Web Directions

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Being good at that doesn't suit everyone, so it's very pleasing to be able to spot people - some of whom may have never spoken in public before - and encourage and support them to be speakers at Web Directions events. Some go on to speak at overseas conferences and build themselves an international reputation. I bring this up because our Video Ristretto is of a talk from Respond 17 by Mandy Michael, Lead Front End Developer at Seven West Media in Perth. Mandy is by no means a beginner, and has even been a web tech conference organiser herself. But I think it's fair to say that during the past year or two, she has emerged as one of our local leading speakers on front end development and CSS in particular. I dare say many of our international visitors who've seen Mandy speak and chatted with her would expand that to "global". Mandy certainly demonstrates not only a mastery of CSS skills in this talk but an ability and desire to share her knowledge and inspire others. By the way, Mandy will be at Summit in Sydney next week (and if you're not, I hope you have a good reason - otherwise, register now!), where the list of speakers runs the full gamut of experience, from seasoned to fresh - all of them compelling. For now, give yourself 20 minutes or so to let Mandy show you some pretty cool and useful text effects with CSS.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(77) "Video Ristretto: Sharpen Up Your Text with The Power of Three - Mandy Michael" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(269) "In a world where JS and SVG are taking over, it’s easy to forget the power of CSS. Luckily there are three powerful CSS items, each with a specific use, whose strengths are enhanced when used together. This is Mandy Michael's short but powerful talk from Respond 17. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(42) "video-ristretto-sharpen-text-mandy-michael" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 13:09:08" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 02:09:08" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8167" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [1]=> object(WP_Post)#1004 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8146) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-27 16:12:54" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-27 05:12:54" ["post_content"]=> string(3165) "This week's video opus comes from our Respond conference in May. We were extremely fortunate to have Rachel Nabors out here. Rachel went from award-winning cartoonist to front-end developer, a story we wrote about here. In this talk, Rachel looks at how animation helps people interact with touch screens, how those same principles apply to the web, where animation has been all this time, and where it's going. Set aside 50 minutes or so for one crackerjack keynote.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(52) "Video of the Week: The Web In Motion - Rachel Nabors" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(185) "At Respond 17, Rachel Nabors looked at how animation helps people interact with touch screens and how those same principles apply to the web. Put aside 50 minutes for a great talk. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(35) "video-week-web-motion-rachel-nabors" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-27 16:12:54" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-27 05:12:54" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8146" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [2]=> object(WP_Post)#1008 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8138) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-25 10:55:34" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 23:55:34" ["post_content"]=> string(3979) "As we get ever closer to the web tech-fest that is our Summit 17 conference (two weeks from now, still some tickets, register here), I wanted to make a small but important point. We are Australian. Yes, our industry is by definition a global one but Australians inevitably bring to it some of their own style and flair - and that can have quite specific effects on our work. Which brings me to Warwick Cox and his presentation at Respond 17. It's hard not to like someone who happily tells us that his company's core value statement came from a slogan on a stubby holder at his wedding. Or whose major app idea came from his teenage daughter. Or who rattles through his 20 minute talk in 15 minutes. Warwick's style is undeniably Australian, but his point is equally undeniable - that he achieved success with an approach to online ordering that does the opposite of many rival models. Instead of presenting users with huge lists of competing products to select from, Warwick's company Crowd Delivery provides a text box and lets the user type in what they want to order. Simple and effective. There's a lot more to it, and Warwick's account not only entertains but might just inspire someone to develop their own idea. You'll certainly enjoy this short talk.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(71) "Video Ristretto: Removing Everything and Having a Crap UI - Warwick Cox" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(258) "It's hard not to like someone who happily tells us that his company's core value statement came from a slogan on a stubby holder at his wedding. Or whose major app idea came from his teenage daughter. Or who rattles through his 20 minute talk in 15 minutes. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(55) "video-ristretto-removing-everything-crap-ui-warwick-cox" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 13:06:40" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 02:06:40" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8138" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [3]=> object(WP_Post)#1009 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8131) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 12:49:49" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 01:49:49" ["post_content"]=> string(4431) "For many years, my primary focus was developing software. In the mid 90s, that morphed into developing software for web developers, in particular one of the very earliest CSS editors, Style Master. For a long time, I knew as much about CSS as almost anyone on earth (Eric Meyer and Bert Bos probably knew more than I did back then). I wrote parsers and editors for all of CSS2 (Pro tip, be very careful about supporting standards that aren't final - CSS2 was never finalised and supported features that ended up in other CSS modules often many years later), and I knew all the minutiae of CSS rules and properties and values. I developed a database of hundreds - possibly thousands - of browser CSS bugs, with suggested workarounds (like caniuse.com, but available in 1996). Fast forward 20 years and what I really know a lot about now is running great conferences. I say that with humility, and based on a lot of feedback that I believe has been honest and has often included ideas for improvement. And yet that's not something I've ever written about (which is unusual for me), despite having some very strong opinions about this (which is not at all unusual for me). So, given we have a big conference coming up in three weeks, I thought I'd write down a thought or two about conferences, in particular addressing the issue, "what is the point of attending a conference?" I actually remember when we ran our first conferences, around 2004, people asking in particular why anyone would come to a conference about the web, since they were all online and learning and connecting. I used to talk abut the value of connecting in person, either with someone new, or with people you meet maybe once a year at our conference. Back then, there were few if any meetups, and indeed not many people actually did this web thing, well at least not compared with today. It was a way to connect with, and share ideas with, and form friendships with people who did what you did. Face to face. While that need is, up to a point, met in other ways now, there is something about hundreds of people in the one place, being inspired and educated, caffeinated and connected that is special. But my focus is very much on the content, speakers and ideas. And this is what I think few people really think about in terms of the value of the content of a conference, or at least this is how I think about that value. When we attend