Featured Speaker: Christine McGlade

Christine began her career in media as a TV Director and Producer before moving into Technology and Digital Media in 2000. As Director of Interactive at TVO for 9 years, Christine managed two large, database driven websites and Executive-Produced over a dozen Transmedia projects, serious games, and public education campaigns.

In 2012 she founded a User Experience Design and Content Strategy Consultancy in Toronto, working primarily with public service, education, and media organizations, and mostly in WordPress with a little Drupal and Ruby thrown in here and there.

Christine has delivered presentations, workshops, and lectures on topics related to Transmedia, Usability & User Experience Design, Open source, and Content Strategy. She has served as curriculum advisor Centennial and Humber College, Guest Lecturer at Humber and George Brown College, Mentor at Kids Learning Code, and teaches Dev Tools at Centennial College.

Christine loves education so much, she is a Masters of Design Candidate at OCADU, holds a BFA in Integrated Media from OCAD, and a Certification in Internet Business and Technology from the University of Toronto.

Presentation: User Experience Design and Business Innovation Mashups That Add Value

“I am always looking for new methodologies to bring into my user experience design toolkit: ways of working with clients to understand their needs as well as ways of researching and imagining users so what we design and develop is useful.”

What unique perspective are you bringing to this talk?

“This session will be of interest to project leaders who want to better understand how to “sell” user experience design, as well as user experience designers who want to learn about new ways of approaching clients who may not understand what they do. I’m not really a developer, although I can write a little code. I work a lot in WordPress but good UX makes sense on any platform 🙂 ”

What’s one really cool thing people will discover during your session?

“I’ll share my “secret sauce” of persona development: this is an area of web design and UX practice that is really essential, but yet it confounds most people. I use scenario planning to help me map a range of likely users that then informs all of the design and functional decisions we make, and brings users to life for designers and developers.”

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

“Lunch! kidding. Always great sessions, great networking. WordCamp is one of my favourite yearly events.”

Do you have a good WordPress related story, anecdote or memory?

“Well there was the time I took down the client site when I popped the google analytics tracking code in the wrong place….and wasn’t using version control so couldn’t easily make my way back to a happy place. Suffice to say I try to always use git on all my projects now. No more cowboy coding!!!”