-stack web developer.

Now he is an engineer at Nokia Berlin, where he spends his time implementing awesome features for http://maps.nokia.com.

In his free time he pushes code into one or more of his several - and often crazy - projects on Github, enjoys good food and fails at learning German.

How late is later? A lazy loading solution on the edge between very clever and incredibly mad.

Reducing the loading time of a web application is a well known problem. Developers need to make sure the browser only downloads the code that is strictly necessary to bootstrap the application and leave the rest for later. This is what we commonly call lazy loading.

But when is later? When is the right time to lazy load?

When users interact with our applications there is a good chance they won't use all the provided features. Why lazy load code that is not needed then? Front-end code can be logically split into 3 sets:

* Code required to bootstrap.
* Code needed for the core functionality. It should be lazy loaded as soon as the bootstrap code has been delivered and parsed.
* Code that may not even be necessary, or that is required only when a particular feature is used, and is therefore strictly dependent on the actions users perform within the context of the application. This means that this code can/should be loaded on demand.

This talk shows how JavaScript code - functions and objects - can be delivered to the browser on demand, thus reducing the perceived loading time of a web application.

Dio Synodinos  @synodinos , Developer & Author, synodinos.net/

Dio Synodinos

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Dio Synodinos is the research platform team lead at C4Media and a freelance
consultant, focusing on rich Internet applications, web application
security, mobile web, and web services. He's also the lead editor for HTML5
and JavaScript for InfoQ, where he also regularly writes about the JVM
platform. Going back and forth between server-side programming and UI
design for more than a decade, he has been involved in diverse software
projects and contributed to different technical publications.

Visualizations for Developers

The more information-rich our societies become, the more demand there is for representing information visually, and the HTML5 platform is one of the best ways to create visualizations and communicate a message. Either for making sense of quantitative data, displaying qualitative information or simply creating the next Mona Lisa, technologies like CSS3, SVG, Canvas, WebGL, etc, provide a very powerful toolbox for developers, designers and artists.

In this presentation we’re going to start of by examining all the enabling HTML5 technologies that were mentioned, their features and how they are used in practice to deliver captivating user experiences. Then we’re going to move one level up and talk about the frameworks that make these powerful but sometimes overly complex technologies, more accessible to programmers. We’re going to see frameworks like Raphaël, Processing.js, D3.js, Fabric.js, etc, their features and their applicability. Finally, time permitting, we’re going to go over online examples that best demonstrate the power of the web platform for visualizations and analyze how they were created.

Paloma Lopez Design Researcher and Information Designer

Paloma Lopez

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 13:30 – 14:30
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Paloma holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Granada, Spain, and a Degree in Visual Communication from the Academy of Arts and Design Basel, Switzerland. She also formed part of the graduate school Image and Knowledge at the NCCR eikones – Iconic Criticism in Basel. Her recently completet dissertation holds the (complicated) title Design and evaluation of qualitative diagrams, and their application in the analysis of visualizations of biological classifications. Her research interests are focused on gaining insights into the power and meaning of images through systematic image generation (Practice-Led Iconic Research).

Reading between visual codes

Visual appearance is usually just considered a question of aesthetics: an exchangeable system of attributes (colours, forms, composition, medium) that can be put over a concept or a structure, like different dresses over a dummy. But through design, more than only beauty and readability are originated: the visual decisions that were taken create also a set of associations, which inscribe themselves into the message of the image. This phenomenon is well known in certain domains of image-creation. A font, for example, is not only considered beautiful or legible, but also appropriate: usually it is not possible to employ the same without further ado for an advertising of a bank and for a youth-festival.
Nevertheless, when it comes about the area of coded images, like graphs and diagrams, this process passes usually quite unnoticed. In my talk I'll show, based on a series of specific examples, that the effects of visual aspects exceeds also in this domain the limits of aesthetics, contributing significantly to the power and meaning of images.

Rupert Breheny  @rupertbreheny , Webmaster, breheny.com

Rupert Breheny

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

With an honours degree in Marine Biology from a prestigious British university, and an expertise in sea urchin reproduction courtesy of a renowned French research institute, Rupert was rendered largely unemployable at an early age. However, thanks to a thin paperback volume of HTML tags taped to the cover of .net magazine issue 6, a career on the Internet was born, culminating in his becoming Google's first British webmaster, relocating to its Zurich engineering office in 2007. His hobbies include semantics, validation, progressive enhancement and getting rid of those annoying bits of trailing white-space.

Responsive Design: For desktop, tablet, mobile and beyond …

This entertaining, live-coding, presentation invites you to learn the tips and tricks needed to ensure mobile accessibility for all your websites. Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) are our fastest growing visitor segment, and yet we’re still building layouts like it’s 1999. Learn how to utilize mobile-compliant best-practice techniques to ensure the optimum user experience, and how to debug your framework with browser inspection tools at narrow widths and on a variety devices.

John Moroney  @jpmoroney , Designer and Developer

John Moroney

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 16:30 – 17:30
Room: HSR
Track: Design

After studying Vehicle Design, John Moroney created content for and maintained a large multimedia blog, eventually winning a short film award for a horror comedy. A deep love of the internet as a medium led down the path to design and coding. Mr. Moroney currently freelances in Vancouver, Canada, where he is attempting a remake of Ben-Hur starring his cats.

The Tools We Use

The tools we use as designers can limit our imaginations to only what the tools are capable of creating.

Yes, design is a business and not an interpretive dance. We usually have neither the time nor the budget to improvise. Yet, we either must begin dancing or allow ourselves to be content creating only what the paintbrush manufacturer has imagined.