a workshop on a specific topic like "Introductory React" or "Advanced CSS Animation", we think of ourselves at a certain level of knowledge (I know a fair bit about CSS and animation, I know nothing about React). We also have a sense of where we want to go over the course of  that day or the days of the class. It's about, in Donald Rumsfeld's famous, often ridiculed but I think valuable formulation, about known unknowns. It's about realising what we know we don't know, and filling that specific gap. That's not what conferences are for, even though workshops and conferences seemingly often take place hand in hand. Conferences are (at least in how I program them) about discovering what we don't know we don't know - and turning these unknown unknowns into the known unknowns we can then focus on (if we think that is warranted). Workshops are turn by turn instructions from point A to point B. A conference is perhaps a travel guide, pointing out the things we could do, the ideas we could explore, the places we could go. Using a conference in this way means we seek out what we don't know (time and again attendee feedback from our conferences is that it was the speaker who they hadn't heard of talking about something they didn't know about that was most valuable). To me it this serendipity, of the people you meet and the ideas you encounter, that is the  irreplaceable aspect of a conference. Yes, conferences require a real commitment of time and money. But I honestly feel they are unique and uniquely valuable. It's why I love running them, and talking at them, and attending them. Every conference I've ever attended has been of real value. And while that remains true I hope to keep doing them, and speaking at them and attending them." ["post_title"]=> string(43) "What is the point of going to a conference?" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(206) ""I actually remember when we ran our first conferences, around 2004, people asking in particular why anyone would come to a conference about the web, since they were all online and learning and connecting."" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(22) "point-going-conference" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 12:49:49" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 01:49:49" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8131" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [4]=> object(WP_Post)#1010 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8126) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-20 12:14:31" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-20 01:14:31" ["post_content"]=> string(4713) "We in web tech do not work in a vacuum. While it might be tempting - whether you're a designer, a front end developer, an engineer, an information architect or anything else - to think just in terms of technical expertise, specifications, skills and code, the real world does not consist of ones and zeroes. The technical products and services we devise not only change what we as human beings can do, but also how we relate to each other. We're seeing the truth of that every day, and more so, and that awareness underpins several of the keynote presentations at our Summit conference next month. Our Video of the Week is of one of our international keynote speakers at our Respond 17 design conference. Mina Markham is the US senior UI engineer who created and maintained the Pantsuit UI pattern library for the Hillary For America US presidential campaign in 2016. That alone is a great story, how Mina put together a suite of design elements for a campaign at such a huge level and with such massive implications. It's an incredibly complex project that Mina handled with aplomb and great desxterity. But there's another aspect to Mina's story and it does come out in this video. The campaign took place amid one of the most hotly contested (to put it mildy) elections in history, with an explosive result, the consequences of which continue to resound around the world. In that milieu, the experience of the African American woman who put together a design campaign to try to help get the first woman President of the USA elected was never going to be a comfortable one. And it's not. Some of what Mina relates in this video is very unsettling and upsetting. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it. Mina always relates to her work, and there are great lessons in here on how to do that with dignity and self-confidence in the face of some confronting treatment. It is, in fact, an entirely inspiring 43 minutes.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(84) "Video of the Week: Styling Hillary: A Design System for All Americans - Mina Markham" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(208) "Mina Markham created the Pantsuit pattern library for the Hillary For America US presidential campaign in 2016. She spoke in detail about the experience - technical, professional and personal - at Respond 17." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(63) "video-week-styling-hillary-design-system-americans-mina-markham" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-20 12:14:31" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-20 01:14:31" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8126" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [5]=> object(WP_Post)#1011 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8123) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-18 13:13:58" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-18 02:13:58" ["post_content"]=> string(3843) "One of the very exciting aspects of this year's Summit conference is going back to the two day, two-tracks format that is so popular with many of our attendees. What this does is allow multiple members of the same team working in different disciplines to attend the same event and see how all their efforts knit together. Summit really is a coming together of the web tech / digital tribes. Which is why our Video Ristretto today is particularly apt. At Respond 17, Michael Taranto from SEEK gave a compelling talk that focused on how components might be a way of ensuring that designers and engineers use the same language, to make sure their efforts work together and not against one another. It sounds a simple plan, and in some ways it really is. The great thing about Michael's talk is that it focuses on solutions, on how to do it, rather than just describing the problems and asking the questions. Definitely worth half an hour or so of your time. And then consider how much more like this you'll get at Summit this year.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(88) "Video Ristretto: Building a ubiquitous design language with components - Michael Taranto" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(190) "At Respond 17, Michael Taranto from SEEK gave a compelling talk that focused on how components might be a way of ensuring that designers and engineers use the same effective design language." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(78) "video-ristretto-building-ubiquitous-design-language-components-michael-taranto" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-25 10:38:38" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-24 23:38:38" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8123" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [6]=> object(WP_Post)#1012 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8108) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-17 12:49:35" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-17 01:49:35" ["post_content"]=> string(3596) "Judging by conversations I've been having with design and multidisciplinary agencies around Australia and beyond, if you run such an agency it's not unlikely you've started thinking about how to use chat interfaces, and "bot" (yeah, I hate that word too, but it's the one we have) approaches to customer service for your clients, and perhaps you've even started implementing these experiences. Or perhaps you - or your clients - think it's just all hype - we've seen it all before, and it'll go away soon. Or maybe you're adopting a wait-and-see approach. Well, as you might have noticed with our recent AI conference, we definitely think "there's a there, there" when it comes to chat, bots, voice and related user experiences. So much so that at Web Directions Summit in Sydney on 9-10 November we have a number of design, engineering and keynote sessions focusing on this whole issue.

