Resources
Podcasts, slides and other presentation materials
We have dozens of presentations online from previous conferences. Explore the links below to see slideshows and hear podcasts from leading experts in:
- @media
- accessibility
- ajax
- coding
- css
- data
- design
- development
- government
- html
- innovation
- interaction design
- interface design
- javascript
- mobile
- project management
- social media
- social networks
- strategy
- user experience
- web apps
- web standards
Jeremy Keith — Hot Topics
Continuing a popular @media tradition, the final session for day one, hosted by Jeremy Keith, will feature a handful of speakers discussing questions posed by conference attendees. Wear your flak jacket: there will be controversy!
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Doug Schepers — SVG Today and Tomorrow
Thought SVG was dead? Think again. Once relegated to plug-in status, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spreading rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even televisions, with broad native support and graphical script libraries. It’s used on major websites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, standalone or integrated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a powerful tool in a developer or designer toolkit. With full scripting support, animations, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies.
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Rachel Andrew — Core CSS3
This session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.
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Tom Hughes-Croucher — An introduction to server-side JavaScript
Server-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future.
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Mark Boulton — Designing grid systems
Grid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that?
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John Resig — Testing mobile JavaScript
This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.
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Simon Willison — Building crowdsourcing applications
Crowdsourcing applications take indigestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter periods of time.
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Christian Crumlish — Designing for play
Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how we can design to foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.
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Patrick Lauke — Brave New World of HTML5
HTML5 was originally called Web Applications 1.0, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for scripters – there’s plenty for markup monkeys as well as JavaScript junkies.
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Sandi Wassmer — Inclusive design is for everyone
Inclusive Design is currently the domain of people who design physical things, like product designers and architects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online environment just makes sense.
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Remy Sharp — Browsers with wings: HTML5 APIs
HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky – plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer!
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Hannah Donovan — Telling stories through design
Hannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a storyteller — especially in terms of the importance of this role within a team. Improve your output as a designer by taking a closer look at influencing the input. As a visual narrator we help to visualise, inspire and curate for the people we work with as well as connecting scenarios around the larger product saga that supports the interfaces we design. By examining your input, make your output more effective with your team and users alike, paving paths for people to tell their own stories as your product evolves over time.
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Steve Souders — Even faster web sites
Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.
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Relly Annett-Baker — All the small things
Microcopy is the ninja of online content. Fast, furious and deadly, it has the power to make or break your online business, to kill or stay your foes. It’s a sentence, a confirmation, a few words. One word, even. It isn’t big or flashy. It doesn’t leave a calling card. If it does its job your customer may never notice it was there.
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Dan Hill — Closing keynote: 15 years in
It is time for the practice of web development and design to broaden its horizons. How can the skills and experience we’ve acquired over the last 15 years of working on the internet be applied more broadly to, say, the design of cities, buildings, organisations, government and so on?
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Kelly Goto — Keynote: WorkFLOW
Shift your thinking, alter your process, and create a dynamic of doing rather than spinning. Workflow veteran Kelly Goto leads you through a fast-paced session designed to help transcend obstacles and develop a culture of adaptation, progress and flow. Learn the fundamental principles behind The FLOW Method, an actionable series of steps utilizing new processes and techniques to re-invigorate your organization and team. Whether you are an independent, small business owner or the manager of an in-house web marketing team, you will gain valuable insights and tools to bring back to your organization.
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Cameron Adams — Keynote: Making Waves
If you work on the web, it was hard to miss the announcement of Google Wave in May. It was especially exciting because this project, designed to leapfrog current modes of online communication, was developed right here in Australia by a Sydney based team. Wave’s interface designer — Web Directions favourite, Cameron Adams — will give us some unique insights into the challenges of bringing such an innovative product to fruition, the problems you face in designing a desktop application in the browser, and how to nurture a startup culture inside a large company. Cameron has given some truly memorable presentations at previous Web Directions — this keynote drawing from his experiences as part of the Google Wave team will be no exception.
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Matt Webb — Opening keynote: Escalante
Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 9.10am.
The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.
The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web — breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero — for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design — playful and rational all at once — to help us figure out what to do when we get there.
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Rob Mitchell & Mike Williams — Test your JavaScript
Mike Williams and Rob Mitchell will explain why you should test your JavaScript code, what to test, and how to go about it. They’ll talk about full-stack browser-based tests, as well as true unit tests, and explain where each are appropriate. They’ll also discuss integration of your tests into an automated build, and you’ll leave with a burning desire to try it out on your own projects.
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Donna Spencer — Information seeking behaviours
Each information seeking behaviour needs very different approaches to information architecture, information design and page layout. During this presentation, Donna will talk about each information behaviour, its key attributes, key design needs, and show good and bad examples of each.
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Christian Crumlish — Designing social interfaces
Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. Christian will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.
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Andrew Fisher — Cloud computing
Cloud services change the way a business or campaign can operate, increasing flexibility, taking less time to deploy and introducing superb cost efficiencies so that we can redirect finances to where they’ll really pay for us — in innovation, experimentation and planning ahead. With these opportunities, however, come challenges around data and platform security, change management and who “owns” the platform and data you are using.
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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.
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Mark Stanton — Best practices for speeding up your site
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.
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Luke Stevens — Data driven design
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.
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Dmitry Baranovskiy — Canvas
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.
