Add an eventWeb Directions South 2010 schedule
Thursday 14th October 2010
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Designing Obama
by Scott Thomas
Join Scott Thomas, a lead web designer on President Obama’s electoral campaign, as he explains how to design online communities that resonate and motivate. All too often, discussions of analytics, clickthrough rates, and search engine optimization cloud the important truth that online campaigns and communities are for human beings. Come discover how to use superior design, authentic messaging, and valuable content to deliver resonant messages that connect with your audience through the noise of the Internet.
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Active web development
by Divya Manian
Web technologies are evolving at such a frenetic pace that it becomes almost mandatory to learn on your own. A lot of us still depend on other people to do this learning for us, and we tend to use their answers to solve our everyday problems. Inconsistent implementations, rapidly evolving specs, questionable performance impacts and maintenance implications mean we cannot always depend on others for answers but must involve ourselves actively in the process of developing specifications for new Web technologies. But how do we go about it? There are some simple rituals we can all do, which can have us be better-informed and also better inform the people and groups who are most directly involved in the development of new Web technologies.
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Active Web Development
by Divya Manian
Web technologies are evolving at such a frenetic pace that it becomes almost mandatory to learn on your own. A lot of us still depend on other people to do this learning for us, and we tend to use their answers to solve our everyday problems. Inconsistent implementations, rapidly evolving specs, questionable performance impacts and maintenance implications mean we cannot always depend on others for answers but must involve ourselves actively in the process of developing specifications for new Web technologies. But how do we go about it? There are some simple rituals we can all do, which can have us be better-informed and also better inform the people and groups who are most directly involved in the development of new Web technologies.
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How digital affects books and publishing
by Craig Mod
We need to decouple the idea of ‘book’ from the mental image we carry around of ‘book.’ The innovation and benefit that digital brings to books and publishing lies less in how digital affects final artifacts, and more in how digital affects the systems leading up to and extending beyond those artifacts.
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Building a better web with HTML5
by Ben Schwarz
Devices have caught up; That is, our technology dreams from the mid 90’s have finally been realised. However since this time, HTML has lay dormant. We’ve been through a decade of tech wasteland. It’s time to change the status quo and take back the web.
During my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new structural elements. You’ll also grasp an introduction to associated technologies that have come into popularity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-location and making applications useful offline.
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Design Thinking & Doing
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RDFa everywhere
by Knud Möller
RDFa is a W3C standard for embedding semantic metadata directly into HTML web pages. While early work on RDFa dates back to 2004, it recently gathered a lot of uptake and traction through the adoption by big players such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. This has put the Semantic Web into the attention of a much wider public, setting RDFa out the be the technology to finally bring the Semantic Web into the mainstream. The language gained the status of a W3C recommendation in late 2009 as RDFa 1.0. Since then, the RDFa working group has been established to improve and extend the standard. Eventually, this work will result in a new version of the language, which is set to be released as RDFa 1.1 in 2011. In this talk, an overview will be given of the RDFa technology in general, followed by an outline of its latest developments, such as the RDFa API, or the definition of RDFa Core, which prepares the standard to extend its scope beyond the context of web pages, by allowing it to be included into any other markup language than just HTML.
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Doing Horrible Things to DNS (in the name of science)
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Creating platforms for social innovation
by Grant Young
In this presentation Grant Young will examine how innovative organisations are using social technologies and design methods to create multi-dimensional value — both for the organisational and community — and will explore the themes that underpin the examples with a view to applying them in your context.
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Creativity, design and interaction with HTML5 and CSS3
by Dan Rubin
HTML5 and CSS3 are the newest stars of the web: the cornerstones of progressive enhancement, the future of online video, the easiest way to build web applications for desktop and mobile devices, and a brilliant foundation upon which we can add complex interaction and animation layers with javascript and Canvas; happily — thanks to much-improved browser support — we can now use them. In this session, Dan Rubin will show you who’s already taking advantage of these latest additions to our toolbox, what this means for interface designers, and how you can bring the same techniques to your projects.