The influence of computer aided design can best be illustrated seeing something we don’t think about everyday—the car. The long, swooping lines of a 1930’s sports coupe capture perfectly the motion of the sculptor’s arm. A 1980’s family sedan looks incredibly rounded, yet the drafting lines are clearly visible in the radii. In the late 1990s, curves and swoops came back, but limited to only what the computer would allow.

Many of the creations in design carry the same unmistakable tools marks, and because 90% of us have the same tool kit, much of our material starts to overlap. We all know when something was created on the internet by its look, and usually with which program. In order for this very special craft to grow, we need to understand that the art form must transcend the tools. We must challenge ourselves to look beyond computer aided design for what is the new possible.

Nellie LeMonier  @NellieLeMonier , User Experience Researcher

Nellie LeMonier

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 13:00 – 14:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Nellie LeMonier is a User Experience researcher and designer who has
been practicing her craft since 1998 when she began her career at
Accenture working with clients in diverse industries - from high tech
emerging e-commerce companies to replacement systems for low-tech
welfare programs. Nellie currently works at Perforce Software where
she passionately designs user experiences that align with the
customer's mental model. When not doing things UX, Nellie participates
on the Board of Directors of the Breast Cancer Emergency Fund, a San
Francisco based non-profit that provides quick and compassionate
financial assistance to people undergoing breast cancer treatment.
Nellie has also committed to run 4 half marathons a year to raise
money for local non-profit organizations.

The Un-researched Persona

Since Allan Cooper presented the Persona methodology to the software development world, companies have adopted the technique, to a fault. While personas are supposed to be "made up" they are not supposed to be pulled out of thin air and we were surprised to learn that many practitioners these days do just that. Background research into the users and product domain needs to be done to gain an understanding of the persona's technical expertise and motivating factors. Why do over 50% of companies cut costs by not taking the time to do this initial critical research? Wouldn't it just be better not to have personas? Last year my company hired Cooper for a new project and we only gave them 1 week to do initial research even though they had asked for more. They were still able to do the research and gave us personas before design started. The talk describes entertaining Persona case studies where quick guerrilla research following initial Persona hypothesis has yielded vital changes to assumptions.

Sascha Corti  @TechPreacher , Developer Evangelist, microsoft.ch

Sascha Corti

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: HSR
Track: Design

Sascha P. Corti is a “Developer Evangelist” for Microsoft Switzerland and introduces the Swiss developer community to the latest trends in the Microsoft universe. He is currently focusing on user experience design and app development for Windows Phone and Windows 8. His studies involved computer science and information management, his work experience includes being a developer and architect for a Swiss bank and a technology specialist for Silicon Graphics. When asked in private, he calls himself a passionate gamer (yes, MMORPGs too) with a life.

From a Signpost to your Screen: The Metro Design Language

The Metro design language is conquering the Microsoft world with its uncompromised simplicity and heavy reliance on typography. It started with the Windows Phone 7 UI and is now integral part of the new Windows 8, Office 2013, the Xbox dashboard and other software. Also, many publications by Microsoft, like the corporate website are now following the Metro design. You will learn about the making of and ideas behind this design language and how to implement it in Windows Phone and Windows 8 user interfaces.

Thomas Jaggi and Rosmarie Wysseier  @backflip , Frontend Engineer, unic.com

Thomas Jaggi and Rosmarie Wysseier

Date: Friday 7th
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Rosmarie Wysseier is working as senior frontend engineer at Unic in Berne. She has studied computer science and adapts this knowhow from backend development to build top-quality frontend. Currently, she's working on complex webapplications and trying to organize them for optimal collaboration.

Thomas Jaggi holds a Master's degree in Nutrition Science from ETH Zurich. Since he always preferred his side job as a frontend engineer over performing histology on the brains of overweighed rats, he decided to spend the rest of his life chasing down CSS bugs.

Frontend development in complex projects

These days, frontend development is no longer limited to the conversion of Photoshop templates into static HTML files. As browsers become more powerful, the frontend increasingly takes on responsibilities that formerly belonged to the backend. As frontend developers, we often build applications rather than just simple websites. Among other things, we have to think about architectural aspects and set up a build process. Additionally, working in a team requires a well thought-out code structure to allow for efficient collaboration and maintainability.

In our talk, we'll give you insight into the frontend development workflow at Unic. We will talk about which tools we use, how we structure and test our code, and where we see potential pitfalls.

Jakob Mattsson  @jakobmattsson , Developer, jakobmattsson.tumblr.com

Jakob Mattsson

Date: Thursday 6th
Time: 16:30 – 17:30
Room: AdNovum
Track: Tech

Jakob is head of engineering at Burt, the Swedish software startup helping publishers and advertisers become more clever and creative with data. It is challenging and complex things that get most of his attention. Professionally this has included leading a technology consultancy firm and starting a few companies in software development and recruitment. But he is a developer at heart, regardless the occupation. Although he is currently focusing on web development and the finer details of JavaScript the journey actually started off with C++ and game development. Lately he has also been sharing his thoughts on advances in programming languages, working in startups and getting things done in software development at a number of universities and conferences, including ScanDev, Nordic Ruby and JSConf.

Manage those dependencies!

Package- and dependency management is like source control; somehow we manage to survive without it, but it's a f***ing pain in the a**. For some reason, web development has been a place of medival darkness without proper tools for handling packages and dependencies. Until now.

This presentation will showcase how you can leverage NPM, Browserify, Yarnify, Jam, RequireJS and all of their friends to bring your application and your development process to the age of Enlightenment.