Sessions at Webstock 2011 on Wednesday 16th February

From first concept to polished pixel, learn to create a mobile app that delights. This workshop teaches you to "think mobile" by planning and creating app interfaces in tune with the psychology, culture, ergonomics, and context of an audience on the go. You'll learn to conceive and refine an app's interface and user experience in tune with the needs of a mobile audience—and their fingers and thumbs. The workshop explores the practical principles of mobile and touchscreen design using examples from all major mobile platforms.

Speed matters. As designers and developers it's a point of personal pride to create a fast web site, to take that extra step to ensure users aren't left twiddling their thumbs and rolling their eyes waiting for our sites to load. But there's more to it than the pride we take in our craft. Google, AOL, Bing, Shopzilla,Yahoo! and others have shown that faster web sites attract more users, engage them longer, and generate more revenue while running on less hardware consuming less power and using less bandwidth. A better experience, more users, increased revenue, and reduced costs. What's not to love?!

So how do we get us some of this fast web stuff? Metaphorical spoonerisms notwithstanding, it starts by finding out what's taking the most time. Sounds simple but tools that give us visibility into the browser are fairly new, they vary by browser and OS, and many produce results that suffer from the observer effect or are plain wrong. In addition to the tools, you need to be able to spot the critical path items that are hurting the user experience.

Join Steve Souders, creator of YSlow and author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, as he peels the performance onion on some popular web sites using the latest tools.

And don't forget about mobile. Steve will show tools that let you test the most popular mobile devices without leaving your chair, and some new tools that give visibility into what the heck is going on in mobile browsers.

Nothing communicates faster and more memorably than images. Learn from a comics master how images can transmit ideas, stories, and information with force and precision. Cartoonist Scott McCloud (Google's choice to explain the inner workings of their Chrome browser through comics!) will get you drawing and THINKING about how we learn and are persuaded through pictures just as successfully as through words, and how techniques from the graphic arts world can be applied in web design and usability.

There’s a shameful open secret inside many companies that nobody likes talking about. It’s the “third rail” of office culture and it unnecessarily electrocutes the spirit of great teams every day:

Truth be told? Managers often say untrue things.

We’re not talking about lies or deceptions in the usual sense; we’re talking about the much more nuanced problem of saying one thing, then doing (or rewarding) something entirely different.

It’s the culture that demands nothing but unadulterated success, while claiming to foster innovation.
It’s the manager who’s a broken record about the need to “define your job,” while demanding you check email all day and tell him when you’re going to lunch.
It’s the C-Level who bellows about employees’ poor productivity and lack of focus as he updates Facebook from his CrackBerry.
In this half-day workshop, we’ll talk about the institutional gulf between what we say is important and what we do to prove, fund, and defend it.

If you’d like your organization to foster an environment in which no one ever needs permission to be awesome–and if you have the stomach for the unconventional cure–you may find this interactive workshop to be far more useful than simply mounting another motivational poster of a sailboat.