Sketchnotes from Valiocon

Sketchnotes and memories from Valiocon 2014.

Speaker and fellow sketchnoter Lee Rubenstein of EatSleepDraw. Check out his take on Valiocon here.

Michael Flarup, of PixelResort and Robocat fame. 

Ryan Carson, co-founder and CEO of Treehouse. He gave a stellar talk on his approach to running a company devoid of management layers. You can read more about this on his blog.

Kim Wouters runs a design agency in Belgium.

Chloe Park of OpenTable shared a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of her approach to tackling “un-shiny problems.” Her story was complemented by a stunning, hand-crafted presentation.

Amy Hood and Jennifer Hood shared their thoughts on the role of context in design, injected with personality and humor.

Sam Kallis, visual development artist at Paramount Pictures, is one of my new creative role models. I was inspired by her authenticity, philosophy, and courage. And her work is simply amazing!

Merek Davis of Mextures - helluva beard.

Also - some old-fashioned sketches to grace the Catamaran Resort notepads. These feature Keiran Flanigan, Jennet Liaw, Chuck Longanecker, and Hudson Peralta.

It was lovely meeting so many talented designers and makers. Onward!

Logo design for Frankendeal.

A long-overdue update on my Women2.0 Labs experience: three weeks ago, I teamed up with a group of 3 other entrepreneurs. We rallied around the idea of creating a platform for audio-guided walking tours. Many interviews, surveys, brainstorms, concept tests, mentoring sessions, and nights at HackerDojo later, we find that our idea has changed quite a bit.

Now we’re hard at work tackling a new problem: how to improve the customer experience of waiting in lines. Our goal is to make it so enjoyable to wait in lines that customers actually look forward to it! We’re exploring the possibility of using location-based mini games to entertain users while providing real-world rewards, such as coupons. Project code name: Frankendeal.

There are still a lot of questions that we need to answer, and problems we’ll need to solve. In the spirit of quick-and-dirty user research, we hung out at a local coffee shop last week, observing & engaging with people as they waited in line. We learned a lot about how people deal with lines– what they do, how they feel, how it affects their overall experience. We also got a lot of great feedback on our idea!

This week, we’re developing a very rough prototype that we can get into users’ hands to gauge actual interest and usage. Our first iteration is very simple and focuses on the following game elements that resonated with users:

• short duration
• potential for real-world reward
• game is somewhat challenging, rather than being “mindless”
• tied to location (using the foursquare API)

I’ll keep you posted as lightning strikes and brings Frankendeal to life!

Thanks again to all who have helped out by participating in interviews, surveys, usability, and more. You are truly wonderful.