A unique gathering of brands and professionals who care about making experiences people love.
Delight 2012 gathers hundreds in Portland, Oregon for 8th annual experience design event
Watch Dave Wieneke’s 2012 ax-wielding keynote address.
A bustling room full of experience design professionals filled the Adrianna Ballroom in Portland, Oregon on October 18 to hear inspiring stories of how brands brings great experiences to life. More than a dozen speakers were featured across a full day of sessions from brands including Warby Parker, Gemvara and Nordstrom Innovation Labs.
Now in it’s 8th year, 2012 was a pivotal milestone for the conference which expanded to a full day, increased in size by 40% and rebranded to Delight from its previous banner of “Love at First Website.”
Delight started in 2004 as a way to bring together organizations and people who care about bringing great experiences to life. For eight years the event has brought together experience design leaders in a unique line up of inspiring case studies, keynotes, conversations, and panels.
Our goal is simple: Find the brands people love and bring them together under one roof to discuss how the people, processes and systems all work together to deliver Delight.
Delight 2013: Save the Date
As we ramp up for Delight 2013 — set for October 17, 2013 — we continue to look for ways to improve the event while keeping to our mission of providing an intimate gathering with inspiring stories from compelling brands and speakers. Interested in speaking, sponsoring, or attending Delight 2013? Contact Katie Del Angel at ISITE Design with any inquires.
Barbara helps clients achieve their business goals and improve the customer experience of digital properties. Barbara leverages her experience in copywriting, instructional design, information design, research, and a tiny dash of programming to focus her problem-solving skills in the fields of marketing, digital strategy, website design, and social media. These days she’s focused on user experience design, usability testing, and user research. Barbara works with her team to design websites, applications, conduct user research and usability testing, and craft digital strategies for clients. As a working manager, Barbara loves to help ISITE’s clients achieve measurable results and infuse her designs with data-informed insights. At ISITE Design, Barbara is delighted to unite her passion for user‐centered design and a deep love of meaningful content to create innovative solutions for clients and to instill this passion in ISITE’s team of user experience aces. She’s a co‐leader of the Portland chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Barbara presents periodically at conferences and to professional groups, most recently to the American Marketing Association and (coming soon) at the Online Marketing Summit conference. Off the clock, she’s a geocacher, a wanna-be runner, and sometimes cyclist.
Bill Derouchey
Simple
Bill DeRouchey is creative director at Simple, a financial startup aiming to reboot personal banking through design, technology and service. He’s loving tackling a problem that seems mundane, but is instead rich with complexity and can help people in their everyday lives.
Previously, he directed interaction design at Ziba Design, designing interfaces for a wide range of physical things, from patient monitors to satellite radios to air conditioners. He also served on the global board of directors for IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. During those fun times, he co-chaired Interaction10, a much-loved conference that pushed the boundaries of the attendees’ experience. Bill is also known for researching and talking about how the history of the button personifies the history of interaction design. Yeah, nerd.
Brian Kalma is an entrepreneur with a long history in e-commerce. For over 7 years Brian was part of the Zappos.com family where he served several roles over the years. He began building and scaling the company’s product photography practices and eventually moved on to head up their marketing efforts. A couple of years later and after incubating several departments within the marketing department Brian ultimately landed a new role as Director of User Experience. As head of UX Brian built the team and led the charge in the Zappos site evolution efforts and ultimately brought V1 and V2 to market before leaving the company in April of 2010. He then landed at Gilt Groupe where Brian was responsible for building and scaling their UX team and practices. Brian has since left Gilt, launched and sold his own startup (Snipwits) and is now Chief Experience Officer at Gemvara where he is focused on creating a world-class personalized jewelry shopping experience.
Chad Jennings
Blurb
Chad Jennings is a founding employee and VP of Products at Blurb, the creative publishing platform that enables you to design, publish, share and sell commercial-quality print and digital books. Chad leads the product, design, and content strategy of Blurb’s Webby Award winning Web Site, creation tools, book and digital products, and brand. As Director of Interaction Design at Method, and team lead at Smart Design, he designed, for a range of product, web, and mobile clients including Samsung, HP, Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, Reuters, Gucci, Microsoft and Palm. Chad holds a Master’s Degree in User-Centered Design from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, but he really adds value to Blurb projects through his signature sound effects: “Da-jink!” for links followed, and “boo-yah!” when a design element plops onto grid.
