What do you want?
Sorry if we appear to be trolling for comments of late - you know it’s not our style.
We all know user generated content is all the rage. So here is your chance to help generate a conference - Web Directions South. We’ve done a lot of work thinking about the kind of content, the subjects, and the speakers we’re interested in for 2007 - but we aren’t omniscient - so, we’d love to hear from you about the kinds of things you’d like to see at Web Directions South
What subject areas are interesting you right now?
What speakers would you love to see?
What kind of areas would you be interested in attending in depth, whole day workshops focussed on?
We’d also love to know how you’d describe what you do IA, designer, developer, or any others? Or of course a combination of one or more - after all we all wear plenty of hats.
Love to hear any or all of this, as we start finalizing our plans for Web Directions South.
What we can tell you is:
It will be on - so keep that last week of September free.
We’ll be letting you know a lot more soon.
Thanks so much in advance,
maxine and john
Benson
February 27th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
What subject areas are interesting you right now?
- XHTML 2, CSS3, Web UI standards and testing.
What speakers would you love to see?
- Steve Krug, Doug Bowman (as always), Roger Johansson, Jason Santa Maria.
What kind of areas would you be interested in attending in depth, whole day workshops focussed on?
- Agile approach to UI prototyping and testing.
I’m a UI designer, usability & accessibly consultant, BA in application design and IA.
I can’t wait to see the list of speakers and workshops. How about WE07 (or future versions) coming to Melbourne? :)
Dmitry Baranovskiy
February 27th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
• microformats, advanced JavaScript, XSLT, design, typography
• Tantek Çelik, Brian Suda, Roger Johansson, Jason Santa Maria, Jeremy Keith, Dave Shea, Molly Holzschlag, Andy Clarke, Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Dean Edwards and heaps of aussie speakers of course. :)
• Whatever with word “advanced” in front
• I am shy web developer
Cheryl
February 27th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I’ve love to see more of the “fluffy” side of online, so online advertising, viral, online marketing strategy, search engine marketing, user centred design, etc.
Might be interesting to have anything from the business side too, such as creating a startup, promoting yourself, pitfalls, etc, although I’m not sure if this is the right forum.
In terms of speakers, you guys always do a great job of unearthing new talent - Kelly Goto is always brilliant and interesting, as are the “usual suspects” listed above.
I have many hats but predominantly online marketing and management right now.
Cheryl
February 27th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
forgot one - lots more on interaction design, especially workshops.
Brendan
February 27th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I’d love to see some emphasis on *emerging* and up and coming standards (such as XHTML 2, XForms, CSS3 etc.). Unfortunately, that might be the only way I convince my boss to pay for my trip to the conference this year!
I work across a variety of areas, but at this point in time there is lots of discussion about page/screen prototyping and generation from meta-data, rich client vs thin client frameworks for intranet applications (extending beyond web technologies).
Nick Cowie
February 27th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
What subject areas are interesting you right now?
mobile web, user generated content, WCAG 2.0 if it makes it.
What speakers would you love to see?
Anybody who knows their stuff and can inspire me and make me think. I will give you my list in Vegas John after SXSW and the IAsummit.
Australians who will be on that list include yourself, Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, Donna Maurer, Alexander Johannesen (his talk on topic maps at OZ-IA inspired me and make me think) and Ben Winter-Giles (not because I seen him speak, but just know he could do a great presentation on managing large web projects).
What kind of areas would you be interested in attending in depth, whole day workshops focussed on?
user generated content, mobile web, how people really use websites.
We’d also love to know how you’d describe what you do IA, designer, developer, or any others?
A variety of hats including IA, user centred design, project management, front end developer and herder of cats.
Donna Maurer
February 27th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
What subject areas are interesting you right now?
- Designing with structured data. Microformats, complex IA, rich interfaces for complex data. Patterns. Rich internet app design.
What speakers would you love to see?
- I’ll think about this and email you ;)
What kind of areas would you be interested in attending in depth, whole day workshops focussed on?
- Anything with ‘advanced’ in the title from presenters who actually know how to teach (not just to lecture). More on the design side than technology side.
We’d also love to know how you’d describe what you do IA, designer, developer, or any others?
- IA & interaction designer
Benedict Wyss
February 28th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Who:
Mark Pesce - Vision of the future, knowing roughly where your going is always handy. That way we are inspired and energised!
What:
Ethics maybe, as an idea. I don’t have any specifics in mind but I ponder it when with everything we race ahead and don’t consider ramifications. This subject is more of a downer so may not work well for an event that basically inspires everyone. Is there a way to spice ethics up inorder to make it more appealing?
Kat
February 28th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Disclaimer: I’m a little bit geeky.
There are so many web developers out there that don’t have formal software training, and people like me who have some formal software training but still have some gaps.
I would love to see something similar to a workshop/talk where they create an imaginary site with data stored in databases, and pulled out and presented to the user, keeping layers (view, logic, business, etc) separated, with UML diagrams, explained in PLAIN ENGLISH. All those pattern descriptions that are written in Academese that disclaim their explanation is not for those who aren’t particularly familiar with design patterns really bug me.
You could choose pretty much an language (PHP, ASP, etc). It’s geeky, but I would turn up to that.
Another topic could be security for web apps.
Lachlan Hunt
February 28th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Well, I see XHTML2 mentioned twice above. I’d rather it not be presented, or for it to be presented as a comparison with (X)HTML5. I’d rather have an emphasis on the one that major browsers will actually be implementing: HTML5! Perhaps some practical demonstrations of the new features that can already be used today. Maybe try and get Hixie, the editor of HTML5, over here to talk about it, or maybe even myself. :-)
Kay Smoljak
March 1st, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Ooh… I’m excited already! I would also like to see more “advanced” topics, and some hard geekery (JavaScript, XSLT etc) as well as fluffier topics like design, inspiration, ideology and the business of web standards.