• • We have the inventor of the hashtag, and coiner of the term 'conversational commerce' Chris Messina talking about what user interaction looks like in a voice and chat based world.
• • We have 2017 Boyer Lecturer Genevieve Bell exploring the meaning of “intelligence” within the context of machines, and its cultural impact on humans and their relationships
• • Lauren Lucchese is the Head of AI Content at one of the biggest US financial institutions, Capital One, and will focus on Designing Conversations.
• • Amior Shevat is the author of the recent O'Reilly book Designing Bots, and will take an engineering based approach to the issue of developing bots.

Plus there's two dozen other incredible sessions in two tracks over two days – one track digital design focused, the other with a front end engineering bent. Sounds valuable to you and your team? I hope so! And we have a special offer just for agencies. Use the code "agency" to save $200 off the full price of a Classic ticket, just $999. And, if you send four or more people, they each get a Silver ticket (that includes all the videos) and we'll feature your agency as an "agency partner", with your logo and link on our conference website, and your logo at the conference itself. We'll even give you onstage shout-outs. All for $999 per person. Just register four or more people from your agency with the code "agency", and we'll set that all up. We know people at any design agency will benefit professionally from attending Web Directions Summit, and we have a history of our attendees bringing genuine value back to their agencies.  With a cross-discipline event like this, the more people you send, the bigger benefit you get back. Hope to see you all at this year's Summit. " ["post_title"]=> string(19) "The Bots are Coming" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(351) "If you run a design agency in Australia, it's not unlikely you've started thinking about how to use chat interfaces, conversational UIs and bots in your approaches to customer service for your clients. Summit 17 could be just what your team needs to understand the issues across the design and engineering disciplines, and how they apply to your work." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(19) "the-bots-are-coming" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-17 12:57:28" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-17 01:57:28" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8108" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [7]=> object(WP_Post)#1013 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8104) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-13 10:16:53" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-12 23:16:53" ["post_content"]=> string(3549) "Following on from our Video Ristretto on Wednesday with Vitaly Friedman, and leading nicely into several sessions at Summit 17 next month (!) on voice, chat and conversation on the web, our Video of the Week also comes from Respond 17 back in May. Dr Elizabeth Allen is a UX researcher and psychologist based in Toronto, Canada, who conducts research at the ecommerce platform Shopify to guide product teams in making strategic decisions about user experience. Her talk Adventures in Conversational Commerce focused on designing and improving messaging bots that can autonomously handle customer service interactions, online marketing campaigns, and even make sales. It's a fascinating area with huge potential benefits for both service operators and product vendors, and the people who buy the products and services. It's also fraught with potential pitfalls. Find 40 minutes to Elizabeth talk through some of what she's learned, so far.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(74) "Video of the Week: Adventures in Conversational Commerce - Elizabeth Allen" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(286) "Give yourself a 40 minute break to take in Elizabeth Allen at Respond 17, talking about the potential benefits and pitfalls of conversational commerce. Without doubt, we will all soon be dealing with online bots. This is a great introduction to some of the key issues for designers." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(61) "video-week-adventures-conversational-commerce-elizabeth-allen" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-14 09:25:55" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-13 22:25:55" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8104" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [8]=> object(WP_Post)#1014 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8099) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-10-11 22:32:43" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-11 11:32:43" ["post_content"]=> string(3851) "One thing you can be sure of with a Web Directions event - there will be surprises. That, of course, especially applies to our big Summit 17 conference in November - you're coming, I hope? Back at Respond this year, for example, one of our international keynote speakers, Vitaly Friedman (founder, editor and boss at Smashing Magazine), put on an extra, unscheduled session. The thing about Vitaly is that as well as running his Smashing empire of conferences, books and one of the most useful websites a web designer or developer could want to know, he's also still a working designer and developer himself. His presentation, our Video Ristretto this week, focuses on his work with an ecommerce company, including improving their Checkout UX. Vitaly is such an engaging speaker with clever ideas and approaches, you really should find half an hour for this video. And it's a great lead-in to some of the UX-focused sessions you'll see at Summit this year.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