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Enriching large data sets
by Paul Hagon
Libraries contain masses of beautifully structured data collected over many years. But these records may have their flaws and might now want to be used in ways, such as location based services, that weren’t imagined 30 years ago. How can we use existing API’s and web services to enrich this data to enable it to be used in a variety of ways. This data also needs to be exposed for others to use and build upon. With the recent release of the Government response to the Web 2.0 taskforce, how can institutions comply with these recommendations by providing their data in usable forms for the public. What’s involved in building an API into our resources and how can our data be given more meaning through semantic linkages like RDFa?
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Widgets: Why should I care?
by Daniel Davis
When I was a young lad, I had the use of a computer for the Christmas holidays so I typed out my thank you letters and felt super cool. Unfortunately there was no printer. I wrote out by hand what was on the screen and got laughed at by my dad. Despite this, I felt I was ahead of the crowd and at the start of something new and exciting. Thirty years later, I feel we’re at the same stage with widgets – at the start of something new and exciting.
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Even Faster Web Sites
Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.
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Keeping your content alive from cradle to grave
By now we all know that the web is not a publication — that it’s a living, evolving thing. But a lot of content I see still appears to be ‘published’ once and then left alone.
This talk is about what happens after content is published. We’ll talk about how to:
- decide what to create in the first place (and what the best format is)
- identify which content types need to be left alone, and which need to be looked after
- revive existing content and give it a second wind
- check your content is still working for its readers
- put it to sleep when it is time
- put a process in place so you can do this yourself and with distributed content creators
We’ll also discuss how this varies depending on your industry, size of site and type of content.
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Keynote: Where are we going?
Today’s web is being defined more than ever by buzzwords, catchphrases, fads and trends. Startups are being created for startups sake, standards are being hijacked by so-called “social media gurus,” and investors are piling on one after another looking to hop on the next big wave. And we, the designers, developers and innovators actually building the web, are left to wonder if we’re still in the drivers seat.
During this brisk discussion we’ll separate fads from the future, debate native apps versus the mobile web, take an honest look at the hype behind geo-location, then take a step back to ask ourselves where the web—and we ourselves—are going. Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride!
Friday 15th October 2010
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HTML5 Report Card
Remember how fun it was to do hands-on classroom projects together in kindergarten? Well, this interactive session is going to be like that, but just with bigger people.
In the first part of the session, I’ll hand out blank report cards, and each of us will — individually and based on whatever criteria we personally want to use — use those report cards to assign A, B, C, D, and E letter grades to particular new features that are part of HTML5 and related specifications that are supported to some degree in browsers.
Then I’ll collect those, and use the info to judge which HTML5 features to focus the discussion on during the second part of the session. During the second part of the session, we’ll make a handful of poster-side HTML5 Report Cards together, by taking a look at the HTML5 features we identified during the first part of the session, and then assigning A, B, C, D, and E letter grades to those together — based on the current quality of the features/implementations, and on criteria such as if/how well the features actually work as expected, as well as on some criteria such as “plays well with others”, “areas where improvement is needed”, etc.
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JavaScript Sprachraum
by Patrick Lee
Despite being an option on web servers as early as 1995 with Netscape’s LiveWire, JavaScript has long been regarded as a language only of the browser.
Approaching sweet sixteen JavaScript has evolved in the community and gained acceptance as a general purpose programming language.
In this session Patrick will be looking at JavaScript outside of the browser, focusing on how to use it for web server applications. Starting with the old in Helma and progressing through various usages to the most new and exciting with node.js, Patrick will talk about why JavaScript on the server matters right now and show you how to get started using it.
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Practicing Web Standards in the Large
by Tatham Oddie
Web standards might be second nature to all of us here, but they don’t always fly so easily in the enterprise. Obscure browsers and CIOs watching their bottom line can often leave a passionate development team feeling stifled. In this session we’ll look at how a number of large scale websites successfully adopted new standards and opened their content to more audiences and devices than ever before. We’ll explore techniques for deciding what client technologies to use on your projects, how to drive the adoption of newer techniques and how not to leave your audience behind. We’ll even talk about how to make all of this possible with Internet Explorer in the room.
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Running effective remote studies
Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.
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Location, location, geolocation
by Max Wheeler
Phones with GPS are now widely available and the growing support for the JavaScript geolocation API means location based services aren’t restricted to the realm of native applications. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add provide your users with the best personal and contextual experience.
