web directions 2015

With digital products, the saying "you never get a second chance at a first impression" is a cold hard fact. There are many hurdles that prevent a potential user from becoming a passionate user and the way that you onboard them to your product can make or break it.

At Canva, we’re quickly approaching 5 million users, and we've learned a thing or two about converting the interested into the engaged. I'd like to share some of our secrets, things you should do and things you should definitely not do to create an engaged user base.

If everyone agrees that customer service is important, why does customer support suck so badly so often? How do some teams provide consistently exceptional service while others drive customers away? And why does Campaign Monitor not try to make customers happy?

Learn how Campaign Monitor embeds customer service into the heart of the company and the product, and how you can do it too.

The Internet of Things adds both capability and complexity to products and services. We’re moving beyond glowing rectangles and the physical dimension gains importance again. This is stretching the limits of conventional UX design. This talk is about how design for IoT is different, what makes it more complicated and what you need to be aware of when working on connected products.

Do you remember the dream of virtual reality? Immersed in a virtual world, your only limitations were your imagination. VR could have been a way to experience the wonders of our - or any - universe. It could have been the ultimate escapism. To our dismay, the real reality was giant headsets, poor graphics and limited interactions.

Well, times have changed! With the evolution of mobile technology over the last 20 years, hardware has reached a tipping point. The big players are getting on board with Facebook buying the Oculus Rift, Sony making their own headset and Samsung and Google introducing lower cost alternatives.

But what about the content? Fresh from delivering one of the most innovative and ambitious projects across multiple markets for General Motors, Rob will share the unique challenges and experiences that come with creating multi-sensory experiences in the virtual and physical worlds.

The internet is enabling a new generation of indie makers that break away from established rules and force big companies to rethink their business models. In this brief talk, Kai shows how his one-man publishing business (creating a print-only magazine called Offscreen) aims to be great without being big. If you run a small product business and sometimes wonder whether it's worth the daily grind (spoiler: it is!), this talk is for you.

The Pacific region has long been considered in need of development. Countless projects from around the world have intervened over the decades and yet there’s been very little real change for the people. Could a human-centred design approach finally create the opportunities remote community dwellers desire? In 2015 Fjord and Good Return partnered up to find out.

We work in an environment where metrics are immediate, and it’s alluring to believe our impact on them is easily split, measured, and determined. We’re also promised, by an abundance of new analytics products, that testing is easy, fast, and that we’ll be making better decisions with less effort.

The reality is that A/B testing is really difficult. I’ll share real-world experiences to show how A/B testing can distract, slow, and cause energy to be focussed on solving the wrong problems. We’ll also walk through some scenarios where the chances of testing success is likely to be increased.

You can't take creative people, stick them in sterile, lowest cost per square foot spaces, and expect them to achieve the best work of their lives. At Atlassian, we've been focussing heavily on the design of our work spaces, to create flexible, engaging, delightful, and yes productive places for our teams to work in.

It's about a lot more than foosball tables and beanbags, and we think what we've learned can have value from a freelancer's home office, to entire buildings (like ours). As our organisation has evolved from its engineering roots to incorporate a large design team, so have the needs of our office space to help us work together as multi-disciplinary teams.

Hear Alastair Simpson and Nat Jones from Atlassian talk about the creative spaces they've designed that have scaled with the changing needs of their teams and what they've learned about the benefits of creating better environments through thoughtful design.

Animations don’t just make things look cool, they provide context and additional details. Animations give us a third dimension with which to communicate: time. The real world doesn’t move in a perfectly linear fashion and when we see things that do, it feels awkward and unnatural. With motion, the difference between dull and delightful often comes down to the math.

This talk walks you through the basic principles of animation design and the simple formulas that can be used to create robust animations. Starting with a quick introduction into interpolation functions and how they can be crafted to represent natural movement we will then see how this translates into software applications. You can create dramatic effects with just a little code. Performance and optimization tradeoffs between CSS3 and Javascript will also be discussed as well as how and when to use the various tools available.

