Do you sometimes find yourself frustrated at the sheer audacity of designers making completely design-centric decisions, throwing all sorts of documentation and rocks over the fence, all the while completely oblivious to just how many holes they're making in your windows? Do you feel that they might as well be speaking in Lorem Ipsum to you? When you say something to them, are they just getting an error 404 message back?

It doesn’t have to be that way! In this talk, you will learn about the fundamental differences in the perspectives of designers and developers and how we might tap into those differences to strengthen the way we work together. You will learn techniques and exactly what to say to take steps towards breaking down silos and becoming involved in the design process while also involving designers in the development process. As a result, you will open the floor up to educating each other and avoiding resentment by working close together in interdisciplinary teams with a unified end goal in mind, finishing on time and on budget (living the dream!).

Rather than trying to memorize a list of hundreds of best practices for software design, apply five basic principles that result in software that is innovative and usable.

1. It's not about you
2. It Depends
3. Simple is good: but it's not simple
4. Influence not control
5. Practice creates change

Elegant design requires talent, but talent is not a prerequisite for avoiding bad design. If you lack artistic touch and prefer rules and logic over the ethereal art form, the fundamental tenets of composition can enable you to apply Design as a programming paradigm. Spend an hour with a coder learning the logic of design--hacking pixels instead of bits--and free yourself of your excuse for horrible designs.

According to CEO Aaron Shapiro, the next big breakthrough in design and technology will be the creation of products, services, and experiences that eliminate the needless choices from our lives and make ones on our behalf, freeing us up for the ones we really care about: “Anticipatory design”. Rather than traditional UI/UX, where the tendency is to provide options in a participatory manner to determine a result, here you remove all choices from the user, and use predictive modeling to give an outcome to liberate them from so-called “decision fatigue,”

“Flow not friction,” “convenience not choice,” and “efficiency not freedom” are the mantras of anticipatory design.

In this talk, we’ll explore some implementations of anticipatory design, discuss areas where it is done well, and issues with the overall movement.