" ["post_title"]=> string(46) "Video Ristretto: Checkout UX - Vitaly Friedman" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(270) "Web Directions events are full of surprises, including this bonus talk from Respond 17 international keynote Vitaly Friedman. In half an hour, the Smashing Magazine head honcho explores his own work with an ecommerce client to improve their checkout user experience. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(43) "video-ristretto-checkout-ux-vitaly-friedman" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-10-11 22:32:43" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-10-11 11:32:43" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8099" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [9]=> object(WP_Post)#1015 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8090) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 14:20:18" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 04:20:18" ["post_content"]=> string(6273) "Since the early 1980s, I've been privileged to witness several "revolutions" in computing. Looking backwards, now we've seen how they played out, each seems inevitable, although the real lesson of each is that how - and even whether - seeming technology revolutions play out is impossible to see at the time. The micro computer revolution of the late 1970s and early '80s saw computing personalised. Not initially something driven by large companies, either as providers or users of the technology, it was enthusiasts and hobbyists who created and bought the early Apple and other micro computers that long predated the IBM PC and MS-DOS that became the model for personal computers for the next 25 years or more. Desktop publishing, enabled in part by the GUI and WYSIWYG revolution, and the laser printer (along with PostScript, the foundation of Adobe's success) - all technologies that are essentially the result of research at XEROX's fabled PARC, even if largely commercialised elsewhere - is, as I've written before, an under appreciated stepping stone toward the Web. It created new marketplaces for digital content (ultimately printed on paper), an explosion in magazines, and increased the number of people capable of creating and designing content - writing, illustration, photography, and page layout – that set the scene for the Web, a few years later. Without this cohort of digital creators, would the Web have had content, and the creators of it - so vital for those early adopters to find value in? The Web itself seems inevitable now but was far from it in 1990, when already many commercial hypertext systems, and commercial internet or internet-like providers like AOL and CompuServe were successful, and - compared to the Web - were relatively sophisticated. The smartphone revolution, driven initially by the iPhone and then increasingly Android, also seems inevitable now. How could have it turned out any other way? But, as a recent in depth history of the iPhone made plain, within Apple the push for a phone that was essentially an extension of the iPod - not at all the powerful Web enabled computer in your pocket that the iPhone became - made it a very real contender for what Apple launched in 2007. If the University of Minnesota hadn't started charging licensing fees for Gopher servers in 1993, at the time Gopher was at least as well established and advanced as the Web - perhaps even more so - would Gopher have been the global interconnected network that the Web became? Things are never inevitable. Not in our individual lives, and not in broader cultural and societal trends. We have to make bets, based on hunches, because the alternative - doing nothing until the outcome is entirely clear - is, at least for many of us, no alternative at all. Yesterday, we held our first AI conference. In my opening remarks, I observed that I studied AI at university in the 1980s, and my enormous enthusiasm was somewhat diminished when it turned out it wasn't about Turing tests and Asimovian intelligent robots, but hill climbing algorithms. AI has, in many ways, been the "next big thing" for so many years, perhaps even since the 1950s. But, as you might be able to tell from my recent writing and presentations, the AI conference - and a good deal of the content at our Summit in November -  my hunch is that now is the time to really start thinking hard about the impact on our work, our businesses, and our products of these technologies. As someone observed yesterday at AI, "No-one knows anything about this stuff". But I remember when that was true of the Web, of the mobile Web, and even of personal computers. As I wrote a little cheekily last week, and repeated yesterday, if you do it today, you'll look like a genius. If you're not doing it in two years time you'll look like an idiot. A rare chance for me to come speak to your team If you are based in Australia, and keen for me to come and speak to your team - indeed, anyone in your company you think might value from these thoughts (and perhaps help you move your organisation toward adopting or further investing in these technologies and approaches) - then early next week we're announcing something that you'll be the first to hear about here. For teams of eight or more who attend Web Directions Summit, I'll come to your company, and deliver my new presentation, The Web in a post app world, which looks at the place the Web has in a world increasingly driven by AI, AR, and non screen based interfaces. Not only that, your whole team will get access to not just the videos from the Summit, but also from our two other major conferences in 2017, Respond and Code. And all that for the price of a Classic ticket. To get all this, and have me come speak (and do a Q&A session, as well), just register eight or more folks from your company, and we'll organise it all. These places are strictly limited, so if you're keen, start organising your team now. And if you have any questions, just drop me a line." ["post_title"]=> string(35) "On the Inevitability of Revolutions" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(205) "John Allsopp considers the revolutions he's seen, how they seem inevitable now (though maybe not at the time), and what's the next revolution we can expect that will later seem inevitable. Remember Gopher?" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(35) "on-the-inevitability-of-revolutions" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 14:20:18" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 04:20:18" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8090" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [10]=> object(WP_Post)#1016 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8083) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-25 12:36:30" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-25 02:36:30" ["post_content"]=> string(2335) " " ["post_title"]=> string(41) "Google's AMP Roadshow is Coming to Sydney" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(0) "" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(34) "googles-amp-roadshow-coming-sydney" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 12:47:09" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-29 02:47:09" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8083" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [11]=> object(WP_Post)#1017 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8058) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-19 15:48:57" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-19 05:48:57" ["post_content"]=> string(4667) "All the pieces of the Web Directions Summit 17 conference have now come together, and we are profoundly excited by what is shaping as perhaps the best Sydney conference we've ever held. Super Early Bird pricing finishes this Friday. Register by midnight for the best possible price (see below for your special offer). To pay just $999 for a Silver ticket (conference and associated videos), sign up by Friday and lock in this price (you can always pay us later). So, now you should know who our final speaker is.

