Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Daniels Lee(tm) – Designing for the 10 foot UI

Photo of Daniels Lee™This talk outlines the most important best practices to keep in mind when designing web applications for TV. We’ll cover issues like directional pad navigation, user interface design for TV, color issues, and zooming, as well as discussing some unique opportunities for TV applications.

Aarron Walter – Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design

Aarron Walter PortraitIn this talk, Aarron Walter will introduce you to the emotional usability principle – a design axiom that identifies a strong connection between human emotion and perceived usability. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn practical interface design techniques that will make your websites and applications more engaging to the humans they serve.

Lisa Herrod – The Age of Awareness

Lisa Herrod PortraitSocial innovation, service design and even augmented reality are now presenting real and interesting opportunities for us as traditional web practitioners. Combined with inclusive design practices, this opens up a fantastic world of change for both us and the people for whom we design.

Juliette Melton – Running effective remote studies

Juliette Melton PortraitRemote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.

Shane Morris – Interaction design school 101

Shane Morris PortraitIn this talk I’d like to reflect on my almost 20 years as an interaction designer – the things I’ve learned along the way, and the things I wish I would have learned at Interaction Design School, if such a thing had existed back then. Along the way we’ll review some of the 101 things we all should have learned in Interaction Design School, sourced from ixd101.com (the blog I share with Matt Morphett), and beyond.

Matt Balara – Flogging design: best practices in online shop design

Matt Balara PortraitConsidering 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.

Steve Souders — Even Faster Web Sites

Steve Souders PortraitWeb 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.

Teale Shapcott – From ordered to managed usability in an Agile environment

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 11.45am.

Teale Shapcott PortraitUsability practice closely resembles the traditional software development approach in its formality and insistence on up-front analysis and design. Usability and design is an iterative process, but not agile. So how can design and usability be effectively embedded into an agile development environment? In this presentation, the tension between agile development and usability is examined and how Suncorp design and development teams overcame the challenges to bridge the gulf between these approaches.

Derek Featherstone – Accessibility beyond compliance

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 10.45am.

Portrait of Derek Featherstone New technologies for web applications open up interactions to a highly sophisticated level. Learn how these new technologies can help designers move beyond simply complying with accessibility rules to create applications that work for everyone.

Lisa Herrod – Usability: more than skin deep

A presentation given at at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Lisa Herrod PortraitWeb Usability is far more complex than user testing and interaction design alone. And while interface design is an important consideration, there’s more to a usable site than what’s on the surface.

We all know the importance of accessibility and web standards, so let’s take that knowledge one step further and into the realm of usability. In this session Lisa Herrod will redefine the common definition of usability by introducing a greater focus on accessibility and web standards. By taking a more holistic approach you will soon see why usability is more than skin deep.

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I had an absolute blast, learnt so much, and met so many great people

Carmen Chung Software engineer, Valiant Finance