• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Scott Byrant
• About Simon Wright

Presentation slides

Session description

Change is never a smooth process. How do know when disruption is useful and how do you cope with the feedback on it? Recently news.com.au, a national news website with large numbers of daily visitors, underwent a major upgrade which tore down existing and perhaps “expected” ways of presenting news. At the heart of the redesign was a desire for change that motivated and challenged every aspect of the team’s design thinking and process.

In this co-piloted session Simon and Scott will fly you over the territories of change they encountered on the project, ones common to many redesign projects. They’ll descend through the experiences that came out of the redesign: fundamentals like stakeholders, requirements and their process for user experience architect and designer working side by side. Sprinkled with some of the twitter and facebook feedback the project received, they’ll touch down on the sticky issues of dealing with feedback and how to suck it up and utilise passionate user and stakeholder feedback.

About Scott Byrant

Scott Bryant is a Senior Experience Architect working on online and cross platform news media and classifieds, most recently for news.com.au within the User Standards and Innovative Technology Team for News Digital Media. He spends his time working across product, design and technology teams utilising design and research to create engaging user experiences for news media.

His career began as a visual artist before working in university and local government libraries, and finally into new media. He completed two Masters Degrees, in Media Art and Information Studies (while working as a Project Manager, Content Producer and IA).

Upon returning from the US working on the Ask Jeeves innovative search interface he concentrated on User Experience, He continues to lecture casually in information and interaction design at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Follow Scott on Twitter: @ScotTheLot

About Simon Wright

Simon Wright is the Art Director of news.com.au, leading the design and front-end development team. He’s responsible for the brand’s design and development across all digital platforms, and also works closely with journalists on new ways to tell stories online. As someone who’s passionate about design, the web, media and well-designed chairs, being a part of a news website’s a near perfect fit (if it was possible to do this while climbing up a rockface, he’d never leave).

In a previous life Simon was based in Perth and wore the many hats of small business, mostly the propeller-topped one of designer/front-end dev and sometimes the dull beige hat of The Guy Who Does The Finance.

Follow Simon on Twitter: @diversionary

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Transcript and additional resources
• Session description
• About Mike Kuniavsky

Presentation slides

Session description

Let’s start with the assumption that computing and networking are as cheap to incorporate into product designs as plastic and aluminum. Anything can tweet, everything knows about everything. The cloud extends from smart speed bumps to exurban data systems, passing through us in the process. We’re basically there technologically today, and over the next [pick a date range] years, we’ll be there distribution-wise.

Here’s the issue: now that we have this power what do we do with it? Yes we can now watch the latest movies on our phones while ignoring the rest of the world (if you believe telco ads) and know more about peripheral acquaintances than you ever wanted. But, really, is that it? Is it Angry Birds all the way down?

Of course not. Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means.

This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large.

About Mike Kuniavsky

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products.

Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikekuniavsky

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Relly Annett-Baker

Presentation slides

Session description

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.

In this session, Relly will show you how you can bolster sales and reflect your company and client’s values through just a few well-chosen words. Designers? Do you get lumped with the interaction copy? Developers? Do you get left trying to make meaningful error messages? Ecommerce managers? Do you want an easy increase in sales? This session will help. It will be a lot of fun. You should definitely come.

About Relly Annett-Baker

Relly Annett-​​Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Supernice Studio, she is employed as live-​​in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again.

Follow Relly on Twitter: @RellyAB

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Paula Bray

Presentation slides

Coming soon.

Session description

The Powerhouse Museum has been working towards making its digital initiatives widely accessible and to a broader audience, online and onsite, to enable a connected digital future. With a blossoming of blogging, significant Flickr and Facebook presences the Museum has been developing great connections with a new audience that has led the institution to rethink access with an emphasis on the importance of community connections and participation. This thinking has had an impact on the Museum’s Strategic Plan and several digital initiatives are now driving change within the organisation.

The Museum has experienced incredible connections, citizen research and innovative digital outcomes such as MOB’s augmented reality mobile app using geo-located historic images from the Tyrrell collection, Paul Hagon’s Google Street view mashup, Digital NZ’s integration of related items from the Museum’s collection and the Powerhouse Museum’s collection download. Releasing data and images under a Creative Commons license has allowed the Museum to make the collection available for use and re-use. Social media initiatives are being adopted and aligned to the right platforms for appropriate audience effectiveness for exhibitions like ‘80s are back’ and ‘Trainspotting’ exhibitions. All these digital projects are allowing the Museum to evaluate, experiment, learn from and progress future initiatives leading to a connected digital future — as well as change the DNA of the Museum itself.

About Paula Bray

Paula Bray is the Manager of the Visual and Digitisation Services department at the Powerhouse Museum that includes: Photography, The Image Resource Centre, The Photo Library and Rights and Permissions and Audio Visuals. Paula is responsible for managing the digital collections to the highest standard whilst coordinating photographic and AV projects for exhibitions, publications, events and the website. Paula runs a blog for the Museum called Photo of the Day and manages the Museum’s two Flickr accounts and numerous public groups.

