A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
Mobile technology is poised to revolutionize how we gather information. By 2010 half the population of the planet will have access to the internet through a mobile device, making the mobile web an essential part of our lives. Yet the mobile industry has few if any resources to help would-be mobile developers from diving in other than applied experience from within the industry.
Brian Fling dicusses the mobile ecosystem in Canada and abroad, how you go about developing an integrated mobile web strategy, mobile design and development principles and best practices, and most importantly, practical techniques and information to start creating mobile websites today.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
User interface design is an iterative process – the design of Digg and Pownce have been a study in evolution and adaptation. This talk will inspect the why and how of these iterations by looking at specific case studies from the two projects as well as previous client work Daniel has tackled.
The case studies will examine specific user interface challenges that have arisen and will chop them up into their various bits. How do I identify a challenge? What is the best approach for getting started? How do I solve the problem conceptually and technically? How will I know if I solved the challenge successfully? Case studies have been selected that are especially pertinent outside of their specific contexts to help you in your everyday UI design.
The presentation will focus on design inspiration, decision-making processes, technical solutions, and learning from missteps as part of a designer’s iterative process.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
We’re at an exciting time in the development of web-based interfaces — along with a maturing front-end toolkit (CSS & JavaScript), there are so many technologies, trends and exciting ideas emerging that are enabling us to push the boundaries of interface design.
Author, designer and code cowboy Cameron Adams will explore some of these areas and how they will apply to our development of online interfaces, including: the possibilities of front-end customisation, application interfaces, browser-native vector graphics, and the general duty of all web developers to make things interesting.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
When we follow the principles of web standards, we write valid HTML and CSS, unobtrusive JavaScript and follow WCAG and other accessibility guidelines. This simple act goes a long way to creating an accessible web site, application or service. At the same time, many sites that don’t utilize all that is good and wholesome about web standards perform surprisingly well when they are used by people with disabilities.
How can we get the best of both worlds to create standards-based solutions that are highly usable for real people (including those with disabilities) in the real world?
In this session, we’ll dissect several examples from real sites and apps to learn about accessibility problems that arise from design and development decisions and what we can do to create a more accessible user experience for all people, regardless of their ability.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
Since the advent of personal computing, we’ve been tied to one place — typically sitting at a desk, with a keyboard and mouse, and in isolation. Even the advent of the web and the wifi-enabled laptop hasn’t much changed this quarter century old paradigm. But with the rise of mobile phones and devices like the Nintendo Wii and PSP featuring first class web browsing, our experience of the web will change dramatically over the coming years. In this context, which design and user experience patterns and techniques we’ve developed over the last 15 years hold up? And… which break?
In this session, Dave Shea and John Allsopp consider the challenges we’ll face as the web devolves onto a myriad devices, and the web is “always on” wherever we are.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Experience Design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.
However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, “Go do that voodoo that you do so well.” Today’s business environment forces us to build multidisciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements. In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs.
He’ll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:
Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business
Is learned, but not available through introspection
Must be invisible to succeed
Is cultural
Is multidisciplinary
Thrives best in an “educate and administrate” environment
You’ll see examples of designs from Apple’s iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Mashups are the hottest web development topic today. Hear about the front-end, back-end, and business issues of mashups with these two experts who know more about them than just about anyone.
Kaitlin Sherwood: Overview of Maps Mashup Technologies
In the past two years, there has been an explosion of tools for conveying geographic information to the masses. In this talk, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood will introduce major concepts and issues, and discuss the pros and cons of each of the major mashup frameworks. Attendees will gain an appreciation for their mapping options, and information to help them better choose between them based on their particular needs.
Steffen Meschkat
A central topic of “Web 2.0” is browser-side web application programming interfaces (APIs) and the specific type of web application they give rise to: mashups.
Using the Google Maps API as an example, I put this development into a perspective that allows one to appreciate how this, on the one hand, is a natural and coherent evolution of the Web that, on the other hand, significantly alters the ways of organizing the world’s information that the Web makes possible. I also discuss the specific technologies that web APIs for mashups are based upon, and their sometimes challenging idiosyncrasies.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Independent designers don’t have the luxury of specialized roles — they wear multiple hats. Those working on the web today are expected to speak the language of programmers and other technical types, on top of building valid and well-coded web sites that are easy to use. All this amongst writing proposals, maintaining client relations, and keeping the financial picture in focus.
