Sessions at Breaking Development 2012: Orlando with slides on Tuesday 17th April

One web! Responsive web design! Mobile first! Inspired by the amazing talks you've heard at the mobile web conference, you return to work ready to tackle your next big mobile web project. Wow, it's a Fortune 500 company! "They thought that newspaper project was cool," you tell yourself, "wait until they see what we do with this!" You're going to change the world!

Wait, what do you mean mobile isn't part of the web division? They call this a budget? And who are these other jokers you have to deal with in eCommerce?

In this presentation, we'll arm you with an awareness of some common pitfalls you may face when dealing with enterprise clients, and show you some strategies to combat or avoid them, so your next project emerges as a shining beacon of mobile web innovation.

Today, mobile feels a lot like the wild west - filled with the frenetic energy of unbound optimism. Yet all too often, the review mirror effect is at play. Instead of embracing the spirit of invention, too often people try to recreate the desktop computing experience on a mobile device. Humans have two legs - making us inherently mobile beings. Yet for the last 50 years, we've all settled into a computing landscape that assumes a static context of use.

The most exciting aspect of mobile user experience is that it is offering us the opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information.

Invention and exploration of a new and unsettled landscape can be daunting proposition for designers and developers working in time and resource constrained environments. Where do you look? In this talk, Rachel will cover three emergent mobile UX themes that will become important to mobile computing in the years to come. They are:

Shapeshifting: Advice for how to think about and create experiences that span and scale across multiple devices.

A Brave NUI World: Defining differences between graphical user interfaces and the emergent world of mobile natural user interfaces as well as advice for traversing the NUI/GUI chasm.

Comfortable Computing: How the proliferation of mobile devices like tablets is ushering in an age of computing that is less about efficiency and tasks, and more about providing people with a sense of comfort and connection.

You've made your web site fit a 320px screen, but you had a hunch there was more to this whole mobile thing than that. And now you're thinking about geolocation, social design, photo uploading, NFC and augmented reality. Wait, what? CSS3 didn't prepare you for this.

The web is getting a whole lot more exciting, and mobile's at the vanguard. The boundaries between browser and device, device and user - as well as between users and their friends - are where many of its unexplored opportunities lie.

Let's talk about what works, what doesn't, what should, and what will - and discuss the real possibilities and opportunities that standardized device and network APIs can offer. Our hopes and dreams for a rich, contextual, social web will depend on them.

Midway through a project, a client of ours recently said "One thing I'm learning is that it's ok to give up on the desktop experience once it stops making sense". This wasn't an isolated incident. In fact, i'm beginning to think desktop web sites stopped making sense quite a while ago. We've just had nothing viable to replace them with. Mobile apps have given us a glimpse, but I think they're merely a glimpse into something bigger.

Mobile isn't merely a new stage in the evolution of the web, it's not even merely a new context, it's the very early stages of an entirely new system. A system that has already started to shape our environment, affect the way we live, how we choose to connect with others, and how we're able to spend our time. A system that is also slowly unravelling our assumptions and causing us to question the very reason we build web sites, why people visit them, and where the true value of the web actually lies.