Paula has also worked as a photographer in the Arts for many years including: the Art Gallery of NSW, The State Library of NSW and The Australian National Maritime Museum. Paula has worked as a freelance photographer and had several exhibitions of her work including a solo show at Blender Gallery in 2007. Her work has been collected by the College of Fine Arts and private collectors. Paula studied photography at the College of Fine Arts for 5 years doing a Bachelor of Art and a Master of Art whilst also receiving the Agfa Gevaert award for the most innovative use of photography upon graduating.

Follow Paula on Twitter: @paulabray

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Tatham Oddie

Presentation slides

Session description

Web standards might be second nature to all of us here, but they don’t always fly so easily in the enterprise. Obscure browsers and CIOs watching their bottom line can often leave a passionate development team feeling stifled. In this session we’ll look at how a number of large scale websites successfully adopted new standards and opened their content to more audiences and devices than ever before. We’ll explore techniques for deciding what client technologies to use on your projects, how to drive the adoption of newer techniques and how not to leave your audience behind. We’ll even talk about how to make all of this possible with Internet Explorer in the room.

About Tatham Oddie

Tatham Oddie is a technical strategist and roaming consultant. For the third year in a row he is a recipient of the Microsoft-issued "Most Valuable Professional" award, and a regular presenter and participant at conferences and industry groups throughout Australia, New Zealand and North America. His business experience includes the launch of a successful creative agency, a fashion retail and PR business, and is now focussed on the development of Tixi - a niche ticketing agency.

Follow Tatham on Twitter: @tathamoddie

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Josh Williams

Presentation slides

Session description

Today’s web is being defined more than ever by buzzwords, catchphrases, fads and trends. Startups are being created for startups sake, standards are being hijacked by so-called “social media gurus,” and investors are piling on one after another looking to hop on the next big wave. And we, the designers, developers and innovators actually building the web, are left to wonder if we’re still in the drivers seat.

During this brisk discussion we’ll separate fads from the future, debate native apps versus the mobile web, take an honest look at the hype behind geo-location, then take a step back to ask ourselves where the web—and we ourselves—are going. Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride!

About Josh Williams

Josh Williams is CEO and co-founder of Gowalla, a mobile and Web service that gives people around the world a new way to communicate and express themselves through the everyday places and extraordinary settings they enjoy. Gowalla empowers everyone to capture and share their journey as they go while following the happenings of family and friends. Josh is responsible for building and growing the business while leading the product design team. Gowalla was launched in 2009 and is backed by notable investors including Greylock Partners, Alsop-Louie Partners, Founders Fund, and other prominent angel investors.

Josh is a self-taught designer and artist who has been creating online for over 15 years. Josh loves mid-century modern design, architecture, skiing, snowboarding and longboarding. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two young daughters.

Follow Josh on Twitter: @JW

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Grant Young

Presentation slides

Session description

People are redefining the relationship they have with the organisations they interact with, empowered by social technologies. They are seeking:

• Human-ness: as organisations have grown in size and become more and more depersonalised, people are wanting more human interactions and personal response
• Trust: from greenwashing to the GFC, the market’s trust has been eroded — people are looking for organisations to say what they mean and mean what they say
• Co-creation: people are taking a more active role in developing the products and services that they use. And if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they will often create it themselves
• Responsibility: people want to engage with organisations that are genuinely addressing the complex issues of sustainability and wellbeing

Building a brand, service or product offering that resonates in this new “economy of meaning” requires a rethinking of an organisation’s relationship to the “market” — their customers, stakeholders and the environment.

In this presentation Grant Young will examine how innovative organisations are using social technologies and design methods to create multi-dimensional value — both for the organisational and community — and will explore the themes that underpin the examples with a view to applying them in your context.

About Grant Young

Grant is founder of social innovation consultancy Zumio. In this role he combines his 15+ years' experience in online and social technology with his passion for sustainability to help organisations harness these increasingly prominent market forces.

Zumio helps its clients — spanning the commercial, government and non-profit sectors — build platforms for social engagement that simultaneously deliver organisational value while increasing societal wellbeing and sustainability. Zumio has recently undertaken projects for the Cancer Institute NSW, the Inspire Foundation, VicRoads and Saasu.

Prior to founding Zumio, Grant produced projects for award-winning sustainable design agency Digital Eskimo and managed online communications and social media strategy for conservation organisation WWF-Australia, including for the inaugural Earth Hour (2007). He has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting (Saasu, Climate Friendly).

Follow Grant on Twitter: @grantyoung

• Audio recording of session
• Session description
• About Matt Balara

Session description

Considering how many businesses depend upon the web for their income, it’s shocking how poorly designed most shops are. Not only aesthetically, but also as far as ease of use, retail psychology and user experience are concerned. How can we design better shops? If customers enjoy shopping more, won’t our clients earn more? Can forms be fun? What’s the psychology behind online purchases? How can online and offline buying experiences be harmonised? Matt Balara will share some of his 15 years of experience designing web sites, the vast majority of which have sold something or other.

About Matt Balara

Matt Balara is a freelance web designer, was a child prodigy violinist and is unintentionally bilingual, all of which has been vitally important to his success in designing for the web since 1993. Despite years of experience, he still can’t understand why so many websites are so useless and ugly.

Follow Matt on Twitter: @MattBalara