Add an eventWebVisions Chicago 2012 schedule
Thursday 27th September 2012
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Opening Comments
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Innovation Starts at the Top: The Role of the DEO in Creativity and Business
Hot Studio founder Maria Giudice has pursued a vision of intelligent, elegant, people-centered design throughout her professional life. It’s an approach that’s helped Hot grow into a full-service creative agency with offices in San Francisco and New York City and one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 5,000 fastest-growing businesses.
Known for her candor and wit, Maria has spoken at conferences around the world, including TEDxPresidio and SXSW. She teaches regularly at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and California College of the Arts, and is co-author and designer of several award-winning books including Elements of Web Design and Web Design Essentials.
Maria holds a BFA from Cooper Union. In 2012, she was named an AIGA Fellow.
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HTML5 and CSS3 Coding Standards
by Shay Howe
There are a million ways to write HTML and CSS, and everyone has their own, but is there a right way? Our code needs to be well structured, written in an organized manner, and performance driven. Sharing code with others should be a joyful experience, not absolute terror.
In this session, Shay will cover some best practices and performance tips for writing the highest quality HTML and CSS possible. Writing code is the easy part, finding a practice and structure that works well across the board is the hard part. Shay will outline HTML and CSS conventions that can be applied to your everyday practice.
Coming out of this session, attendees will understand:- How to best structure HTML and CSS
- What it takes to write clean, valid code
- Practices on how to organize and modularize styles
- Performance and its relation to HTML and CSS
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The Why of UX Design
by Steve Fisher
Think about your product, company, service... whatever your main focus is daily. Imagine if you always started with the Why. That one question would transform everything else. A common phrase I use when talking with our Creative Team is “start with the Why and everything else will follow.” It’s not quite as simple as that, but it’s close. The vision, mission, goals of a project (or better yet, an organization) should define Why something is happening. They should be the essence driving all of our UX decisions. People are come to our sites to complete a task, to get information, to interact with our stories.
Start with the Why. Build from that inner circle out to the How and then finally to the What. It will establish a foundation for your project that will be successful and will motivate intrinsically. It will keep you from jumping on the latest “feature bandwagon” and give clarity to each step you take.
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Mobile Usability Testing
by Jenn Downs
Jenn subscribes to DIY, inexpensive, and experimental methods of usability testing. We'll look at the current state of mobile testing, including in person testing, remote mobile testing, behind the scenes beta and app testing, and find out what's next for mobile testing.
Session highlights include:
- Mobile Testing Methods, including the state of Remote Mobile Testing
- How to build a simple and cheap mobile recording rig
- Unmoderated testing options
- Behind the beta testing scenes
- Apps that are leading us into the future of Mobile Testing
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The Honey Badger Way: Or, How I Learned to Get Things Done
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Responsive Design, Mobile First, Content Strategy — Honey Badger Don’t Care! Sure, it’s important to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies, design patterns, and trends, but they can far from guarantee your success in the real world. It is your ability, or lack thereof, to understand and work with other people —your project team, stakeholders, and users — that often determines the success of your project, as well as how you feel along the way. And chances are, it is the skill that you spend the least amount of time working on because it's the "soft skill" that's really the hardest one.
Join Honey Badgerologist Nishant Kothary as he takes you through some of the most irksome dilemmas of working in technology, using case studies and research from the fields of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. You'll laugh and you’ll cry, but you’ll leave with a more technical understanding of how to work with and influence other people. More broadly, if you are a person who has ever wanted to go Honey Badger on another person, this session is for you.
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Designing with Data
Every piece of information on your screen is visual noise. From background textures, to fonts, borders, rounded corners, drop shadows, and even the number of buttons or navigation items--it's all visual noise. Clear and effective design is about striking a balance between being visually appealing and being useful. With the rise of big data, navigating the waters of visual noise becomes even more challenging.
In order to effectively design with data, you need to understand the data, prioritize it, and make it scale for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Jam packed with visual examples and case studies, Todd will show a number of tricks and techniques that anyone can use for designing with data.
