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.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Where can you find Ajax enlightenment? At the mystical point where a kick-ass application connects perfectly with the Flow of the best user experiences. Let Masters Jeremy and Derek guide you there.
You seek to infuse your work, whether an app or a web site feature, with the power of Ajax. But, taking the wrong path at the beginning of your project will lead to frustration for visitors, rather than a graceful, intuitive experience. True Masters start with the right questions: When is Ajax an enhancement? When is it a hindrance? How can its energy be channeled elegantly? This insightful session will be grounded in real-life examples and demonstrations, revealing the impact of the choices we make. Above all, you’ll learn the strategical thinking and higher perspective that will ensure a brilliantly user-centered web site.
Where can you find Ajax enlightenment? At the mystical point where a kick-ass application connects perfectly with the Flow of the best user experiences. Let Masters Jeremy and Derek guide you there.
You seek to infuse your work, whether an app or a web site feature, with the power of Ajax. But, taking the wrong path at the beginning of your project will lead to frustration for visitors, rather than a graceful, intuitive experience. True Masters start with the right questions: When is Ajax an enhancement? When is it a hindrance? How can its energy be channeled elegantly? This insightful session will be grounded in real-life examples and demonstrations, revealing the impact of the choices we make. Above all, you’ll learn the strategical thinking and higher perspective that will ensure a brilliantly user-centered web site.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits.
Cameron Moll says the web is a volatile medium that changes endlessly, but one thing remains constant: a demand for designers who are disciplined in graphic design theory, human computing principles, and communication techniques. Oh, and CSS, accessibility, and (soon) mobile devices, too. How does one stay abreast?
Hear one of the web’s most disciplined designers share his advice for mastering fundamental user interface principles, good vs. great design, communication-centric approaches, and mobile web development, all with the hope of producing meaningful interfaces that deliver a rewarding user experience.
A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.
Web standards investigators: Get your crime scene gear on and help Molly dig up the dirt on crimes committed against web standards. Molly will demonstrate code samples from her own felonious work dating back to 1993, as well as the work of other infamous standardistas before they got rehabilitated and let standards into their hearts. Help unearth the felonies and reveal the clues that lead to a life of crime-free, guilt-free code.
