Respond

Scott Jehl Responsible Responsive Design

Building responsively allows us to create flexible user interfaces that support the widest possible audience with a single front-end codebase. But in embracing the ever-increasing contexts in which our sites are used, performance and accessibility must remain our highest priorities; we must continually question each code addition, and improve our delivery and application techniques to ensure they’re best serving users’ needs.

This talk will explore the challenges of creating fast and broadly-accessible websites and offer approaches that dramatically improve performance, usability, access, and sustainability.

In an age of varying screen sizes and devices, how can we get type to look its best? In this talk, we'll discuss why type is so important, how to focus on readability for your audiences, regardless of what they're viewing your content on, and share practical advice that both designers and developers can benefit from regarding font size, proportion, and web fonts.

Responsive Web Design is why we're all here, but most of us still need to pay the mortgage. That means advertising. And unfortunately, advertisers and ad networks aren't quite there yet. We've been trying to solve the problem of responsive ads for years, so... what's the big hold up? Kris Howard will walk through the obstacles facing the industry and what we can do to help resolve them.

Cow-paths of hacked together responsive imagery techniques gradually turn to paved and charted roads, while some revert to nature. We'll take a look at the routes which have made the grade and how best to navigate them in practice.

When we think of Responsive design our first thoughts are to visual design and art direction across multiple screen sizes and resolutions, but our users don't just read our content, increasingly they interact (perhaps buying something, perhaps sending feedback or commenting). And of course across different devices we interact in very different ways (virtual versus real keyboards, tapping versus clicking, not to mention shaking to undo!)

So how do we address the issue of multiple ways that users might interact with our site and its components in a "Responsive" way? Hear Damien Fitzpatrick on how they solved exactly these challenges with Textbox.io, a rich text editing Web component that works across a huge range of browsers and devices.

The myths are that enterprise grade, business to business apps are not ready to go responsive and responsive is unperformant. The reality is: developers don’t make a business case for going responsive and need to respond to these concerns up front.

Peter will cover how to make a business case for responsive within your company, recruiting allies up the chain, addressing concerns and taking a proposal to the decision makers and getting it over the line.

We design sites for a myriad of devices with varying connection speeds. More and more, we’re discovering the importance of fast page speed. Even 100 millisecond delays in load times negatively impact user experience and conversions. The problem is, making a site fast and lightweight is often at odds with other design goals—like creating visually immersive experiences or meeting all of an organization’s rich-media ad requirements.

While a stripped–down site with no images, set entirely in Arial, is certainly going to be light, it’s not going to accomplish all of our client’s business goals. In this talk, we'll discuss how we can make smarter design decisions, from the beginning of a project, to ensure that our sites perform well. Some topics Yesenia will discuss are optimizing typography and UI, responsive images, and how to get clients on board.

To create a responsive interface, you need to know what you’re aiming for and have a way to roll it out. This can be reasonably clear in a greenfields project but gets harder as a legacy codebase collects cruft. Off-the-shelf frameworks may seem like an easy fix, but chances are you really need a vehicle for your own design language. Creating a custom UI library may be your social and technical way forward.

In 2010 Ethan Marcotte packaged together fluid grids, media queries and flexible images to create Responsive Web Design. Fast-forward to today and responsive design is now a project requirement coming directly from clients and stakeholders. But is the way we define (and therefore approach) responsive design holding us back? In this session we’ll explore why we should adopt a new mindset as fluid and flexible as the techniques themselves suggest.

Our industry has matured into something that’s very different from the almost joyfully naive, creative designer’s playground that it was when I started. While we focus our thoughts onto processes, methods and mechanics, instead of ideas, we’re losing the creative ‘soul’ of our work. I’m hopeful that all’s not lost and that we can make work that’s memorable if we focus as much on creativity as we do on implementation.