A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
You know what blogs and wikis are, and you know your YouTube from your Facebook. But do you know how to make a compelling business case for these technologies? Social media and social networking tools are poised to have as much of an impact on business as they’ve had on the way we communicate with our friends and family online.
Anil Dash, a blogger since 1999 who’s helped thousands of businesses make use of social media through his work at Six Apart, shares real-world examples of how companies are using social media to build their business. Six Apart is the world’s biggest blogging company, behind such platforms as Movable Type, LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad.
And even more important than where technology has been is where it’s going: Learn about cutting-edge technological initiatives like OpenID and OpenSocial, and how these aren’t just about new ways to poke your Facebook friends — they’re business opportunities.
Finally, no change this big happens without thinking about the social and political realities of the business world. What works in convincing your company, your coworkers, or your boss to spend their time and money trying new things? This session will lead a conversation to find out.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Have you ever seen a web site so clear, logical, and exquisitely composed it made you stop in your tracks? Have you wondered how the designer achieved such a stunning and cohesive design?
In this presentation, Kimberly Elam, designer and author of the best-selling “Geometry of Design” and “Typographic Systems” will reveal the mysterious relationships between proportion, visual systems, composition and aesthetics.
Too often excellent conceptual ideas suffer during the process of realization, in large part because the designer did not understand the essential visual principles. This presentation explores these elements and how they work by examining how the use of visual principles informs, even creates, beauty in typographic design, but, more importantly, how you can use these techniques to create cohesiveness in your own design. The wide range of visual examples are both informative and insightful, and any designer can benefit from learning or revisiting the rules governing the basics of typographic design.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
What happens when a designer decides to quit his day job, hang his shingle, and wakes up seven years later nowhere remotely close to where he imagined he would be? This frank, semi-informal discussion on the pros, cons, and potential progressions of a designer’s career
will explore the following:
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Last year, Google released an experimental Greasemonkey API for Gmail: coding hooks that let anyone add CSS and Javascript to Gmail that enhances how it looks and behaves. Why would you want to do this? Why wouldn’t you? Hear how Google’s using Greasemonkey to distribute Gmail development amongst independent web developers–and how those developers are integrating their own product into Gmail — resulting in a Better Gmail for everyone.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
We’ve always had metaphors to understand and design for the Web.
The original conception of the Web was as a library of documents. Our building blocks were derived from spatial ideas: “breadcrumbs,” “visits” and “homepages” were used to understand the medium.
Website-as-application was a new and novel metaphor in the late 1990s. The spatial concept of navigation was replaced by concepts derived from tools: buttons performed actions on data.
These metaphors inspire separate but complementary models of the Web. But the Web in 2008 has some entirely new qualities: more than ever it’s an ecology of separate but highly interconnected services. Its fiercely competitive, rapid development means differentiating innovations are quickly copied and spread. Attention from users is scarce. The fittest websites survive. In this world, what metaphors can be most successfully wielded?
Matt takes as a starting point interaction and product design, with ideas from cybernetics and Getting Things Done. He offers as a metaphor the concept of the Web as experience. That is, treating a website as a dynamic entity – a flowchart of motivations that both provides a continuously satisfying experience for the user… and helps the website grow.
From seeing what kind of websites this model provokes, we’ll see whether it also helps illuminate some of the Web’s coming design challenges: the blending of the Web with desktop software and physical devices; the particular concerns of small groups; and what the next movement might bring.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
Information visualization is becoming more than a set of tools and technologies and techniques to understand large data sets. It is emerging as a medium in its own right, with a wide range of expressive potential.
Stamen’s work in visualization and mapping is among the most high profile online today, with the live dynamic displays at Digg Labs and Cabspotting being just two of many examples. The studio’s approach is deeply pragmatic, always starting with real data and aiming to work with graphics on screen as soon as possible. Though all analysis is a work in progress, a project is usually finished when it shows something nobody has seen before, or builds a vocabulary for describing a system, or offers more questions than answers. And then the process begins again.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
What does Web 2.0 mean and, specifically, what does it mean for the future of governments? Tara Hunt has been speaking all over the world, talking to government audiences on this subject. She believes that Web 2.0 has very little to do with the technology and everything to do with people. Her talk will cover the main tenets of Web 2.0: openness, collaboration and community and what it means for government.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
Mobile technology is poised to revolutionize how we gather information. By 2010 half the population of the planet will have access to the internet through a mobile device, making the mobile web an essential part of our lives. Yet the mobile industry has few if any resources to help would-be mobile developers from diving in other than applied experience from within the industry.
