Ben Winter-Giles – Managing agile projects within large organisations
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
So you work at enterprise level. Lots of stake holders, lots of competition for time, need to deliver to multiple demands that…POP up. All projects incur change over time, that’s the way of the world. Using a benefits driven approach to delivery rather than a process driven or methodology governed approach frees the team to think laterally, and be responsive to client demands.
In this session, Angela Beesley will explain how Wikia is not only hosting but actively developing wikis and creating hundreds of thriving communities. The methods and processes that have led Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia can be adopted for any type of wiki use, including educational and business communities. Using examples from successful online wiki communities, Angela will explain how to enable a wiki community to manage itself, and how to minimise the common problems that wikis have, including ways to deal with unhelpful or unreliable information, lack of adoption of a wiki, and the problems of malicious edits on open wikis.
When Version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is finally released, the status of Javascript will be quite different to that assigned to it in Version 1.0 back in 1999. Back then, Javascript was to “degrade gracefully”. Currently AJAX offers increased usability for visual users, but may detract from accessibility. In future, use of JavaScript will be encouraged but, of course, must enhance rather than detract from accessibility. During this presentation, Andrew and Grant will demonstrate how Javascript, when implemented well, offers enhanced accessibility. By way of balance, they will also present examples of scripting that causes problems. Importantly, they will provide corrections to the errant coding.
In 1998 the American Dialect Society voted “e-” (as in electronic) as the “word of the year”. This signified how important the internet had become in our world. Almost 10 years later we’re undergoing an even larger change. Only this time the “e-” prefix stands for “everywhere”. Mobile content, services and commerce are changing the way we communicate, work and do business. And these changes are building upon the already massive revolutions brought about by the internet – only faster and made more pervasive. This presentation will look at the strategic issues facing managers and developers as they strive to adapt to this literally “moving” target.
The Web is full of information that is presented inefficiently – both for machines and for humans. Adrian Holovaty shares philosophies and strategies for efficient data collection and information design, drawing from his experiences at data-heavy news sites lawrence.com, washingtonpost.com) and side projects such as chicagocrime.org.
Forms. We all have to make ‘em, but few of us love ‘em. Aaron Gustafson believes that this is because we don’t understand them. In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including error, warning and formatting messages, styling and its implications, as well as best practices for manipulation with Javascript and Ajax.
Working in usability and user experience can give you some great insights into the product design process. Yet few organisations know how to take advantage of this information silo. As a user experience expert do you sometimes wish you could have more input into product ideas handed down from above? Ever wanted to have the ear of business strategists? Even be best friends with marketers and sales people? Stephen Cox explores some of the exciting things that can happen when the disciplines of usability and user experience are allowed to seep out into the realms of strategic and tactical design innovation. He approaches the field of ethnographic design research in practical terms illustrating how News Digital Media has come to embrace the idea of extensive customer research, and the benefits that this has brought to different levels of the organisation.
Hear all about the exciting possibilities created by these technologies from Google Australia.
Can web-based social systems with their wide reach, user-generated and user-filtered content harness the wisdom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent experiments reveal how popularity based web social systems can throw up fickle, random trends that are essentially unreplicable, and only tangentially related to quality. However, popularity as a way to filter information continues to rise in popularity – replacing hierarchical menus, overtaking tags, and even used in lieu of relevance. Rashmi will link decades of psychology research on group decision making and social influence to what is happening on the web today. She will discuss different models of popularity based filtering such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma – including Google’s model of sociality, tag-based social systems, and object-based social networks. She will present some principles for the design of web social systems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and discuss how SlideShare as an evolving social system handles popularity.
Many of the today’s leading and most innovative websites are now running or developed using open source software and tools. This talk aims to provide an insiders look at the growing array of open source software driving today’s leading websites.
There can be a feeling in the web development community that “SEO is evil” – Scott Gledhill cuts through the hype to focus on how developing accessible, standards compliant websites is the first step in creating search engine friendly websites – and also talks about what is being done in the industry to make websites more findable, sometimes at the cost of making them less usable.
Ajax brought about a host of new possibilities in online interfaces, but where are we going next? Cameron Adams will look at the evolution of dynamic interfaces; interfaces that truly meet the needs of all their users. Through the careful use of Web Standards, client-side scripting, and server-side intelligence, it’s possible to create interfaces that shape, adapt to, and predict a user’s needs.
Once seen as unsophisticated, childish and of low artistic value, comic-book art and culture has inspired artists and designers for generations and are now are often untapped resource for web design inspiration. In this session, designer and author of Transcending CSS, Andy Clarke will examine comic book layout, conventions and colour in the context of making inspirational designs for today’s web.
Much of what we know about innovation is wrong. That’s the bet this entertaining keynote takes as it romps through the history of innovation, dispelling the mythologies we’ve constructed about how we got here. This talk, loosely based on Scott Berkun’s recent O’Reilly book (May 2007), will help you to recognize the myths, understand their popularity (even if you don’t believe in them), and how to use the truth of innovations past to help you in your work today.
Wikis are the buzzword-du-jour but practical on the ground experience can be hard to come by for those working within organisations. How are enterprises using them? What’s the best way to get one adopted? What should a wiki not be used for? Pragmatic enterprise wiki adoption lessons and experiences.