Kat
March 6th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Also, I’d love to see Laurel Papworth back, she was brilliant, amazing, stunning, inspirational, educational, entertaining, informative and awesome. I personally rated her as one of the top speakers from Web Directions South in 06.
I think I would like to hear about the ‘hidden’ topic of X-Forms. It seems as though they may be right around the corner yet I know very little about them. It feels like they’re sneaking up on us and wanting to catch us unawares (like teddy bears).
Maybe the subject of the web from mobile phones - that’s where they’re predicting the major change will come from, right? There seems to be a lot of discussion in terms of optimum site structure for mobile phones. How to design for mobile phones and the desktop (maybe that’s an IA topic?)
The use of SVG in web design (maybe a bit too forwards thinking) because it will be included in the Gecko rendering engine v1.9 and released for Firefox 3.0 (whenever that is). And if you go by Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS ideas, we should start using it to create an optimum experience for those that can.
Microformats!:) CSS3 - there seems to be quite a lot of hidden jewels in that one.
Laurel Papworth
March 6th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Wow Kat thanks! *hugs* I SWEAR I didn’t pay her to say that!
There’s some huge moves afoot in online community software - I simply can’t keep up. Now Cisco is buying up Fifth Across/Apart/Squared and other community software products, by September it will be all the rage. Hmmm speakers? Let’s hear speakers from an open source standpoint (Joomla/Drupal) and also from a big fuckoff expensive one. Oh yeah, and me. :)
Sheri Bigelow
March 13th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Right now, I am interested in stats–i.e. how is social media delivering a return on investment, or is it? I am interested in balancing search optimization/marketing with best practices in design. I am interested in analytics. I am interested in stories based on experience like the 2006 web app success story about Campaign Monitor.
I think the obvious speaker veterans mixed with fresh new perspectives would be ideal. At WD07, I heard several people say that Kelly Goto and Cameron Moll were particularly good speakers. I really enjoyed Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone’s presentation. And, Jared Spool’s talk was very good. Based on the positive comments here, I’d love to hear a presentation by Laurel Papworth. I just read Steve Krug’s book; it would be cool to hear from him. In addition, it might be cool to have a panel session with site reviews.
I would be interested in whole day workshops about effective usability studies (how to run them, how to report them), maybe site design process from start to finish (analysis to analytics), search engine optimization, and e-commerce best practices. In order for the workshops to be successful, I think they should include some hands on work instead of just being an all day lecture.
Gary Barber
March 15th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Been thinking on this one. Hence the late comment.
-Selling usability and accessibility against a tight budget
-Navigation systems without menus (tags, search, dynamic menu generation)
-What next in standards and should we care.
-What’s Beyond microformats
-Web patterns (I have an interest in this one, even if its not progressed much that I know of),
-Some search engine optimization goodness.
Workshops usability, design inspiration, XSLT, IA.
Mainly into front end development/design (with part time backend development).
Speakers (this is hard): “The Featherstone”, Andy Clarke, Steve Krug, Donna Maurer, Laurel Papworth, Ben Winter-Giles (if you can talk him into it), Kathy Sierra, Veerle Pieters, Dan Cederholm, and talk Vicki into presenting too :)
and getting a few new startups to talk would be good to.
Sander
March 26th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Pretty late to the party here, but I finally finished reminiscing on (and editing photos of) Web Directions North, which made me decide to look in.
One of the things speakers at conferences seem to do is trying to cover for the entire range of possible qualifications and backgrounds in the audience, and thus keep their talks very general. So, I’d like to echo Dmitry’s request above, and see some talks that say “okay, in here you’re assumed to know all the basics” and specifically go into _advanced_ techniques, ideally featuring cutting edge code examples and such that no one feels need to be explained. DOM Scripting in particular is an area that could really benefit from this.
Another subject I personally am really interested in would be a comparison of server-side technologies from a client-side developer’s point of view. There’s so many frameworks - and just languages themselves - which generate HTML to make development ‘easier’ for developers, but a lot of this seems to have never heard of web standards. Think of the “easy” forms modules in Asp.NET or ColdFusion with their absolutely atrocious output, or even think of the nl2br() in PHP which generates <br /> (or ? - this comment area needs a preview button so I can see which’ll come out right) and thus is useless for generating real HTML, rather than fake XHTML. So, which languages and frameworks out there have which features that’ll allow you to build real world standards compliant websites efficiently - and conversely, if you’re forced to use a specific language, what are the ways in which you can negate the bad of that language and get the job done efficiently after all? That’s very much developer oriented, but there’s ever more designers who do some server-side scripting to the side as well, so I suspect a very large part of the audience could be interested in such a subject. (This all _in addition_, btw, not as replacement of. I don’t want a different type of conference - just a conference that goes a bit deeper.)
Finally, speakers. To echo Lachlan above: Hixie! Either about HTML 5 specifically, or about the state of web standards (both W3C and WHATWG) and their real use (through his Google studies) in general. Or any of the browser layout people: David Baron, Maciej Stachowiak, Anne van Kesteren, Hallvord Steen or someone like that. I’d love to hear firsthand what they’re cooking up and what direction they’re going with web standards available for real world use in the near future.
Some of the would seriously make me consider coming flying over from the Netherlands. :D
Respiro, the logo design guy
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
1. What subject areas are interesting you right now?
I am interested in design-related subjects.
2. What speakers would you love to see?
Eric Meyer
3. What kind of areas would you be interested in attending in depth, whole day workshops focussed on?
[web] design, web 2.0 and web 3.0 predictions
4. We’d also love to know how you’d describe what you do IA, designer, developer, or any others?
I’m a web- and print-designer.
Best wishes,
Respiro