“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Humans are designed for experience. Underneath the form, function, and technological advancements that surge the heights of new products and services everyday, the experience each design enables and creates is inevitably what girds a product’s success, makes or breaks market receptivity, and distinguishes the best apart from the the pack.
Because your users are people, experience matters.
Join us this Nov 7th to explore the magic behind making experience an MVP in your product’s design, implementation, and deployment.
Jonathan Hirshon
Principal, Horizon Communications
Called ‘The Guru of Silicon Valley’ by BusinessWeek, Jonathan has exclusively focused on high-tech PR over the last 24 years, with extensive corporate and agency PR experience. The company’s main website is at http://www.horizonpr.com. Jonathan was the PR manager for Sony Corporation in its heyday, representing the company’s far-flung ‘non-consumer’ business units – at the age of 25, he was acclaimed as one of the youngest managers in Sony corporate history. Sony products in the non-consumer area include professional audio/video equipment, computers, peripherals and semiconductors. As a key member of the headquarters corporate communications staff, his role included counseling top management, day-to-day product PR responsibility and control of a million dollar+ budget, all within a few years of graduating college. Jonathan has gained the respect of leading media, analysts and peers for his in-depth technical knowledge as well as his marketing ability and industry contacts. Through his expertise, Horizon was awarded Agency of Record status at Apple, SGI and other Fortune 500 companies, as well as a host of startups. He has arranged Business Week and Forbes cover stories, as well as articles in leading business, consumer and high-tech venues. He has been personally profiled in BusinessWeek (twice), The New York Times, RJ Magazine, and the San Jose Mercury News. Jonathan currently contributes to gigaom.com. Jonathan has also been invited to speak at several prestigious venues, most recently to address the Reuters Foundation’s Digital Vision Program at Stanford University. He is a past member of SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) and a current member of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
Jon Innes
President, UX Innovation LLC
Jon Innes is the founder of UX Innovation LLC, a product design management consultancy that specializes in helping companies improve their design & research practices. His experience spans a wide variety of domains including consumer and enterprise software, consumer hardware, IT projects, and e-commerce website design. Jon has led UX projects for several members of the Fortune 1000, such as Intuit, Cisco, & Siebel, both as a consultant and a member of an in-house team. He is also a Certified Scrum Product Owner, with extensive experience integrating Agile and UX in both large distributed teams and early stage startups. Jon is a frequent speaker at conferences such as ACM CHI and the User Experience Professionals Association. He is also the author of several articles in UX trade magazines such Interactions and was a contributing author to the book User-Centered Design Stories: Real World UCD Case Studies. He has guest blogged for www.uxmatters.com and www.boxesandarrows.com and tweets as @innes_jon
Debbie Kawamoto
Senior User Experience Designer, Yammer
Debbie Kawamoto’s 15+ years in design spans product design, advertising, and print for large Fortune 500 companies and start-ups. Currently she leads up product design at Yammer, an enterprise social network acquired by Microsoft and used by more than 200,000 companies worldwide. Debbie has been the lead product designer for 4 start-ups, including uTorrent which has over 100M users. Prior to Silicon Valley, Debbie worked in the advertising space where she designed consumer web experiences for Nissan, Infinity, Kia, Sony Vaio Latin America, and the US Army. She began her career designing print for entertainment clients like Columbia-TriStar and the Emmy Awards. Debbie is passionate about bringing this holistic design background to users by creating compelling experiences which engage users with a product and brand.
Rodrigo Lopez
Director Of User Experience, Banjo
Boasting more than 11 years of recognized product design, Rodrigo Lopez is a passionate Peruvian born mobile user experience designer who has worked with a variety of tech companies. His career in Silicon Valley began at Adobe Systems, where his expertise helped make Adobe the world leader in graphic software. Anticipating the future of mobile technology as the next big thing, Rodrigo joined Yahoo Mobile in 2004 as their 16th employee. During his years there, he created several high-revenue mobile products and formed one of the largest and most respected mobile teams in the industry. Adding to his diverse background, Rodrigo has been a valued team member of start ups including Bluepulse, a mobile social messenger funded by VantagePoint, as well as Aardvark (acquired by Google) and Intuit GoPayment. Having designed for the every aspect of the mobile ecosystem, it’s highly likely that Rodrigo’s work can be found in the phone you use every day. Rodrigo’s other interests include traveling the globe, collecting airliners stuff, visiting art galleries, and dining on rare filet mignon.
Paolo Malabuyo
Director of Product, Zynga
Paolo is a designer and product manager with a 17-year track record with the industry’s largest players, from giants like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM to startups like Pelago and Zynga. He is currently the Director of Products at Zynga where his team is building the company’s mobile social game service. He helped build and lead the Xbox 360 user experience team, enabling Microsoft to launch its biggest consumer product and brand in 2005; he later led projects that explored the future of home entertainment experiences, leading to prototypes and a product roadmap that continues to play out at Microsoft. He was a designer on multiple award-winning video games. He also spent the few years of his career designing enterprise and database visualization and management software and is listed as an inventor on over a dozen patents and applications. He laughs like a hyena when provoked.
SCHEDULE:
6:30 – Registration (Networking)
7:00 – Dinner Commences
7:15 – Panelists’ Presentations
8:15 – Panel (moderated by Howard Lieberman!)
9:15 – Wrap-Up (Networking till close at 10:30)
Pre-registration Tickets ($20) on SALE now!
