Folks from InContext will be presenting three sessions at CHI this year, sharing some of the most exciting work we’re doing here.

First, on Monday, May 9, Karen Holtzblatt and David Rondeau will present Looking Below the Surface: Understanding and Analyzing Interaction Design. Focusing on essential core concepts, this course provides a foundation to better understand interaction design and the importance of underlying structure. It helps participants see past surface details to understand the fundamental aspects of the interaction and how they affect user experience. The course introduces interaction design patterns as a method for analyzing and revealing structure.

Then on Tuesday, May 10, Karen Holtzblatt will present Designing for “Cool”: Making Compelling Products and Applications. In this talk, she reveals some of the results of our research into what makes a product cool. We have found that a set of core attributes generate the cool experience, and these attributes can be named, explained, and analyzed to help develop compelling products.

And on Wednesday, May 11, Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt present The Role of the UX Professional on an Agile Team, in which we discuss Agile development and how that affects the role of the User Experience designer on a project team. The tutorial arms UX designers with concepts and techniques enabling them to participate effectively in Agile projects. We show how principles driving Agile methods can be used to support UX involvement and we describe proven Agile/UX best practices for integrating the two perspectives.