Suze Ingram – Would you like service design with that?
Service design is well established in Europe and North America and there’s already a handful of Australian businesses offering service design. What is it? Does experience in designing for screen interaction translate to designing services too? Will service design be the next big thing? Suze offers insight by drawing on her years of experience as a UX designer and researcher. She shows how service design might fit into your business in the future, who you might pitch it to, and what sort of skills you might need to deliver service design.
As we pack our pages with AJAX and RIA goodness we often lose sight of the fact that the key to exceptional user experience is the responsiveness of your site. Inspired by the excellent work by Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team, this talk will have something that every site can benefit from. You will learn how to analyse what your end users are experiencing and how to reduce your load times by 25-50% using a range of simple techniques.
Far from being the enemy, data can be a designer’s best friend. So much so that it just might be the backbone of the next evolution of web design. Data doesn’t mean less creativity and experimentation, it means more. We’ve learned how to design sites that look good, and we know how to mark up our pages with web standards. Now it’s time to figure out what performs best.
In this session, JavaScript ninja Dmitry Baranovskiy takes us into the heart and soul of Canvas, looking at what it does well, and not so well, how well it is supported, and how to use it in cross browser compatible ways. Developers with a good grasp of JavaScript will be able to add another dimension to their web solutions based on what they learn in this session.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a unique mix of marketing, usability and technology which can often cause confusion on how it is implemented across different organisations. An important part of your SEO strategy is getting the most out of your SEO dollars. This session will explain what your developers, designers, producers, content authors and marketers should all know about SEO to ensure you’re getting the maximum return on your SEO.
Rapid prototyping. Widely acclaimed as one of the best ways to create great user experiences, it isn’t without its own pitfalls. This session will discuss the pros and cons of different prototyping techniques, and introduce a new technique called “screenflows” that focuses on visualising the user experience. Discover how to combine the best of paper prototyping, wireframes and HTML prototyping into one simple and effective prototyping technique. Learn how using this method can dramatically decrease the need for documentation, while increasing the speed and agility of the development process.
When visualization is coupled with collective intelligence it becomes a very powerful tool for making sense of the data that is now an increasing part of our personal and organizational experience. But how do you design social web applications so they can use visualization effectively?
Over 4 million people in Australia have a disability. As a result they may use the web in a different way to you: a keyboard instead of a mouse; a screen reader instead of a screen. Accessibility is the way that you can tap into this large and growing audience.
The most interesting problems on the web are social, not technical. Once the open, social stack moves into wide use, the real work is going to be on us to create ongoing experiences that inspire, inform, evolve. Avoid this talk if you want to hear about monetizing community, gaming the newest social site for a quick spike in your user numbers, or how to get a [insert cutting edge social platform] strategy for your brand.
The ABC launched three new socially networked digital radio websites: 
In the summer of ‘07 in a flood-soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His presentation, ‘Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation’, looked at how to reward modern browsers with the latest CSS tricks and punish IE by dropping certain site features. Over two years later, what has changed? We’re starting to see the ideology of progressive enhancement — especially with CSS3 — spread throughout the web design community, but more work needs to be done.
AJAX is changing the way that users interact with websites – it has the potential to provide richer and more interactive online user experiences but also introduces its own set of usability and accessibility problems. This session will present views from leading usability experts from around the world from an experienced practitioner workshop conducted at the Usability Professionals Conference in USA.
The Open Web is an evolving term that encompasses technologies from web standards stalwarts like HTML, to almost-mainstream buzzwords such as OpenID, and on to emerging specifications like PortableContacts, but it’s more than that. It is a philosophy.
This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C to improve the new HTML 5 media elements with mechanisms to allow people to access multimedia content, including audio and video. Such developments are also useful beyond accessibility needs and will lead to a general improvement of the usability of media, making media discoverable and generally a prime citizen on the Web.
Doug will talk about the technologies currently under development at W3C which we are likely to see in browsers now or in the near future, and will have demos of as many of them as possible. Some of these demos will be HTML5 demos, but also technologies from the WebApps WG, Device API and Policies WG, CSS, SVG, geolocation, etc. He will clear the air about HTML vs. XHTML, and why they are not as far apart as people think.