What makes the winning product stand out from its competition? Probably countless hours of forethought, weaving a personal experience into the product, while on a quest for that magical, aha moment that thrills and surprises the user. Charles Warren of IDEO leads his audience through a thought excursion to demystify the process of delivering uncompromised quality products that are a delight to customers.

While many software evangelists preach that it matters to establish a culture where we talk about and accept mistakes, few go ahead and talk about their own. Leading heads of Adaptive Path reveal what they did wrong and what they learned from it. Mistakes in project management and especially in communication may lead to months of work wasted.

The scope of designing software stretches beyond the artifacts to be materialized. Peter Merholz, Director of Practice Development at Adaptive Path, discusses the subtleties of a good design, the barriers thereto, and what skills an exemplary designer must have.

Web technologies in various stages of adoption are having tremendous impact on the way we all communicate and collaborate online. Ryan Freitas of Adaptive Path provides an overview of how online collaboration has evolved because of tools such as wikis, syndication, and blogs. He looks at the impact on how teams work together to use these tools both internally and externally.

Leadership is about more than simply building the right organization. Leadership also requires motivating people. In this session, Janice Fraser from Adaptive Path converses with Kathan Brown, author of the book "Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively," about being an effective leader of creative teams.

Effective user research requires both observation and interviewing. In addition, interesting things happen when we leave our homes and our comfort zone, perhaps in another country where business, language, food, and more is beyond our own frames of reference. Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, offers expert tips in both observation and interviewing, and considers the challenges and opportunities in conducting research abroad.

What exactly is Interaction Design and how can it benefit your next product or service? Dan Saffer, Senior Interaction Designer for Adaptive Path, peels back the onion layers of the Interaction Design discipline; a fairly new practice which is still taking shape. In this presentation, he defines what an interaction designer does, and how the practice fits into the larger scope of the User Experience community.

What are content audits and content maps, and why should they matter to companies who publish information on the Web? Chiara Fox, a senior information architect for Adaptive Path, defines the art of Content Analysis in the scope of web application design and migration. She identifies several milestones and key deliverables that most companies can use on their next (re)design project.