This session will take you through building a location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-platform techniques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fallbacks options for devices that don’t have geolocation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-friendly map with local points of interest.
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Setting standards-friendly web type
Web typography has in the past two years seen a resurgence in interest and many would agree only rightly so, with most of the content on the web still textual. However the range of technical options available for setting type on the web is quite broad—not to mention the range of stylistic choices available—and often confusing. This session aims to demystify the current techniques available to set type on the web by comparing and contrasting the various options at hand while offering a set of good defaults and safe advice for not only making it accessible but also pleasurable to read.
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The Age of Awareness
by Lisa Herrod
Inclusive design. It might sound like a rebranding exercise from the Web Accessibility Marketing Team, but it isn’t. For years inclusive design and research practices have been applied to a wide variety of disciplines from industrial design to the arts, the built environment and more.
What can we learn from this? And how can we apply it to the digital environment in which we work?
Social innovation, service design and even augmented reality are now presenting real and interesting opportunities for us as traditional web practitioners. Combined with inclusive design practices, this opens up a fantastic world of change for both us and the people for whom we design.
So starting with the web, we’ll reinvig orate our passion for diversity and inclusion. Let’s declare this The Age of Awareness!
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101 Things I Learned In Interaction Design School
by Shane Morris
When I first picked up Matthew Frederick’s book: “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” I was struck by the number of principles of architecture that can be directly applied to interaction design, but also disillusioned by the fact that Interaction Designers generally do not have a similar body of knowledge to draw on. Sure we have lots of “process”, but relatively little “wisdom” of the sort found in this book.
The field of Interaction Design isn’t very old — If we’re talking purely software interface design, then let’s say about 25 years old. No surprise, then, that we borrow heavily (and unashamedly) from a range of other, more established, disciplines. We try to compensate for our relative lack of a history, tradition or body of knowledge by leveraging others’. That’s entirely appropriate — but how far does it get us? Interaction Design is an essential component of the delivery of virtually any product or service today. Many of us may already be at the point where we interact with more digital products in a day than we do physical products, and many of the most important transactions in our lives are entirely virtual. Maybe Interaction Design needs to be taken a bit more seriously?
In this talk I’d like to reflect on my almost 20 years as an interaction designer — the things I’ve learned along the way, and the things I wish I would have learned at Interaction Design School, if such a thing had existed back then. Along the way we’ll review some of the 101 things we all should have learned in Interaction Design School, sourced from ixd101.com (the blog I share with Matt Morphett), and beyond.
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Building mobile web apps
by Myles Eftos
There is no denying that the Apple App Store is huge, but who wants to have to deal with Objective-C? Thankfully, technologies like PhoneGap and Sencha allow web developers to work in languages they know (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) while still making them look native. PhoneGap also allows us to port our apps to other platforms, like Android.
This session will look at the mobile web development lifecycle from building a prototype in the browser, integration with the phone, app submission and some basic marketing tricks.
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Mark Nottingham — Browser Caching and You (A Love Story)
Over time, Web developers have feared, hated and loved Web caching, at times trying to kill it, at others professing undying love. Mark Nottingham (chair of the IETF HTTPbis Working Group and author of its revised Web Caching specification) will examine how browsers (mis)-treat your content today, as well as where your relationship with browser caching might go in the future.
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Wrangling Time: The Form and Future of the Book
by James Bridle
The internet has been around long enough now that it has a proper history, and it has started to produce media and artefacts that live in and comment on that history. James will be talking about his work with writing, books and wikipedia that hopes to explain and illuminate this temporal depth.
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Flogging design: best practices in online shop design
by Matt Balara
Considering how many businesses depend upon the web for their income, it’s shocking how poorly designed most shops are. Not only aesthetically, but also as far as ease of use, retail psychology and user experience are concerned. How can we design better shops? If customers enjoy shopping more, won’t our clients earn more? Can forms be fun? What’s the psychology behind online purchases? How can online and offline buying experiences be harmonised? Matt Balara will share some of his 15 years of experience designing web sites, the vast majority of which have sold something or other.
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