Kathryn Grayson Nanz!
UI Designer & Front-end Developer
Bio!
In 2013, I graduated with a BFA and took my first job as a Junior Graphic Designer at a small, boutique ad agency. While there, my Creative Director warned me to never let anyone find out I could code, because if I did I'd be stuck doing it forever. I ignored his warning; it turns out he was completely right, but I've never been happier.
I currently work as a developer advocate on a wonderful team where I help people build web applications in React, design and maintain their UI component libraries, and desperately attempt to stop back-end devs from writing any more CSS.
Session!
How to Ruin a User Interface: Surprisingly Easy Ways to Screw Over Your Users
Sure, when your boss signed the expense form for you to attend this conference, they thought you’d be bringing back new ideas about BETTER ways to do stuff – but honestly, isn’t that a little boring? What if we mixed it up a bit and instead discussed all the ways to make your UIs WORSE?
From dark patterns to bad designs, there are tons of shockingly easy ways that you might be unknowingly making your website or app experience more difficult – or even painful – for your users. In this session, we’ll talk through some of the most common, so that you can avoid them in the future…or, you know, intentionally include them, if you’re evil. With great power comes great responsibility.
The Life-Changing Art of Being Wrong
Even if it’s not intentional, there are a lot of assumptions we make about our users – everything from which devices they use to access our applications to what kinds of characters are included in their names. And guess what: our assumptions are usually wrong. Like…really wrong. Sometimes this creates laughable situations, but other times it causes a lot of unintentional harm. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the most common (wrong) things that we, as developers, believe about our users and how we can shift our assumptions to create software that’s better for everyone.
Where/When?