Web Directions » usability

Aaron Weyenberg — Getting Real: Pros and Pitfalls of Realistic UI Design

Guy Leech — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:10:52 +0000

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 13th.

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About Aaron Weyenberg

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A new generation of touch devices have proven to be exciting playgrounds for app designers. And with every new product we create, we have the opportunity to offer the most clear and efficient experience for our users. Recent UI trends often lean to realistic, faithful representations of analog controls and features. These designs can offer advantages, but also come with their own set of hazards.

In this session Aaron will lead you on a tour of current trends and practices, examining the strengths and drawbacks that realism brings. We’ll talk about things like mental models, innovation and usability as they relate to lifelike UI. Finally, Aaron will share some pragmatic guidelines to keep in mind as you build the next wave of mobile and tablet apps.

About Aaron Weyenberg

Aaron Weyenberg is the UX Lead at TED in New York. Over the last 13 years Aaron has served in key roles at a range of companies, from small design agencies to fledgling startups to internationally recognized media brands. As an Art Director for ESPN, Aaron guided best practices, developed core UI components and designed pioneering real time game and scoring apps. His work appears in places like Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions and Tripwire Magazine.

His offline hobbies involve learning about social psychology and human behavior, photography, reading, and an intrepid quest to find the perfect iPod earphones.

Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aweyenberg

Relly Annett-Baker — All The Small Things

Guy Leech — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:50:59 +0000

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 14th.

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About Relly Annett-Baker

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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

Stephen P Anderson — Keynote: Sustaining Passionate Users

Guy Leech — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:37:58 +0000

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 13th.

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About Stephen P Anderson

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Yes, business applications can be made fun and gamelike. No, points, levels and badges are not the way to create sustained interest.

While many sites have added superficial gaming elements to make interactions more engaging, the companies that “get it” have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again.

So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will share common patterns from game design, learning theories, and neuroscience to reveal what motivates—and demotivates—people over the long haul.

About Stephen P Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playful and effective online experiences. He’s currently writing a book about “seductive interactions” that will be published by New Riders in 2011.

Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephenanderson

Wendy Chisholm & Charles Pritchard — Universal Access: now for apps as well

Guy Leech — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 06:49:34 +0000

Web Directions Unplugged 2011, Seattle, May 12th 2:40pm.

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Coming soon.

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Many web designers and developers are motivated to create accessible sites because more people can use the site, more people can find the site, and more devices can access the site. As we migrate to HTML5 and CSS to develop applications, we further the opportunity to create far more inclusive results, no matter the preferences of your audience and no matter why they have those preferences: are they driving? riding in a bumpy bus? accessing content in the sun? or might they be blind?

About the presneters

Wendy Chrisholm

In this session, Wendy Chisholm, co-editor of WCAG 1.0, author of Universal Design for Web Applications, and one of the leading experts in accessibility and universal access helps you understand the challenges to and solutions for creating accessible apps with web technologies. Wendy will cover WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), accessibility and HTML5, as well as some common accessibility pitfalls when designing and developing applications, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.Wendy Chisholm is an author, activist and developer. She co-wrote “Universal Design for Web Applications” with Matt May (O’Reilly, 2008), and before that co-edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0–the basis of most web accessibility policies. She has focused on inclusive web design since 1995. Being both a developer (B.S. in Computer Science) and a Human Factors Engineer (M.S. in Industrial Engineering/Human Factors), Wendy bridges communication between developers and designers. As a staff for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 6 years, she helped synchronize work on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with developments in internationalization and mobile design.

She is currently a Senior Strategist at Microsoft, where she works to make all web-related applications throughout the company accessible.

Her personal mission is to find elegant solutions that remove barriers that prevent everyone from participating fully in society. “I am an advocate for people with disabilities, people who are injured (especially vets) and people who are aging (i.e., all of us). I want to make inclusion a reality–both online and off”.

Wendy’s photo is courtesy of Matt.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @wendyabc

Charles Pritchard

Charles Pritchard has founded several startups during his fifteen years as a web developer. A web standards advocate and an early adoptee of HTML5, he has produced several canvas implementations enabling web applications to run on a wide variety of virtual machines. His current focus is on creating and maintaining accessible applications as a critical component of software quality.

Daniels Lee™ — Designing for the 10 foot UI

Guy Leech — Sun, 29 May 2011 00:14:46 +0000

Web Directions Unplugged 2011, Seattle, May 13th 2:25pm.

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About Daniels Lee™

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The web platform has already taken a center role in our desktop and mobile computing lives. The next space for the web platform to take over is the biggest screen in your house — the TV in your living room. However, designing for television has its own set of demands, different than designing for desktop and mobile implementations. 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.

About Daniels Lee™

Daniels is a Developer Programs Engineer who’s had the pleasure of working with several developer communities since he joined the team in 2006. After starting with iGoogle gadgets, he worked closely with advertisers and agencies via Gadget Ads, then onto Geo APIs focusing on V2 to V3 migration, and now Google TV. He’s not afraid to publicly confess his love for JavaScript and recognizes its profound ability to make the web more interactive. With a growing love for HTML5 technology, sky’s the limit. On his off time, he enjoys cultivating authentic relationships while always pursuing a greater sense of self and awareness.

