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.
In this talk, Relly will show you how narrative runs as deep through websites as it does through your favourite TV dramas, video games, comic books or musicals, and explain how you can write decent help for your users, define personality for your site and create documents to support everyone involved in creating that experience.
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.
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.
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!
This session will take you through building a location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-platform techniques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fallbacks options for devices that don’t have geolocation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-friendly map with local points of interest.
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.
Most apps suck. Making an app that doesn’t suck is hard work and requires uncompromising focus. We call apps that don’t suck “usable”. However, in the Age of User Experience, making apps that are merely usable is no longer good enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!
Ethan Marcotte Inventor of 'Responsive Web Design'
