Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

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.

Relly Annett-Baker – Telling tales

Esther Derbyr PortraitIn 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.

Esther Derby – Agile meets UI

Esther Derbyr PortraitEsther will share strategies for evolving UI design as the software grows, keeping UI designers in the loop and helping everyone on the team be a better designer (cause they think already are).

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater – Effective and efficient design with CSS3

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater PortraitCSS3 is changing how we design and develop web sites, allowing us to quickly and easily create and maintain highly efficient and adaptable sites that are a pleasure to use. You’ll learn practical yet progressive examples of the most beneficial CSS3 techniques to put to use in your pages today.

Nicholas Zakas – High Performance JavaScript

Nicholas Zakas PortraitIn this talk, you’ll learn what’s going on inside the browser that can slow JavaScript down and how that can end up creating a “slow page”. You’ll also learn how to overcome the conspiracy against your code by eliminating performance bottlenecks.

David Gravina – Design thinking and doing

David Gravina PortraitFrom the perspective of the digital domain this session will take a look at what Design Thinking is and it’s potential to amplify creativity so that we may embrace and apply our skills to the messy problems that business, government and society face every day.

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.

Paula Bray – Connected digital initiatives and strategies

Paula Bray PortraitThe Powerhouse Museum has been working towards making its digital initiatives widely accessible and to a broader audience, online and onsite, to enable a connected digital future. With a blossoming of blogging, significant Flickr and Facebook presences the Museum has been developing great connections with a new audience that has led the institution to rethink access with an emphasis on the importance of community connections and participation. This thinking has had an impact on the Museum’s Strategic Plan and several digital initiatives are now driving change within the organisation.

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Thanks for an amazing few days Web Directions. So many great themes of empathy, inclusion, collaboration, business impact through design, and keeping our future deeply human.

Laura van Doore Head of Product Design, Fathom