Will Hacker

Will Hacker is a Manager of Interaction Design at Cars.com, where he leads a team responsible for experience design and usability for a portfolio of consumer-facing automotive shopping, research, and financing products. He is also the author of Mobile Prototyping with Axure 7, and his work has appeared in Boxes and Arrows, Mobile Commerce Daily, Smashing Magazine, UX Booth, and UX Magazine. Will is a frequent speaker at design events in Chicago.

For more, keep up with Will at willhacker.net or on Twitter as @willhacker.

Presentations

UX Camp 2016

Sketch-to-Code Prototyping: Moving Faster to Final Designs

Prototyping in code, and making use of established pattern libraries, allows UX design teams to have greater control over how their work is executed across devices. This model lets designers do what they do best: think about experiences and interactions, and not the ins and outs of the latest prototyping tool. It also frees designers from having to wait for the development team to see if their designs will work as planned, and can speed time to market by delivering working HTML and CSS to the technical team.

This talk takes you behind the curtain to see how a real design team is using a sketch-to-code approach to prototyping that gets it to testable responsive designs faster than traditional prototyping approaches. If you’re looking for ways to add more agility to your design and build process, this talk is for you.

UX Camp 2015: Mobile Camp

Material Design: It’s a Whole New Language

This talk is an introduction to Material Design, Google’s new visual design and interaction language for cross-platform applications.

Material Design has been introduced in various Google web apps and in Android 5 (Lollipop). Material Design is more than a visual pattern language; it also address interaction patterns, motion and animations, and transitions between on-screen states. On the ever-evolving continuum of approaches to design, Material Design is the next step on a journey that has already taken designers from skeuomorphism to flat design. Learn from examples drawn from real applications about the principals behind Material Design and how it adds a new dimension to how we conceive user experiences.

Prototyping Responsive Designs with Axure RP7

This one-day workshop will get you up to speed prototyping responsive web designs with the new Adaptive Views feature in Axure RP 7. In this hands-on workshop you’ll learn how to create designs that scale for smartphones, tablets, and desktop displays. This workshop includes examples, tutorials, and exercises covering the functionality of an cross-platform ecommerce project prototyped with Axure.

In addition to learning how to create Axure pages with device-specific views, you’ll also discover some of the other new advanced features of Axure 7 that offer improved prototyping methods that were not available in previous versions. At the end of the workshop, participants will take home the completed prototype file.

Topics Covered:

• Adaptive Views
• Using Adaptive Views to create responsive masters
• Configuring, viewing and using prototypes on actual mobile devices
• Publishing to the free AxShare prototype hosting service
• Repeaters
• Building accordions
• Axure 7 support for touch gestures and interactions
• Using Axure’s Style Editor to easily control the appearance of most design elements

UX Camp 2014: Prototype Camp

Dodging Speed Bumps When You Take Your Prototype on the Road

Once that prototype leaves the safe confines of your office it could encounter slow network connections, devices that won’t behave as expected, and corporate firewalls that are ready to shut you down. So you’ll have to be prepared to improvise on the fly, but will be ready with the real world examples covered in this look at prototyping for the road. Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a fun and enlightening ride.

Because after you’ve created that perfect prototype, covered all the anticipated use cases, fixed all the bugs so that it works as it’s expected to, and considered all of the web browsers and mobile devices you have to deal with–you’re still not done! We’ll uncover why and how to better prepare yourself for the real world just outside your door.

UX Camp 2014: Mobile Camp

Manage this! Account & Profile Management on the Small Screen

So you’ve built a great app, included awesome features, and have personalization in place to make it a rich and robust experience for every user. But have you considered when those folks are using handheld devices, with small screens, with less-than-optimal text input interfaces? Suddenly your well-crafted account and profile are about to get painful. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This talk looks at how we can create mobile account and profile experiences that get the information we need to deliver value from our apps even in a small-screen context without burdening users to the point they just give up and go somewhere else.

Getting Started With Axure RP 7

This one-day, hands-on workshop is designed for those who want to learn how this powerful rapid prototyping tool can be used to create clickable HTML-based prototypes so they can more clearly communicate their visual and interaction designs to stakeholders and end users. Unlike tools that create static wireframes, Axure RP 7 lets user experience designers create highly interactive prototypes that can be used in web browsers and on mobile devices without having to write any code.

This workshop will get you up and running (or refreshed on the new Axure 7!) with a mixture of examples, tutorials, and exercises that start with static wireframes and then advance to interactive prototypes that use forms and variables to capture user input and update the interface based on user actions. You will take home working Axure RP 7 files that you build in the workshop. These project files include the functions you’ll need get up and running with the latest version of this extremely popular prototyping solution.

Topics Covered:

• Planning an Axure project
• Learning the Axure workspace
• Using Axure’s interface widget library
• Creating simple wireframes
• Working with forms
• Adding interactivity to a prototype
• Using variables to store data used by the prototype
• Displaying and sharing a prototype

UX Camp 2013: Mobile Camp

Mobile How? Mobile Now.

If you’re not taking your existing web properties mobile, you’re already slipping behind. But it’s not too late to start making changes, even if you don’t have the time to invest in a full mobile strategy right away. Jumpstart your mobile approach using this set of design techniques geared toward making your website easier to use for people on tablets–see real-world examples and hear practical advice that you can use right away to make your site mobile-friendly as quickly as possible! If you need to improve your website’s tablet experience but don’t have time or resources available to you to stop everything and go responsive, these easy-to-use-and-implement techniques will help you find your way. Quickly.

UX Camp 2012: Prototype Camp

Mobile Prototyping with Axure

So you have a great idea for an iPhone or iPad app. But you lack the coding skills needed to bring it to life for testing and refinement before moving to development. Well a new set of features in Axure RP 6.5 allow you to rapidly prototype iOS applications for on-device testing with native-looking iOS UI widgets, home screen icons, splash screens, full-screen display, and swipe event detection. And all without writing a single line of code.

In this session Will shows some of the techniques he used to create a demo iPhone app using some of the new features in Axure. You’ll learn how to simulate the user experience using dynamic displays, stored data in variables, multiple chained events, and more. For mobile user experience designers without ready access to iOS developers who can assist with prototyping, Axure provides a great way to get your ideas in people’s hands for design exploration and iteration.