Embrace UX speaker: Jamie Levy
Embrace UX (@EmbraceUX) will be taking place Friday April 15th – Saturday April 16th at the Lincoln Alexander Centre in downtown Hamilton. Featuring a line-up of experience design thought leaders at a gorgeous venue (with breakfast, lunch, and snacks included), a party at the Collective Arts Brewery, and 250 attendees from around North America – Embrace UX is Hamilton’s annual premier tech and design event!
Embrace UX speakers will be profiled every few days until April, but register soon, as the 20% early bird discount expires on February 14th!
Jamie Levy
Jamie Levy (@JaimeRLevy) is the author of UX Strategy: ‘How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want’, an exceptionally well praised O’Reilly book blending business strategy and UX design.
“Where has this book been for the last ten years? As the principal at a user-experience design agency, this is the book I’ve been waiting for. Essential reading for anyone interested in Lean UX and Startup, and for those who need to create great user experiences.” – Reviewer
Jaime also heads a consultancy called JLR Interactive that caters to startups and enterprises, helping them transform their business concepts into innovative and scalable online solutions. She conducts workshops worldwide and also teaches a graduate level UX design and strategy course in the Viterbi engineering school at the University of Southern California.
Jamie has decades of UX experience and a storied career filled with fascinating work, which is well-captured by her Wikipedia article:
Her career began in 1990 with the creation of the electronic magazines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood. They were programmed in HyperCard and Macromedia Director and distributed on 800k floppy disks. She leveraged her publicity from numerous print publications and tv to increase the sales of these disks in book stores and mail-order.
In 1993, she worked with EMI Records where she designed, animated, and programmed the first commercially released interactive press kit (IPK) for Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk CD digipack. The project featured sequenced samples, digitized video, hypertext, and interactive animation all integrated together as a seamless experience. She followed that up with the animated electronic book, Ambulance, that was written by Monica Moran and included music by Mike Watt from the band Minutemen and art by Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets.
In 1994 while employed by IBM as an interface designer, she began hosting “CyberSlacker” salons for programmers and animators at her East Village loft. By 1995, she took a creative director position at Icon CMT, where she could focus on the creation of the online magazine WORD. It received national recognition for its design and cutting-edge non-linear storytelling. She was recognized as Newsweek’s top 50 people to watch in cyberspace and on Good Morning America as one of “The Most Powerful Twentysomethings in America.”
As the dot-com era took off, she went on her own as a consultant. In 1996, she designed a graphical multi-user environment called Malice Palace using The Palace software. Set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, users could engage in real-time chat and interact with robots depicted as homeless people. Prints from Malice Palace were exhibited in a group show titled “Channel 3” at Team Gallery in New York alongside Tracey Emin, Erik Brunetti and Pedro Ortuno.
In 1997, her Silicon Alley-based start-up called Electronic Hollywood received an angel investment. For the next 5-years her company focused on web design, interactive advertising, and original content development. The most prestigious production was the CyberSlacker, Flash cartoon series, which won the Flash Animation Award. She appeared in Doug Block’s 1999 documentary film Home Page and her story was chronicled in the book Gig.
