Speaking

Combining an exciting and passionate delivery with timely and thought-provoking ideas, Justin helps companies learn how design can help them deliver better experiences to their customers.

Justin is a natural performer with a love for the stage and a passion for teaching others.  His dynamic speaking style immediately engages audiences – but it’s not all sizzle.  Justin’s carefully crafted messages leave audiences talking, challenging each other and scratching furiously on notepads in an effort to bring parts of Justin’s message with them as they leave.

Justin speaks about design and business from a high-level strategic level down to tactical approaches to better experience design.  His focus is on helping companies understand how to craft better experiences by using design as a catalyst.

Ideal audiences range from CEOs (and others in the elusive C-suite), to product managers, developers, designers and almost anyone an organization (indeed, Justin can inspire the mail clerk to use design to deliver a better mail experience…).  No industry is off-limits, and he particularly enjoys crafting presentations to fit specific vertical markets.

Contact Justin today to book him for your event. He has spoken internationally, and enjoys the opportunity to travel in order to speak.

2011 Speaking Engagements (The “Adaptive Interactions” Tour)

February 11th, 2011 – Interaction ’11 – Denver, CO:

Craft Beer as Design
Leading a group of 20 interaction designers around downtown Boulder, CO to experience several microbreweries and engage in conversation around how the craft beer industry might benefit or learn from the design world. I’ll be leading this discussion and organizing the group for this particular activity.  This is not a standard “lecture-style” engagement.

March 14th, 2011 – Conversion Conference – San Francisco, CA:

Design Over Time: Adaptive Interactions as a Driver for Deeper Engagement
By designing interactions to leverage behavioral data over time in order to adapt, we can cause interfaces to deliver more poignant and relevant information to users, creating opportunities to intentionally drive engagement along a specific path in a persuasive manner.  In this talk, we’ll look at what it means to consider information as a persistent ecosystem that can be used to design adaptive interactions, with the goal of leading users through a carefully designed conversion funnel.

April 2, 2011 – IA Summit – Denver, CO:

Toilet Paper and Information Systems: Designing Compelling Information Ecosystems

Can my grocery store prevent me from forgetting to buy toilet paper?

Yes, it can, by thinking about my interactions with them as part of an information ecosystem. The data is there, it simply hasn’t been designed well.

Interactive systems and products are particularly adept at helping us to eliminate these moments of stress from our lives, by providing an infrastructure for negotiating these daily tasks. In the case of remembering to buy toilet paper, the technology is available to help us with this problem, but the system hasn’t been designed to use the information effectively. The strategic design of this information – the information ecosystem – can create opportunities to deliver remarkable experiences to our customers.

This session will explore how the design of interactive products can be thought of systemically – working together to form an information ecosystem, opening opportunities to bring delight and joy to people. Instead of approaching the design of interactive systems as static fiefdoms of information, we’ll look at how data might be used across a chain of interactions, opening new opportunities for creating remarkable moments.

This is truly information architecture being used for good – preventing uncomfortable moments with better design.

July 2011 – HCI International – Orlando, FL

Design Over Time: Adaptive Interactions as a Driver for Deeper Engagement
By designing interactions to leverage behavioral data over time in order to adapt, we can cause interfaces to deliver more poignant and relevant information to users, creating opportunities to intentionally drive engagement along a specific path in a persuasive manner.  In this talk, we’ll look at what it means to consider information as a persistent ecosystem that can be used to design adaptive interactions, with the goal of leading users through a carefully designed conversion funnel.

Speaking Topics

These are just a few examples of presentations that Justin has ready to roll for your organization.  Don’t see something quite like what you want?  No worries, Justin is happy to create custom talks for your organization, just contact him and tell him what you want.

Innovation in the Crevices: Finding Hidden Opportunities for New Advances

Finding ways to differentiate your products and services is increasingly difficult.  With the competitive landscape becoming more and more crowded, the importance on innovation is dramatically increasing; finding ways to engage your customers in new and different ways is not just a nice thought – it’s an absolute necessity.