Dan Harbison is the Senior Director of Digital at the Portland Trail Blazers. He currently oversees the strategy, operations and execution for the digital properties of the Portland Trail Blazers. These properties include websites, email marketing, social media, mobile and video content. Harbison has been involved with digital marketing since 1999, and has held positions at Entercom Radio Portland and opus:creative.
Dan, like the team, is a Trail Blazer. He strives to innovate in the space and is regarded as one of the visionaries in digital marketing in sports. Some of the “digital firsts” that Dan and his team have achieved include: the first sports to to launch a stand alone social network, first team to have a twitter handle, the first team to stream games live online, the first team to launch a video platform that has daily live programming specific to the coverage of the team.
When Dan isn’t breathing Trail Blazers basketball and keeping up with the ever-changing digital world, he is the father to two small children, husband to a native Oregonian and avid runner.
Dave Tragethon is the Executive Director of Sales, Communications and I.T. for Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort. The resort is Oregon’s most popular winter recreation destination, hosting up to 500,000 skier visits annually. The past four years Meadows has intensified its efforts to connect and communicate directly with its guests. The Meadows team working with ISITE Design created a web site which provides current, dynamic and relevant information. The resort has grown its Facebook page to more than 27,000 fans and uses Twitter to provide lift operational and parking lot status updates. Meadows is stoked to use it’s technological and human talent to develop innovative and reliable systems to excite and empower its guests while clearly communicating and setting realistic expectations of the Meadows experience.
Dave Wieneke is a digital strategist. He helps brands crack the code for being more accessible and influential via digital channels.
He heads ISITE’s Digital Strategy practice, and is a faculty member at Northeastern University and Rutgers University, where he teaches graduate courses in digital business, social branding and mobile design.
Before agency life, Dave built and directed digital teams at Thomson Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, and Sokolove Law.
He writes for eConslutancy, and AdAge, and you can find him tweeting at @UsefulArts and blogging on the future of digital marketing atwww.UsefulArts.us.
A mobile developer and strategist, Gene has experience translating a wide variety of challenging client technical needs into elegant and durable online systems. As Director of Mobile Solutions, Gene works with ISITE’s clients to craft mobile strategies that align with their broader digital strategy and business goals, and leads a team of solution providers developing innovative native mobile apps and mobile web applications and sites. Prior to ISITE, Gene founded and ran Portland-based firm Anomaly Incorporated for fourteen years, specializing in web and mobile application development. An avid outdoorsman, Gene enjoys skiing the Oregon backcountry and playing the electric guitar (though rarely simultaneously).
Ben Grossman-Kahn, Design Strategist, Innovation Coach
David Von Lehman, Developer
Ryan Rosensweig, Designer, Open Innovation Coordinator
The Nordstrom Innovation Lab is a lean startup operating inside of Nordstrom. Our goal is to validate discoveries in response to customer problems and we strive for creative, human-centered solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable. Through our design-led innovation process, we incorporate mindsets from Design Thinking, the Lean Startup, Agile, and Lean manufacturing. We move through ideas quickly, using whichever technologies make sense.
Our lab members are multidisciplinary, and our teams interdisciplinary. We value a “T-shaped” philosophy of professional development and opt for pairing stations over cubes. We seek to delight and surprise our customers by uncovering their latent needs through ethnographic research and co-creating prototypes for their use.
Jason Grigsby
Cloud Four
Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user inferface for the Wall Street Journal’s Blackberry application. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland, a local mobile group.
Jason is a co-founder of Cloud Four, a small start-up focused on mobile and web development. He blogs athttp://CloudFour.com/blog and provides frequent updates about mobile as @grigs on Twitter.