We are extremely proud to announce that Jina Anne has joined the speaker line-up for Summit 17. Regarded as one the leading designers in the world today, Jina is also a developer, writer, and speaker, and a leading global authority on design systems.

" ["post_title"]=> string(51) "Summit 17 - the Final Speaker and the Full Schedule" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(256) "It's all happening at Summit 17 - we have our final speaker (the inimitable Jina Anne), we've locked in the conference schedule, and we're zeroing in on the close of our Super Early Bird (seriously good deals with hundreds of dollars off). Don't miss this." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(37) "summit-17-final-speaker-full-schedule" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-19 15:48:57" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-19 05:48:57" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8058" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [12]=> object(WP_Post)#1018 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8026) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-15 16:12:49" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-15 06:12:49" ["post_content"]=> string(14016) "It's time for Part Two of the Program Launch for Web Directions Summit 17: the Product & Design Track. We are returning to our most popular conference format: two days, with two tracks - one focused on Engineering, the other on Product & Design, plus over-arching opening and closing keynotes on each day - a format to suit the whole team. In this way, we are positioning Summit as a coming together of the different disciplines we practise, and as a peak event on your team's professional development calendar. We launched the Engineering Track program on Wednesday, and today we're going to share with you the full program for the Product & Design Track of Summit 17. Given this, we're extending the Super Early Bird period by one week to Friday 22 September. And remember, if you register now to lock in the lowest possible pricing,  you  can pay later - even if that's after the Early Bird closes. Read on for an overview of the design track  or  Register now (don't forget the special offer at the end of this email). Product & Design Track, Day One

Lessons from the Death of the PC Chris Messina As the PC meets its slow demise, we stand on a precipice overlooking a broad shift in how technology is designed and serves people, with new hardware and embedded technologies that spell new paradigms for user experience, voice experience, and conversation experience.

 

The Landscape of (Extended) Reality Rob Manson For a technology that's been over 55 years in the making, it’s taken a long time for VR to become an “overnight success”. What's driving this buzz and how does VR relate to Augmented, Mixed, and Extended Reality?

 

DesignOps: The Future of Design, as a Service Mark Dalgleish By focusing developers entirely on translating a company's design language into production-ready code and monitoring its real-world effectiveness, teams can deliver high quality design across large organisations at a pace not previously possible.

 

Style Guides, So Hot Right Now Ben Birch & Tim Churchward A look at emerging tools and strategies that drive collaboration at the boundary of design and development, point out some pitfalls you might want to avoid, and help you evaluate the right approach for your team and organisation.

 

Retros, Research and Opinionated Design Nicola Rushton How do you create a culture of open communication, fast feedback and shared ownership? When it comes to normalising the sharing of feelings and helping a team own their process, structure is key.

 

Disruptive Design: The Designer as an Agent of Change Rona Shaanan You're a designer, hired by an engineer-driven company that wants to get some of that umpteen per cent rise in productivity from being design driven. You are the agent of change. Now what?

 

A Life on the Web Dan Rubin Dan has lived a life curiously suited to the web, one that has eschewed the traditional linear career structure and more closely resembles the inter-connected, graph-like nature of the web itself. Find out what he's learned along the way.

  So that's Day One - although there's actually one more speaker to lock in. Even then, we're deep-diving into some major key topics already. Let's see what's on Day Two. Product & Design Track, Day Two  

Artificial Intelligence: Making a Human Connection Genevieve Bell It's tempting to keep separate the art and science of the robot and the artificial intelligence that underpins it. However, there are reasons to thread them back together and understand how the story of AI is connected to the history of human culture.

 

13 Golden Rules of Typography on the Web Richard Rutter Typography is what comes between the author and the reader. If you design websites or use CSS then you are a typographer. The guidelines in this talk combine implement­ation details with typographic theory, to set you on the road to designing beautiful and effective responsive typography.

 

Designing Conversations Lauren Lucchese How do we design for conversational UIs, when the content is the experience, and words are the interface? Can we design contextually relevant conversations for bots that evoke emotion and lead to relationships rooted in trust, empathy, and understanding?

 

Designing Better Coffee Simon Wright How the idea for, and design of, a new brand of ethical coffee came to be, and how the design was informed by the business and ethical goals, while these, too, were in turn shaped by the design decisions.