Part I: The End of Global CSS

Back at the dawn of time, CSS, once of the first standards from the W3C, came along to save us from table based layouts, spacer gifs, and the font tag. And there was much rejoicing.

But fast forward (nearly) 20 years, and we've long since run into some pretty significant limitations of CSS, particularly when building complex reusable components and sophisticated application like experiences.

Along the way, we've tried various approaches to modularising and otherwise thing the complex beast that is CSS, from OOCSS to BEM to SMACSS. Some developers have even abandoned style sheets altogether in favour of inline styles.

To make sense of this increasingly complex landscape, and to shine a light on the way forward, Glen Maddern and Mark Dalgleish will look at how modularisation, and local, rather than global CSS might just be the answer.

Part II: The Rise of Modular Styles

Back at the dawn of time, CSS, once of the first standards from the W3C, came along to save us from table based layouts, spacer gifs, and the font tag. And there was much rejoicing.

But fast forward (nearly) 20 years, and we've long since run into some pretty significant limitations of CSS, particularly when building complex reusable components and sophisticated application like experiences.

Along the way, we've tried various approaches to modularising and otherwise thing the complex beast that is CSS, from OOCSS to BEM to SMACSS. Some developers have even abandoned style sheets altogether in favour of inline styles.

To make sense of this increasingly complex landscape, and to shine a light on the way forward, Glen Maddern and Mark Dalgleish will look at how modularisation, and local, rather than global CSS might just be the answer.

Human brains are amazing machines, but they're not perfect. Our software development projects are often compromised by what psychologists call “cognitive bias”, a category of cognitive processes that cause imperfect decisions and judgements.

Why aren't we great at estimating time and cost? Why is group decision making often flawed? Why do we sometimes put off that really valuable minor refactor, or that useful doco? And why, at the post implementation review, are we all suddenly experts on what went wrong?

Level up your ability to identify cognitive biases and fallacies like status quo bias, planning and sunk cost fallacies, groupthink, and hyperbolic discounting as they happen, and get equipped with strategies to beat those biases before they beat you.

There was a time when pixels were pixels and even relative units such as em and rem were just comfortable abstractions of a base font size, that was usually 16 pixels. We became so familiar with this paradigm, we may have overlooked the potential of viewport units and calc expressions to provide a holy grail of responsive design techniques.

Mike will provide a general overview of unit types and values in CSS, with a specific focus on how viewport units, calc expressions and other computed values work. Armed with an understanding of how computed units are resolved in the browsers, you're going to learn how to create a "pure function" in CSS that uses vw as a variable. Then we are going to learn how to apply this technique to a number of practical use cases including: min and max font sizes, advanced fluid typography, elastic widths and fluid modular scale headings and more. Each of these techniques can be used today and can be applied with progressive enhancement.

Our customers are our bread and butter. When we build a website or an app, our goal is to hook our customers in and keep them coming back.

Every time they return means more exposure and in some cases more money. Waz be running through some real world learnings and examples of how to Hook customers in the web with push notifications using the service worker.

Keyboard navigation is something of a radical sport on today’s Internet. Chances you’ll make it through a website with nothing but your keys are fairly slim.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. By making sure all interactive elements can be reached (and escaped) through the keyboard and by providing visual evidence of the focused state we can make the web a friendlier place for keyboard surfers. Plus we can implement all sorts of handy shortcuts: surfing is all about speed, right? And avoiding the jaws of the dreaded focus traps. Forget about mice, we’re going to see what it takes to build the coolest keyboard experience ever!

The revolution in JavaScript is not just in ES6 and ESNext, but in the changes that don't make the headlines. String concatenation and forEach iteration don't have the allure of a shadow DOM, but they've changed the way we look at behaviour development.

With the strong trend to Responsive Development, matchMedia is another way the browsers are showing they've got your back. A CSS Developer with a command of Media Queries can shake the way you see your site across viewports, and with matchMedia your JavaScript can make that shake an earthquake.