Jeanne Turner is a passionate and versatile interaction designer who is dedicated to creating delightful experiences through greater understanding of user needs, goals, and motivations. After earning a BA in Computer Science with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction, she’s spent the past 7 years using her skills to build both mobile applications and web environments for clients including Ecotrust, Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, Tektronix, Harvard Business School, Starbucks, and Amazon. Jeanne is also an invaluable part of the Portland interaction design community, serving as the leader and co-leader of the local chapter of IxDA since May of 2008. Recently, Jeanne decided to pursue her interest in alternative philanthropy and was selected to join the Board of Trustees for Awesome Portland.
Jen Rubio oversees all social media and editorial strategy and campaigns at Warby Parker. Previously, she spent several years working for big brands and startups alike, and led the digital strategy and campaign development for brands including Ford, Comcast, Disney, MTV, Amazon, and Estée Lauder while at Brooklyn-based agency Carrot Creative.
Jill has both an analytical spirit and a zest for making people happy. She holds her bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Oregon, and you might say she has a slight obsession with KPIs (and the mighty Oregon Ducks!). Her passion for number-crunching, telephonic geekery, and superb customer service fuels our top-notch receptionist service and makes us stand out in the virtual crowd. She has held multiple positions on the board of the Portland chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. In 2010, she was honored with a Portland Business Journal Orchid Award for her service as a female business leader who is deeply involved in the community.
Louis Rosenfeld
Rosenfeld Media
Louis Rosenfeld is an information architecture consultant and the founder of Rosenfeld Media, a user experience publishing house. He has helped such organizations as PayPal, AT&T, Caterpillar, Ford, Microsoft and the Centers for Disease Control make their information easier to find. He is author of Search Analytics for Your Site and co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, considered the bible of information architecture. Lou is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and helped found the Information Architecture Summit.
Nat co-founded GlobeSherpa in 2010 and oversees all GlobeSherpa staff and partner relationships. He focuses on strategy, business development, and contract management. Prior to GlobeSherpa Nat worked as a Project Manager for Element Power, overseeing the development of utility-scale wind and solar projects in the Western US, as well as for Pacific Crest Securities, a technology-focused investment bank. Nat also worked as Regional Manager for the Sierra Club in Oregon and Idaho, and served two years as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal, West Africa. Nat holds a Bachelors Degree in Political Science from James Madison University and a Masters Degree in International Management from Portland State University. When not evangelizing GlobeSherpa’s technology, Nat can be found pursuing the perfect telemark turn in Mt. Hood’s backcountry, or floating one of Oregon’s world-class rivers.
Nick Finck
Übermind
Nick Finck is a user experience professional who has worked in the web industry for over a decade. He specializes in information architecture, interaction design, usability, and user research. Nick has created web experiences for Fortune 500 companies including Adobe, Boeing, Google and Oprah.com. He lives and plays in Seattle, Washington, where heʼs a User Experience Architect at Ubermind, the leading digital agency specializing in mobile and emerging technologies.
Prior to working at Übermind he was a founder of Blue Flavor, a user experience consultancy, where they launched one of the very first web applications for the iPhone. Nick was the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, an online publication for web professionals, for ten years. He is actively involved in the web community, helping as adviser to such events as SXSW Interactive, the Information Architecture Summit, InfoCamp Seattle and in the past, WebVisions. Nick has also judged The Webby Awards and the SXSW Web Awards.
Samantha Starmer
REI, Inc.
After more than a decade of customer focused work at companies like Amazon.com and Microsoft, Samantha Starmer now leads cross-channel experience, design, and information architecture teams at REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.). She is passionate about evangelizing and creating holistic customer experiences across channels, time, and devices. Samantha regularly teaches at the University of Washington, and enjoys speaking about experience design and how to evangelize its importance.
Steve Gadlin is the founder of Blewt! LLC, creators of comedy to delight and confuse. In January, 2012, he appeared on ABC’s reality competition Shark Tank with his stick-figure cat drawing company I Want To Draw a Cat For You, and successfully closed a deal with Mark Cuban. He has since drawn over 8,000 cats for people all over the world. Blewt!’s other head-scratching initiatives include the game show Don’t Spit the Water!, whose pilot aired recently in Chicago, and The Nairobi Project – a series of absurd plays and musicals penned entirely by a Kenyan email spam artist.