Follow Daniels on Twitter: @dannon81

Aarron Walter — Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design

Guy Leech — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:52:44 +0000

Web Directions USA 2010, Loews Atlanta Hotel, September 23 10.45am.

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About Aarron Walter

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Humans, though cute and cuddly, are not without their flaws, which makes designing for them a challenge. By understanding how the wet, mushy processor works in these hairy little devils, you can design interfaces and web experiences that will have them hopelessly devoted to your brand.

In 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.

About Aarron Walter

By day, Aarron Walter is the mild-mannered lead user experience designer for MailChimp, and by night he leads a team of education crusaders in The Web Standards Project who are the magic behind The WaSP InterACT curriculum.

Aarron is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond, and is a co-author and project manager of the book InterACT With Web Standards: A holistic approach to Web design.

Follow Aarron on Twitter: @aarron.

Juliette Melton — Remote research: Running effective remote studies

Guy Leech — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:34:20 +0000

Web Directions USA 2010, Loews Atlanta Hotel, September 24 10.10am.

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About Juliette Melton

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Remote 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.

About Juliette Melton

Juliette Melton is a user experience researcher and design strategist based in San Francisco. Her background in web development and product management gives her a practical perspective on how to conduct effective user experience research. She advocates building products that delight users while supporting organizational realities.

Juliette holds a master’s in education from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She runs Deluxify, a boutique UX consultancy, writes about her various projects at juliemelton.com, and makes lots of terrariums.

Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j

Lisa Herrod — The Age of Awareness

Guy Leech — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:41:55 +0000

Web Directions South 2010, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 15 11.45am.

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About Lisa Herrod

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Inclusive design. It might sound like a rebranding exercise from the Web Accessibility Marketing Team, but it isn’t. For years inclusive design and research practices have been applied to a wide variety of disciplines from industrial design to the arts, the built environment and more.

What can we learn from this? And how can we apply it to the digital environment in which we work?

Social 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.

So starting with the web, we’ll reinvigorate our passion for diversity and inclusion. Let’s declare this The Age of Awareness!

About Lisa Herrod

Lisa is the Principal User Experience consultant at Scenario Seven with over ten years of hands-on experience on the web. She has a background in standards based design and development with the last 7 years focusing on design research, usability, accessibility and user experience strategy.

Lisa believes in an inclusive, holistic approach to user experience design that permeates every layer of a site and every role on a team. Her clients range from small, non-profit organisations through to large multinationals such as Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, Sydney Opera House, Qantas and the Brooklyn Museum NYC.

Lisa is an experienced lecturer and conference presenter having spoken at conferences both locally and abroad in the UK, NZ and the US. She's a sporadic blogger and a crazy lover of whippets, with two little ones of her own...

Follow Lisa on Twitter: @scenariogirl

Juliette Melton — Running effective remote studies

Guy Leech — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:32:37 +0000

Web Directions South 2010, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 15 10.45am.

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About Juliette Melton

Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j

Shane Morris — Interaction design school 101

Guy Leech — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:57:52 +0000

Web Directions South 2010, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 15 1.40pm.

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About Shane Morris

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When I first picked up Matthew Frederick’s book: “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” I was struck by the number of principles of architecture that can be directly applied to interaction design, but also disillusioned by the fact that Interaction Designers generally do not have a similar body of knowledge to draw on. Sure we have lots of “process”, but relatively little “wisdom” of the sort found in this book.

The field of Interaction Design isn’t very old — If we’re talking purely software interface design, then let’s say about 25 years old. No surprise, then, that we borrow heavily (and unashamedly) from a range of other, more established, disciplines. We try to compensate for our relative lack of a history, tradition or body of knowledge by leveraging others’. That’s entirely appropriate — but how far does it get us? Interaction Design is an essential component of the delivery of virtually any product or service today. Many of us may already be at the point where we interact with more digital products in a day than we do physical products, and many of the most important transactions in our lives are entirely virtual. Maybe Interaction Design needs to be taken a bit more seriously?

In 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.

About Shane Morris

Shane Morris is one of Australia’s most respected user experience professionals. Through consulting, mentoring and training he has helped organisations create compelling digital experiences since 1991. In that time he has worked on desktop applications, internet applications, mobile user interfaces, physical devices and web sites. Shane has taught user experience topics around the world and is a key contributor to “101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School” at ixd101.com.

Shane has worked with companies like Microsoft, Lonely Planet, M&C Saatchi, Cochlear, Amnesia Razorfish and Sensis - helping creative and technical professionals collaborate to create services that empower, inspire and reward. His passion is transforming the complex and constrained into the simple and powerful. Not just because it's valuable endeavour, but because it's hard - and therefore immensely rewarding.

Shane's experience includes:

Director of Automatic Studio (Formerly Echo Interaction Design)
One of Microsoft's first User Experience Evangelists world-wide
General Manager and Principal Consultant at The Hiser Group