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Cheryl Gledhill & Scott Gledhill — Beyond SEO
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.
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Grant Robinson — Visualising the user experience
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.
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Jeremy Yuille — The social life of visualization
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?
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Damien McCormack — Accessibility means business
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.
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Deborah Schultz — It’s the people, stupid
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.
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Fergus Pitt & David Peterson — The mashed up playlist
The ABC launched three new socially networked digital radio websites: ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country in July 2009. They are the first of several ABC projects involving content aggregation. As well as having slick, highly usable designs the music platform integrates with various sources including MusicBrainz, YouTube, Last.fm and Wikipedia. This aggregation functionality graphically illustrates the possibilities of Semantic Web technology for an editorial organisation such as the ABC.
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Elliot Jay Stocks — Progressive enhancement
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.
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Tania Lang — Using AJAX to enhance UX
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.
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Lachlan Hardy — The open web
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.
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Silvia Pfeiffer — Taking HTML5 <video> a step further
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.
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Doug Schepers — W3C and web standards big picture
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.
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Pete Ottery — Designing for suits
Designing websites in amongst the “suits” and their business models, targets, projections and synergies (ha!) can be death by dot point. Or fun. What are manager types actually thinking when they brief (or don’t) you. How do you translate their KPI’s into interface designs that
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Kerry Taylor — Semantics & sensors
The Semantic Sensor Networks W3C Incubator is an international initiative to develop standards for sharing information collected by sensors and sensor networks over the Web, including an ontology for different types of sensing devices and their observations, and new approaches for the semantic markup of sensor descriptions and services that support sensor data exchange and sensor network management.
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Renato Iannella — Opening up social networks
Social Networks have been a world-wide phenomenon and their proliferation poses a pressing interoperability and usability challenge to both web users and service providers. Web users have different social networks accounts and utilise them in different ways depending on the context. For example, more friendly chat on FaceBook, more professional on LinkedIn, and a bit daring interaction on Hi5. Maintaining these multiple online profiles is cumbersome and time consuming and locks in the web user to a service provider. Also, sharing information and user-generated content is particularly challenging due to the obscure nature of privacy and rights management on social networks and the lack of awareness and transparency of such policies.
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Scott Hollier — Boosting new media accessibility
This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C and its members to promote and improve web standards and in particular HTML 5 with mechanisms to allow people with disabilities to access multimedia content, including audio and video.
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Rob Mason — Pervasive computing
What is driving this accelerating diffusion of networked technologies? How do you really measure or control how “pervasive” something is? Why would you even want to? We’ll introduce you to a practical framework for analysing and measuring your “spatial perception of an activity” and explore what it literally means for an application to be “pervasive”, in both an experiential and business sense. At the end of this session you’ll be able to clearly diagram the key change that’s driving this evolution and how it will impact your strategies for technology and business in the future.
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Mark Birbeck — Marking up content with RDFa
RDFa is at the cornerstone of the Browser Web and the Semantic Web. With RDFa, publishing data becomes as easy as publishing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and leverage all the URI-based data integration features brought by Semantic Web and Linking Open Data technologies.
In this introductory session primarily directed at those who author web content, Mark will touch a range of RDFa topics from its goals and how it came about, to its relationship to linked data and how it’s being used in some recent projects for UK Government web-sites.
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Kevin Yank — CSS frameworks
With the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were born. In this session, we will survey the landscape of CSS frameworks and consider how each of them deals with the unique challenge of creating generalised, reusable CSS styles.
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WCAG2 — Gian Wild
So WCAG2 — version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set out by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative — has been released as a Candidate Recommendation. What does that mean for Australia? There are many issues that were addressed in WCAG1 which have been left up to policy makers and developers in WCAG2. This session will highlight these issues and talk about what kind of impact they will have on your development and on your audience.
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Ben Galbraith — The state of developer tools
In this session, co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and The Ajax Experience conferences, and now head of Mozilla Foundation’s new Tools team Ben Galbraith will take us on an expedition through the developer tools landscape. Learn what’s out there, and what they can do to make you more productive, your sites and applications better and faster, and your life as a developer more enjoyable.
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Lynne d Johnson — Opening keynote: New media — new business
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 9.10am
Lynne will set the tone of the conference this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of experience in business, media and online communities as Senior Editor at Fast Company.
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Mark Pesce — Closing keynote: This, that, and the other thing
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 4.05pm.
This is what it feels like to be hyperconnected: a new kind of community – pervasive, continuous, yet strangely tense and tenuous, like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. The limits of the neocortex meeting the amplifier of the Human Network. That creates unique opportunities: we can come together at a word, self-organize around or against a blog post, a live-streamed video, an automated reply from a faceless, rent-seeking organization. Nothing can stop us. We can’t even stop ourselves. But what do we want? And the other thing? You’ll need to be at Web Directions South, for the closing keynote, if you want to find out.
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David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
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Ruth Ellison — Integrating accessibility into design
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
When developing websites or web applications, we often follow the principles of web standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other accessibility guidelines. But is this enough? In this session, Ruth will look at how we can develop accessible web products by taking a holistic approach to web accessibility. She will look at different ways of incorporating accessibility into the design process to produce accessible and useful user experiences. This presentation will focus on the user experience design process by drawing on examples and learnings from Ruth’s work in Government.