Speaking
Photos from NSConference 2010 (Atlanta) are copyright Chuck Toporek, all rights reserved. Used with permission.
I’m available on a very limited basis for speaking engagements worldwide, including presenting at conferences and holding workshops. I’m an experienced public speaker, and my primary topics of focus are software user interface and interaction design. I’m especially interested in the iPad, iPhone and Mac platforms, and multi-touch interfaces and devices.
If you’d like me to speak at your event, please contact me via email – you can reach me at matt at this domain, or you can find my contact details here.
Topics
I most enjoy speaking about user-focused aspects of the software lifecycle, including everything from tailoring an application’s feature-set, to interaction design and even custom GUI controls programming. I try to pitch my sessions such that they will be enjoyed and understood by technical and non-technical audiences alike.
For workshops, I favour guided collaborative discussion of user interface and interaction issues currently being faced by the workshop’s attendees, with implementation details taking second place to best principles.
Past topics covered include: designing software for portable and/or touch-screen devices, designing & developing custom controls, making mistakes impossible, how to present lists, the problem of showing “no value”, consistency vs user experience, live editing, contextual inspectors, cross-platform UI optimisation, choosing features for 1.0, when to update your application, user testing and feedback, soft landings (the first-launch experience), when to use custom UI, handling feature-requests, help systems, software analytics, and plenty of others.
Podcasts
I have a regular segment on The MDN Show podcast, entitled “The World According to Gemmell”. You can listen to past podcasts to get a feel for the sort of material I often cover (and indeed to acclimatise yourself to my Scottish accent).
Testimonials
Honestly, here we go:All in all it was an excellent job.
- You knew your audience and presented them with pertinent material.
- Your slides were well crafted yet they were not your presentation, you were.
- The entire session had great pacing and delivery (telling me that you practiced and honed it for quite a while).
- You were clearly passionate about the subject matter and that came through to the audience.
Excellent talk on “Making Mistakes Impossible”.
Awesome keynote talk by Matt Gemmell on making the user experience better.
No surprise, Matt Gemmell rocked the house!
Matt Gemmell’s talk has been an amazing perspective “focuser”. Will definitely take this presentation to heart in my work.
This morning’s keynote by Matt Gemmell was excellent. Great material for designing a good UI.
I was very happy with the workshop, which covered a lot of ground. … (It) definitely served its purpose, providing lots of food for thought.
Thanks again for your participation in NSConference. I wasn’t sure what exactly would happen in your session but it far exceeded my expectations. Certainly, I knew we were going to discuss UI but the concepts you presented in both your talk and the workshop encouraged, validated and, most importantly, challenged each of us in our work. I think most of us in that room have tried to give attention to good design, but I had never had it distilled and presented so succinctly before. I hope you’ll take pleasure when you start to see software put those principles in action: meet expectations, avoid mistakes, remove consequences. … I hope to put all this into practice as I design my future apps and I hope you’ll get a chuckle to see the default plus/minus control disappear. As far as feedback on the day’s format, I thought it brought out great ideas. You got us started thinking and then the interchange of ideas from all the people was excellent. I look forward to the opportunity to participate again with something beautiful to show off.
The Matt Gemmell talk was pretty damn awesome.
And Matt Gemmell delivers an outstanding presentation!
The initial section about the iPad was fantastic and really very useful. When might seem obvious to you probably isn’t to most developers (myself included) so having a discussion about designing apps for the iPad was wonderful. You managed to bring everything into focus and pointed out a lot of areas for us to consider and be aware of. All really great stuff. I also enjoyed the constructive criticism and feedback element of the workshop. Obviously it was of great help to those that had submitted things for you to discuss but it also worked really well for the rest of us too because the discussions around each submission were informative and made us all think about the various issues involved. … Overall it was a great workshop and I think it worked really well. Just being able to bounce ideas off you and hear your thoughts on things was extremely valuable and useful.
I really enjoyed the workshop and got a lot out of it.
I came to Matt’s workshop on Sunday. I found it very useful, the people were friendly (even to someone with a Windows laptop!), the venue was great and it was all very well organized. I can only imagine how much hard work goes into organizing something like this. Thanks!