When design becomes a process and deadlines loom, it can be difficult to keep the ideas fresh. Communicating with clients is an art on its own; dealing with cringe-inducing change requests and keeping your cool during difficult client relations takes an ability to see things from someone else’s perspective.
Veerle Pieters and Dave Shea are here to share some of their past experiences working with varied clients, juggling multiple projects concurrently, and keeping the creativity flowing when crunch time hits. As well, they’ll be looking at working environments, various organization and workflow methods, and dissecting the idea-generation process by way of example with a special project they’ve put together for this presentation.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Web apps are an intimate marriage of back-end systems and client-side interaction, but it takes two very different skill sets to build robust scalable application platforms and create smooth user interfaces that work in multiple browsers.
In this session, George Oates and Paul Hammond consider the development process from the perspective of both back- and front-end developers, and the cooperation required between them. They’ll discuss how simple architecture choices, development patterns and — above all — good communication are key to making the relationship work.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Web based distribution is changing the nature of established authorities like newsprint and television.
As traditional media declines, the relevance of their online brands continues to grow in both revenue and traffic. All of this is leading to a radical restructuring of how the mainstream media sees itself, and how it operates. From the surprisingly quick adoption of blogs, RSS, and other technologies that fall under the “Web 2.0” label, there are many discussion points about what is working, and what isn’t.
In this session, two experts working at the intersection of the web and newsprint will discuss how this change is occurring. They will be looking at the fallacies built into online advertising and traditional metrics which don’t map to how the new Web operates.
They’ll also explore the maturing online landscape and how traditional media now face a fragmented market, populated by strong Web brands that offer genuine competition through their innovation and nimbleness.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.
Interaction design is no longer limited to the web. The concept of user experience is being redefined as multiple delivery methods of social and business interaction merge into our lifestyles. As design migrates from the web to mobile devices we carry and interact with on a daily basis, our approach must also shift into cycles of design and research centered around the way people actually live.
In this enlightening session, design ethnographer and web veteran Kelly Goto discusses the evolution of Web, handheld, and product interfaces and their cultural impact. Learn how companies are utilizing ethnographic-based research to conduct rapid, immersive studies of people and their lifestyles to inform the usefulness and viability of interfaces both online and offline.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
When people talk about incorporating accessibility into the design process, they usually refer to selecting colours that correspond to somebody else’s ‘accessible’ contrast ratio or using a large enough font size. Trivial, really.
But the design process — observation, ideation, evaluation, refinement, and presentation — gives us many opportunities to build accessibility in from the very start. We’ll look at some real-world examples of Web-based services (like a transit-system route planner) and classic accessibility problems (like masses of old PDFs) and use those examples to build in accessibility from the ground up.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Microformats are much more than just a promising technology or passing fad — hear these three experts cover the whys and the hows of designing and developing with microformats.
Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits. John Allsopp, author of the forthcoming friends of Ed microformats book will cover a number of practical examples of quickly and cleanly adding microformats to existing code. Renowned designer and developer Dan Cederholm will look at how microformats provide excellent scaffolding for styling with CSS.
This session will really get you up to speed with this exciting, quickly spreading technology.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Traditionally, CSS has been the domain of designers while JavaScript was for programmers, but these technologies can and should work together to improve your visitors’ experiences. After all, you can do amazing things with CSS, but when you start to use CSS in concert with DOM Scripting, there’s almost no limit to what you can achieve.
MOD-ern web designer Andy Clarke and DOM/Ajax developer Aaron Gustafson will take your CSS skills and supercharge them with JavaScript magic, exploring how you can make CSS and JavaScript work together to make beautiful (and functional) results.
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
When we follow the principles of web standards, we write valid HTML and CSS, unobtrusive JavaScript and follow WCAG and other accessibility guidelines. This simple act goes a long way to creating an accessible web site, application or service. At the same time, many sites that don’t utilize all that is good and wholesome about web standards perform surprisingly well when they are used by people with disabilities.
Since the advent of personal computing, we’ve been tied to one place — typically sitting at a desk, with a keyboard and mouse, and in isolation. Even the advent of the web and the wifi-enabled laptop hasn’t much changed this quarter century old paradigm. But with the rise of mobile phones and devices like the Nintendo Wii and PSP featuring first class web browsing, our experience of the web will change dramatically over the coming years. In this context, which design and user experience patterns and techniques we’ve developed over the last 15 years hold up? And… which break?