Brian Fling dicusses the mobile ecosystem in Canada and abroad, how you go about developing an integrated mobile web strategy, mobile design and development principles and best practices, and most importantly, practical techniques and information to start creating mobile websites today.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
Security design is an important, but often neglected, component of system design. In this session, Douglas Crockford, creator of Javascript Object Notation, will outline the security issues that must be considered in the architecture of Ajax applications.
The design of the browser did not anticipate the needs of multiparty applications. The browser’s security model frustrates useful activities and allows some very dangerous activities. This talk will look at the small set of options before us that will determine the future of the Web.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
User interface design is an iterative process – the design of Digg and Pownce have been a study in evolution and adaptation. This talk will inspect the why and how of these iterations by looking at specific case studies from the two projects as well as previous client work Daniel has tackled.
The case studies will examine specific user interface challenges that have arisen and will chop them up into their various bits. How do I identify a challenge? What is the best approach for getting started? How do I solve the problem conceptually and technically? How will I know if I solved the challenge successfully? Case studies have been selected that are especially pertinent outside of their specific contexts to help you in your everyday UI design.
The presentation will focus on design inspiration, decision-making processes, technical solutions, and learning from missteps as part of a designer’s iterative process.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
We’re at an exciting time in the development of web-based interfaces — along with a maturing front-end toolkit (CSS & JavaScript), there are so many technologies, trends and exciting ideas emerging that are enabling us to push the boundaries of interface design.
Author, designer and code cowboy Cameron Adams will explore some of these areas and how they will apply to our development of online interfaces, including: the possibilities of front-end customisation, application interfaces, browser-native vector graphics, and the general duty of all web developers to make things interesting.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Everyone wants an “intuitive” interface: the users, the designers, and the content publishers. But building them is hard. User Interface Engineering’s recent research has given insight into why it’s hard and how to get past major obstacles.
To build an “intuitive” interface, a designer has to do two things: (1) Take complete advantage of what the user already knows, so what they see is completely familiar to them and (2) make the act of learning anything new completely imperceptible to the user. It turns out, if the interface requires the user to realize they are learning something, the “intuitive” label disappears instantly.
In this talk, Jared will show:
How users need both tool knowledge and domain knowledge to complete their tasks
How simple problems with designs can cause big problems for users
What successful teams are doing to create experiences that delight
Jared will show examples from Microsoft Word, MSN, Google Talk, Flickr, Avis, and many more.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Dubbed “the King of Web Standards” by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the group and movement that brought standards to our browsers. Through A List Apart Magazine, his books, and endless advocacy, he brought wisdom to our industry and benefits awareness to the people who approve our budgets. Ten years into the web standards movement, how are we doing? What agreements have we reached? What battles no longer need to be fought? What hurdles still prevent us from reaching standards and accessibility utopia?
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
It seems like there’s a new Ajax library or JavaScript framework coming out every week, and there probably is! Which is the best one to pick? Will you be up the creek without a paddle if you choose the wrong one?
“Working with Ajax Frameworks” will delve into some common Ajax design patterns and how various frameworks can be used to meet those needs. We’ll also take a look at how we can keep our own code flexible as we bridge the gap between it and the various frameworks.
Have you ever seen a web site so clear, logical, and exquisitely composed it made you stop in your tracks? Have you wondered how the designer achieved such a stunning and cohesive design?
What happens when a designer decides to quit his day job, hang his shingle, and wakes up seven years later nowhere remotely close to where he imagined he would be? This frank, semi-informal discussion on the pros, cons, and potential progressions of a designer’s career
Last year, Google released an experimental Greasemonkey API for Gmail: coding hooks that let anyone add CSS and Javascript to Gmail that enhances how it looks and behaves. Why would you want to do this? Why wouldn’t you? Hear how Google’s using Greasemonkey to distribute Gmail development amongst independent web developers–and how those developers are integrating their own product into Gmail — resulting in a Better Gmail for everyone.
We’ve always had metaphors to understand and design for the Web.
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
Everyone wants an “intuitive” interface: the users, the designers, and the content publishers. But building them is hard. User Interface Engineering’s recent research has given insight into why it’s hard and how to get past major obstacles.
Dubbed “the King of Web Standards” by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the group and movement that brought standards to our browsers. Through A List Apart Magazine, his books, and endless advocacy, he brought wisdom to our industry and benefits awareness to the people who approve our budgets. Ten years into the web standards movement, how are we doing? What agreements have we reached? What battles no longer need to be fought? What hurdles still prevent us from reaching standards and accessibility utopia?
It seems like there’s a new Ajax library or JavaScript framework coming out every week, and there probably is! Which is the best one to pick? Will you be up the creek without a paddle if you choose the wrong one?