Every user experience embodies its creators' experience. All of its creators, not just the single person with the title "user experience designer." Justin Maxwell has come to believe that conflict in an organization will be apparent in its products. A team that gets along and has fun will create fun products. Justin gives a clear definition of user experience and concludes, "User experience is multi-dimensional, is evolving, and cannot be designed."

Why are so many TiVo owners TiVo advocates? Cable subscribers often simply use the DVR supplied by their cable provider, but TiVo devotees crow about its ease of use and features. In this 2004 BayCHI appearance, TiVo's Paul Newby and Margret Schmidt explain TiVo's development process and a bit of TiVo's history. They mix detailed techniques and formal studies with humorous anecdotes and engage with the audience on challenging questions.

Jef Raskin started Apple's Macintosh project, and he wants to set the record straight. He decries mistakes in published accounts of the creation of the Macintosh. For example, he cites the "creation myth" that the Mac was built by "college drop-outs and intuitive engineers flying by the seats of their pants." Jef spices his account with anecdotes of square pixels, one-button mice, bit-mapped fonts, and more. A longtime BayCHI member, Jeff passed away a year after this program, the last of his six BayCHI appearances since 1994.

No product is an island. People switch freely between desktop apps and web sites, so studying your product in isolation can't reveal the true pattern of your customer's behavior. Cameron Turner describes several kinds of user studies and the kinds of insight each can offer. It's now possible to capture every click and every change of context, so smart filtering and sampling are important. Studies must comply with privacy laws, a particular challenge with subjects in many countries. But the benefit of new analytics tools are worth the effort.

Good user interface design reflects the realities of human psychology, which has evolved over eons. Jeff Johnson studies the relationship between technology and human perception. In our daily use of computers we form goals, make plans to achieve them, and evaluate our progress, all in a fraction of a second. We consciously experience very little of this of decision-making. Jeff uses vivid examples to explain the perceptual constraints that good designers must keep in mind.

GreaseMonkey is a powerful tool for customizing web pages after they are rendered in a browser. Kent Brewster of Netflix demonstrates how you can delete elements from a page, splice in data from another source, or change the way parts of a page are displayed. Designers can use this to make working prototypes before they go to the engineers that need to implement the changes for real.

Why did that visitor come to your site? The answer will always surprise you. Avinash Kaushik explains that the "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" (HIPPO) often overrides expert analysis. He argues that qualitative and quantitative research, traditionally separate, are far more effective when combined, as unified web analytics reveal what's important to the individual user. He suggests we stay in perpetual beta, because nothing on the web is ever really final.

You may find Cisco's TV ads touting "the human network" a bit abstract, but the company is serious about understanding how networks can help people collaborate. Hear user experience experts from several Cisco teams discuss their research into how a global workforce can work together, in particular using video to build knowledge in an organization. The panel shares lessons learned in applying current technology to business collaboration and planning for the network of the future.

As we use social tools on the web, design patterns are emerging. Social design must be organic, not static, emotional, not data-driven. A social experience builds on relationships, not transactions. In 2008, Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish introduced the idea of social design patterns to BayCHI. In this 2010 program, he shares what he has learned, including principles of social design: Pave the cow paths. Talk like a person. Be open. Learn from games. And respect the ethical dimension.

What are people doing, socially, on-line? How well can you really know someone on-line? If you see a critical comment, how do you take it? Is the author well-liked or respected by others? Christian Crumlish, curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, distills on-line social interaction into patterns. He discusses the interrelated concepts of individual, community, and activities and the constructs of identity, presence, personal history, reputation, and trust.