 

Designing for Extremes Sarah Pulis Designing for the "average user" doesn't mean  you are designing for everyone. It means you're designing for no-one. There is no average user. But what happens if instead you deliberately design for the extremes, for each individual?

 

Personalised Curiosity: Why and how machine learning can keep your users surprised and engaged Kazjon Grace How an AI model of curiosity inspired by cognitive science can be used to encourage us to broaden our tastes.

 

On Mobile, Context is King Oliver Weidlich Most mobile service designs take no notice of what the device knows, or previous interactions, and assume each ‘channel’ is a new unconnected experience. But in a mobile-connected world, we can design richer and more contextual experiences.

 

Don’t Kill Them Softly: Fostering a Culture of Fearless Feedback Amélie Lamont Like opinions, harmful or useless feedback can kill your team by demoralisation. Design Anthropology can inform a framework that fosters a fearless feedback culture focusing on creating value, rather than pointing out flaws.

  So, like the Engineering Track, we've curated a seriously substantial program of Product & Design presentations, each focused on a key topic or issue facing designers now and into the immediate future. Now, you should be aware that tickets are already selling fast (just as they did in Melbourne for Code, when we sold out before Early Bird even closed). In fact, as you'll see below, for Summit we've already sold out of Gold tickets. Pricing Register during the Primary Early Bird period up to and including Friday 22 September and get $200 off the regular cost.

• • Classic Summit ticket (conference only) for just$999 (save $200)
• • Silver Summit ticket (conference plus videos) for just $1,199(save $200)
• • Gold Summit ticket - sorry, sold out!

NB Don't forget the option of a Three Day Pass to Summit plus our new Culture or Reality conferences - outstanding value! You'll find much more info about the speakers and their presentations on the Summit 17 website. Curating a two-track conference is a bit like putting together two conferences at once, and there's an inevitable concern to make each track as potent as the other. With this conference, I think we've really achieved something special with both tracks. If your work focuses on Product & Design, I think you'll find Summit 17 to be just what you need. See you there." ["post_title"]=> string(43) "Summit 17 - Lo, the Product & Design Track" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(244) "To complement the already announced Engineering Track of our Summit 17 conference, here are the details of the Product & Design Track - a pretty stunning program, you will agree. (NB We do still have one more speaker to announce on Monday)." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(33) "summit-17-lo-product-design-track" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-16 12:24:26" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-16 02:24:26" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8026" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [13]=> object(WP_Post)#1019 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8000) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-13 11:59:24" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-13 01:59:24" ["post_content"]=> string(13920) "Web Directions is back! We've taken our annual Sydney end-of-year conference back to the structure that's best known and loved: two huge days, with two big tracks - one focused on Engineering, the other on Products and Design, plus stellar over-arching opening and closing keynotes on each day from high profile industry leaders;  a format to suit your whole team, across disciplines. At the same time, we move forward. We renamed the conference Summit to distinguish it from other Web Directions events, and to characterise it as both a coming together of the different disciplines we practise, and a peak of our professional development year. If there's just a single web / tech / digital conference you go to each year, we want it to be Web Directions Summit. We've so far announced eight Summit speakers, all important figures of international stature. We still have a detail or two to finalise in the Product / Design Track, but we can't stand to wait any longer, so today we're going to share with you the full program for the Engineering Track of Summit 17. We'll launch the other track next week, and because of that, we're going to extend the Super Early Bird period by one week to Friday 22 September (the best ticket deals), and the second Early Bird to Friday 20 October (still good deals there). When you have a line-up this good, you can't keep it to yourself! And remember, you can register now to get your Super Early Bird discount, and pay later - even if that's after the Early Bird closes. Engineering Track, Day One

Lessons from the Death of the PC Chris Messina As the PC meets its slow demise, we stand on a precipice overlooking a broad shift in how technology is designed and serves people, with new hardware and embedded technologies that spell new paradigms for user experience, voice experience, and conversation experience.

 

WebXR: Virtual and Augmented Reality on the Web Iker Jamardo A deep dive into the current state of the Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies on the web, with the most outstanding examples of VR/AR websites to date, cutting edge browser prototypes and an update on standards progress.

 

Some Thoughts on CSS Architectures, Frameworks and Tooling Chris Eppstein Insights and thoughts about how and why styling components led us to CSS-in-JS (and, inevitably, JS-in-CSS) and how tooling can bridge the divide between what's best for the developer and what's best for the browser

 

Keep Betting on JavaScript Kyle Simpson JavaScript is no longer trying to prove itself. It has arrived, it's now fully a first class citizen in the programming language ecosystem. So what's over the horizon for the world's most ubiquitous and popular (by usage, if not emotion!) language?

 

Meta Programming in JavaScript Mehdi Valikhani Meta whaaat?! Meta programming is a way to customise built-in features of a programming language. Say we have an array of multiple Beer objects, each of them has a field called 'name'. What if I tell you that you could fetch VB's data using 'beers['VB']'!

 

Back-end Development for Front-end Developers Erwin van der Koogh With the release of AWS Lambda and similar "serverless" computing services, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript can write reliable and scalable back-ends. And front-end developers actually have a big advantage.