The problem?  It’s really hard.  Great innovation is extremely hard, and creating products and services that deliver exceptional experiences to your customers can at sometimes seem almost impossible.  Often, it seems that you’re doing all you can – how can you come up with revolutionary new ways to serve your customers?

In this presentation, Justin shows how a design-thinking approach can help to thaw the frozen innovation processes in many organizations.  By adopting a user-centered approach to designing new products and services, organizations can find surprising new places for innovation, uncovering opportunities to leapfrog the competition and create unparalleled customer retention.  By the end of this talk, you’ll be brimming with ideas for ways to spur innovation and design exceptional customer experiences.

A User Experience Story

On the web, just being present no longer cuts it. Instead, you’ve got to deliver content and value to your customers in ways that leave them thrilled. Unfortunately, in the fast paced world of web design and development, the design of the user experience – the work dedicated to making sure the website serves the customer in the best way – often gets neglected or omitted. In today’s marketplace, better usability equals bigger revenue, as is being proven time and again.

In this session, we’ll take a look at three ways to evaluate your website and instantly start improving the user experience, told through the story of an eCommerce manager and her plight to improve sales. By the end of the session, you’ll look at your website through different eyes, and you’ll be well on your way to delivering a more usable and efficient experience for your customer that ultimately results in more zeros for your bottom line.

The Design of Everyday Web

Getting web usability right isn’t easy. Until recently, user experience design and usability testing were shunned in lieu of shiny, exciting, sexy tactics. “If the technology will allow it, do it” was the mantra of the early web.

However, the study and design of usability in the physical world has been in practice for awhile. Long ago, product designers recognized the importance of designing for usability, and this practice has studied and talked about for decades.

One of the seminal books on usability and user experience design is Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”. In the book, Norman discusses foundational concepts of usability in physical objects (and some computer interfaces), introducing concepts like affordance, conceptual models, mapping, error handling and more.

In this session, we’ll take a look at some of the concepts introduced by Norman, and look at how these same ideas can be applied to the web as they’re applied in the physical world. At the end of this session, you’ll never look at a door handle or a web page the same way.

Make it Obvious: Affordance as a Design Tool

The real world makes things easy. We understand how to navigate interfaces naturally, due in large part to physical properties of objects. Shadows, textures and shape give us immediate clues as to how we should interact with different objects, providing a natural and obvious experience with most everyday things. Take, for example, a door handle – its design affords our reach and grasp, communicating to us that we need to grab and pull to use the object.

But what about the web? In a two-dimensional world, where everything is limited to pixels on a screen, what role do these affordances play in allowing users to understand how to navigate an interface? How does the design of a button, with its beveled edge and slight shadow, help users to understand and interact with interface elements with the same ease and subconscious thought that we interact with physical objects? Intentional design of these moments – where the virtual needs to accommodate our ingrained understanding of the physical world – can make or break an interface.

Even in the real, physical, world, affordances break down. A door handle appears to communicate “pull”, when the action needs to be pushing. A faucet knob appears to communicate “push”, when the action needs to be turning. Online, the opportunities for affordances to fail and miscommunicate are magnified by the removal of physical cues. In this venue, designers need to carefully construct these affordances from scratch, keeping psychology of the real world in mind at all times.

Simply put, affordances make life easier. By communicating the use of an object before the user interacts with it, affordances assure that people are able to navigate interfaces with ease. Bringing these concepts from the physical world into the virtual one is a critical step in building intuitive interfaces.

Speaking Example

You want a speaker who’s exciting and engaging with a clear speaking style, not someone who will blandly flip through slides in a monotone voice.  When you have Justin speak, you’ll get that excitement with a talent for teaching complex concepts in a simple way.  Here’s an example of Justin’s speaking style:

A User Experience Story: Short Clip from Justin Davis on Vimeo.

Ready to have Justin speak to your organization? Contact him now to schedule a date!