Sunday, 4:00pm, 5:00pm, Continental Ballroom
Learn how Hotwire, Razorfish, Disney, and Microsoft are evolving User Experience, discussing how their UX Management is making it happen. What’s the best mix of skills? How do you scale your team? How do you foster thought leadership, growth, and organizational gravity? Our panel will talk about how to develop a cross-functional team and harness emerging approaches to design. Each organization positions UX differently - including varying levels of intimacy with Creative, Strategy, and Analytics; myriad models and organizations to offer as examples for your UX practice. Hear what works, what used to work, and what to avoid.
Consistent with emerging trends, the group will offer a special focus on driving UX decisions from building a strong business case to delivering a defendable design rationale. Learn how to effectively set up collaboration between UX, Research, Creative, Product Management, and Technology teams.
Evolve or die. This session will provide key insights from a variety of team types - and will offer invaluable advice for managing UX; whether you’re building a team from scratch, optimizing what you’ve got, or aggressively looking to take your team to the next level.
Why Us?
Between us four, we’ve got the gamut covered. From the ultra-glitzy, over-priced, interactive agency Razorfish; the entertainment behemoth with a billion dollar store in Disney; a seasoned and integrated pure digital play in Hotwire; to the world’s largest software company, Microsoft. Demanding users & unrealistic business owners? Yep. Millions of customers served? Check. Core business metrics and user goals optimized? Slam dunk. We’ve put old methods to bed, held onto old tricks, and we’ve optimized our teams for various configurations. We’re pragmatic because we do this every day…and we’re constantly shifting and growing our approaches to problems solving. What we’ll show is a mix of very new, along with the tried and true.
INSTRUCTORS
Melissa Matross
Melissa Matross currently heads up the user experience discipline for Hotwire, an Expedia-owned
discount travel website. With 10 years of industry experience, Melissa has led information architecture, interaction design and product strategy efforts to deliver successful user experiences that drive business results. Prior to Hotwire, her most recent clients included: Royal Caribbean, American Legacy Foundation (Truth), Children’s Hospital Boston, Fidelity Investments, Timberland, Lycos, and SAP, among others. Melissa studied Human Computer Interaction and Psychology at Stanford University.
Tim Richards
Tim leads the User Experience practice for Razorfish in Los Angeles, working with clients such as Disney, NFL, Intel, Fox, University of Phoenix, and Yahoo! With over 10 years experience in Interactive and Digital Marketing, Tim helps his teams and clients focus on building good rationale for change and connecting the experience design process to the underlying strategy. Before Razorfish, Tim worked at Sapient, and innumerable other web, interactive, startup, and {insert other terms that gain the OG web cred here} positions. Tim was the child of a dancer and a Jazz prodigy who met in Vegas in the 60’s; Welcome to Ham, Incorporated.
Chris Chandler
Chris Chandler is Director of Creative Development for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online, where he oversees a creative staff that includes IAs, Visual Designers, Content Strategists, Copywriters and Media Development. Prior to that he managed a 10 person IA staff. WDPRO is an internal agency where all projects must be useful, usable AND magical. While at WDPRO Chris has led projects to redesign the online booking process for Disneyland.com and Disneyworld.com, as well as the creation of several new websites such as Hongkongdisneyland.com. Since 2000, Chris has taught a hands-on class in Information Architecture in the UCLA Department of Information Studies.
Michael Kopcsak
Michael Kopcsak is Sr. Manager of UX for the Microsoft Windows Live initiative where he manages a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, web metrics analysts, designers and writers. Michael has over 14 years of experience in the digital design business. Thoughout his career, he’s led UX teams in both agency and “in-house” environments. Some of his most notable work includes the re-invention of the online presence for two well several brands: Symantec Corporation (software) and Cnet (tech publishing). He has worked with a wide range of top tier brands including Intuit, Charles Schwab, Genentech, Chrysler, Virgin Mobile USA, Western Union and ADP. He has built many Experience teams from the ground up as well as completely re-tooling/re-focusing existing teams. Michael received his Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU in 1999. He has guest lectured at NYU, R/GA, and UCLA on a wide range of topics.