 

Exploring Static Types: Writing Typesafe Code that Feels Like Real JavaScript Josh Duck Flow and TypeScript are changing the foundations of JavaScript. Far from turning code into an object oriented mess, static typing gives us JS code that's cleaner and more predictable. With typechecking, we end up with easier interfaces for humans, too.

 

A Life on the Web Dan Rubin Dan has lived a life curiously suited to the web, one that has eschewed the traditional linear career structure and more closely resembles the inter-connected, graph-like nature of the web itself. Find out what he's learned along the way.

I think you'll agree that is a pretty substantial Day One: five internationals and three locals, big picture and deep dive, a few perspectives on JS, some "now" and some "coming soon". Let's see what Day Two holds. Engineering Track, Day Two  

Artificial Intelligence: Making a Human Connection Genevieve Bell It's tempting to keep separate the art and science of the robot and the artificial intelligence that underpins it. However, there are reasons to thread them back together and understand how the story of AI is connected to the history of human culture.

 

Moving from Web & Mobile to Messaging - To Bot or Not to Bot Amir Shevat We're seeing a big move from web and mobile apps to conversational interfaces. The future of work doesn't include endless email chains, 30 open browser tabs, or siloed tools. Find out instead what bots and delightful UI can do for you.

 

Workers of the Web Unite Jessica Edwards With increasing browser support for Service Workers, developers can now create websites that work offline, independent of network status, and with great flexibility. By understanding the Web Worker API, we can better understand Service Workers and how to use them.

 

Performance is About People, Not Metrics Tammy Everts A brief history of UX and web performance research, highlighting key studies that connect the dots between performance and user experience, with some educated guesses about new metrics just around the corner. Some day we’ll laugh at how little we actually knew.

 

Delivering a Web Experience in 10KB Hannah Malcolm Can you deliver a compelling web experience in less than 10KB, without the need for JavaScript? Learn about the challenges and breakthroughs in designing and building the Best Design winner of the 2016 A List Apart competition.

 

2FA, WTF? Phil Nash Everyone is hacking everything. Everything is vulnerable. Your site, your users, even you. Are you worried about security? You should be! Let's look at one time passwords, implementing 2FA in web applications and the only real life compelling use case for QR codes.

 

The Latest in Browser Developer Tools Elle Meredith The capability of tools like Firebug in our modern browsers has grown extraordinarily, but keeping up with them is hard work. Get up to speed with some of the more overlooked ways in which we can improve performance, code quality and more.

 

Don’t Kill Them Softly: Fostering a Culture of Fearless Feedback Amélie Lamont Like opinions, harmful or useless feedback can kill your team by demoralisation. Design Anthropology can inform a framework that fosters a fearless feedback culture focusing on creating value, rather than pointing out flaws.

All up: nine international speakers, seven locals, four broad theme keynotes, and 12 tightly focused presentations on many of the fundamentally key topics and issues with which engineers are engaging, now and into the immediate future. And this is just the one track! Now, you should be aware that tickets are already selling fast (just as they did in Melbourne for Code, when we sold out before Early Bird even closed). In fact, as you'll see below, for Summit we've already sold out of Gold tickets. Register during the Primary Early Bird period up to and including Friday 22 September and get $200 off the regular cost.

• • Classic Summit ticket (conference only) for just $999 (save $200)
• • Silver Summit ticket (conference plus videos) for just $1,199(save $200)
• • Gold Summit ticket - sorry, sold out!

NB Take a look at the add-on deals available by registering for a Three Day Pass to Culture or Reality conferences the day before Summit - outstanding value! You'll find much more info about the speakers and their presentations on the Summit 17 website. As someone who's been in the business for over a decade now, I can assure you that this is one of the strongest programs for a conference engineering track I have ever been privileged to curate. I'm very proud of it, and I know you'll love it. See you there." ["post_title"]=> string(41) "Summit 17 - Behold, the Engineering Track" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(302) "We've so far announced eight Summit speakers, all important figures of international stature. We still have a detail or two to finalise in the Product / Design Track, but we can't stand to wait any longer, so today we're going to share with you the full program for the Engineering Track of Summit 17." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(34) "summit-17-behold-engineering-track" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-13 11:29:51" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-13 01:29:51" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=8000" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } [14]=> object(WP_Post)#1393 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(7997) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-09-08 15:00:35" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-08 05:00:35" ["post_content"]=> string(5660) "Pre-industrial economies did not favour large scale, oligopolistic or monopolistic economic structures (power structures are an entirely different matter). The rise of industrial, hand in hand with what we now call "Capitalist" economies (the word is an invention of the 19th Century) economies saw the rise of oligopolies – think of the "big three" US auto makers, or closer to home for Australians, our "big four" banks. But if we look at the largest companies in the world today, the top five of which now are all what we still (but will less and less) call technology companies (Apple, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) we can start to see a new pattern emerge. Between them, Google and Facebook in 2016 captured two thirds of total online advertising spend, and 99% of the increase in advertising spend for the year. In mobile devices, Apple is estimated to take as much as 91% of total profit. As more business categories are atomised and reconstituted by technology, and we move to a network economy, these "winner take all" models, with one or two big winners, and fewer and fewer hyper-niche players will appear in more and more parts of the economy. In networked economies, as Metcalfe, the inventor of ethernet, observed about physical networks (his initial observation had to do with networked printers), the value of a network is a polynomial function of the number of nodes. Which roughly translates to the idea that as the number of people, or devices, on a network (be that Facebook or the internet, or…) increases, the value of the network doesn't increase in step (twice the number of nodes, twice the value), but more or less as the square of the number of nodes (twice as many nodes means two squared the value, or 4 times the value). Which for small numbers doesn't seem all that important. But as those numbers increase (4 times the size, is 16 times the value, 8 times the size is 64 times the value). You get the picture. The lesson is most businesses must embrace network economics, and aim to reach as many customers as possible. And of course, the lowest marginal cost for doing so (coupled with the approach that yields the most data and greatest insights into your customers, collectively as much as individually) lies in using what a certain category of folks call "digital channels". This has meant, for many (particularly, but not exclusively) larger companies, one thing: Native Apps. But, in recent years, after the initial app goldrush, we see the power law distribution of network economics emerge once more.

• the top 1 percent [of app publishers] accounted for 70 percent of all downloads.
• Mobile Users Spend 80 Percent of Time in Just Five Apps
• "Most smartphone users download zero apps per month”
• a “staggering 42% of all app time spent on smartphones occurs on the individual’s single most used app,” comScore reports
• “13 percent of smartphone owners accounting for more than half of all download activity in a given month”
• 60% of apps have never been downloaded
• 94% of U.S. App Store Revenue Comes from the Top 1% of Monetizing Publishers

In short, using native apps as a path to reaching a large number of potential customers and benefitting from crucial network effects is close to impossible. But, in the meantime, the Web has responded to the very significant impact that native apps had on user behaviour. Progressive Web Apps, the ability for web content to work offline, to be installed on the user's device and be treated as first class citizens, to hook into the native platform notification system (a critical aspect of maintaining ongoing engagement with users), and other device capabilities (cameras and microphones , among other things) are increasingly a reality, even on iOS (Service Worker is now under development in WebKit, WebRTC and sophisticated access to cameras and microphones is in iOS11, shipping in weeks). And, of course, as platforms fragment across operating system, device type, input modality, screen size and resolution, the underlying Web technologies and practices that have emerged around "Responsive Web Design" bring down the cost of reaching a far larger audience, something we've observed that is critical in a networked, winner takes all economy. Something that is both increasingly expensive to achieve via the path of native apps, and increasingly unlikely – if not impossible – following that path. In the "native is always better" mania of the past few years, we've focused so much on one aspect – our personal aesthetics, an obsession with janky scrolling, or buttery smooth animations – over many others. Now no-one is downloading new apps anyway, perhaps we can overlook these trivial concerns and embrace the opportunity the Web presents in a networked economy. SOURCES https://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over-snapchat-uber https://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-apps-per-month/ https://sensortower.com/blog/app-store-one-percent http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/" ["post_title"]=> string(49) "A Progressive Web Approach to a Networked Economy" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(0) "" ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(6) "closed" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(42) "progressive-web-approach-networked-economy" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2017-09-08 15:00:27" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-09-08 05:00:27" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(37) "https://www.webdirections.org/?p=7997" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" ["post_category"]=> string(1) "0" } } ["post_count"]=> int(15) ["current_post"]=> int(-1) ["in_the_loop"]=> bool(false) ["post"]=> object(WP_Post)#1006 (25) { ["ID"]=> int(8167) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "3" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 13:07:44" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2017-11-01 02:07:44" ["post_content"]=> string(4548) "One of the more pleasurable tasks in organising web tech conferences - although often a difficult one - is talent spotting: identifying people who not only have developed some particular technical facility, or some approach to skills development, or a fresh perspective on our digital futures, but can also articulate their point of view and then stand up in front of several hundred of their peers and expound on that topic. Being good at that doesn't suit everyone, so it's very pleasing to be able to spot people - some of whom may have never spoken in public before - and encourage and support them to be speakers at Web Directions events. Some go on to speak at overseas conferences and build themselves an international reputation. I bring this up because our Video Ristretto is of a talk from Respond 17 by Mandy Michael, Lead Front End Developer at Seven West Media in Perth. Mandy is by no means a beginner, and has even been a web tech conference organiser herself. But I think it's fair to say that during the past year or two, she has emerged as one of our local leading speakers on front end development and CSS in particular. I dare say many of our international visitors who've seen Mandy speak and chatted with her would expand that to "global". Mandy certainly demonstrates not only a mastery of CSS skills in this talk but an ability and desire to share her knowledge and inspire others. By the way, Mandy will be at Summit in Sydney next week (and if you're not, I hope you have a good reason - otherwise, register now!), where the list of speakers runs the full gamut of experience, from seasoned to fresh - all of them compelling. For now, give yourself 20 minutes or so to let Mandy show you some pretty cool and useful text effects with CSS.    

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!  

Want more?

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