If you want to ride the big data wave, want to learn techniques for making analytics, dashboards, and screens packed with information more effective, delightful, and easy-to-use, then this session is for you.
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Everything I Need to Know About the Web I Learned from Performance Art
by Heather Gold
The web was always social because people are social. The advent of social media is merely a moment where the use of data gives data-oriented feedback on just how social we are and thus the use of social media can be read by our analytics to dominate the use of the Web. Our social nature and drives should be more of a focus for web creators since the machines will take care of the calculations more and more.
Understanding how we communicate, connect in public and create conditions that aid this are increasingly important. This is where performance meets web. -
Be a Creative Superhero. Save the World.
by Eve Simon
The Mission: Create stunning, impactful and engaging online experiences that spur action for important social causes.
The Heroes: Mild mannered yet steely eyed Creative Avengers, fearlessly leading the fight for truth & beauty in effective design. (In other words – YOU.)
The Villains: The Legion of Misguided Design Foes (including Wasted Pretty, Code Zombie & Mr. BottomLine), trying to distract, destroy, and thwart visual engagement at every turn.
The battle for purposeful website design is on, and the future is in your hands! Will you let buzzwords and bad creative decisions be your kryptonite or can you save the day with your superpowers of visual narrative? Don that cape, grab a sidekick, and learn how to change the world through design that is both beautiful and meaningful.
Phone booth and Spandex optional. -
Steel Wires and Treadmills
“The horses - real ones - galloped full-pelt towards the audience, secured by invisible steel cable traces and running on treadmills. Electric rubber rollers spun the chariot wheels. A vast cyclorama revolved in the opposite direction to create an illusion of massive speed, and fans created clouds of dust.”
—William W. Young
In 1902, steel wires and treadmills were used to create a spectacular enactment of Ben-Hur, to create an experience that inspired wonder.Drawing examples from ancient theater, early film, architecture and optical illusions, Thomas will reflect on different techniques, technologies and platforms used over the ages to engage audiences and move them to wonder. With a nod to the cutting-edge technologies of the past, such as Eidophusikons and cycloramas, Thomas will discuss how Second Story and its peers are using current creative technologies to inspire future generations.
This session is for those interested in:
* the history of engineering in the arts;
* the use of digital technologies to create engaging physical experience;
* the current and near future state of interactive, display, and sensing technologies. -
Content Strategy: You're Soaking In It
by Tim Frick and Russ Unger
This presentation will cover content strategy from two perspectives: user experience (UX) and marketing, with a focus on where the two disciplines cross paths. It’s a lonelier place than you might think with marketers, designers, and UX professionals often siloing themselves off from each other—and losing valuable opportunities to collaborate, meet business goals, learn, and build truly successful digital products in the process.
Presenters Tim Frick and Russ Unger will discuss how content strategy forms the basis of all elements in a digital project and how collaborating at key touch points during a project’s life cycle—analyzing keywords, building sitemaps, designing interactions, and so on—will get marketers, UX teams, and clients on track to creating digital products that thrive.
If you’re not thinking strategically about your content, you’re probably still struggling to deliver with your best ROI, KPI’s, and other acronyms in mind. These days, content strategy is becoming more of an expectation than a differentiator. The person who owns a project’s content ultimately owns the project, so ensuring success means enacting content strategy practices from the first phone call through ongoing maintenance and every step in between. This session will help you get there.
Tim & Russ will then walk participants through a Content Strategy-influenced process that helps them guide their projects toward success, and the tools that are needed to achieve them.
Key take-aways will include:
* Defining content strategy’s role in an organization or project
* Where do content strategy and UX overlap?
* Maintaining marketing goals throughout the content life cycle
* Methodologies for assessing content performance
* Maintaining content strategy over time -
The Death of the UI?
We are living in interesting times. Technology that at one time would have been considered the ravings of a mad men has now become reality: pocket computers, ubiquitous Internet access, cars that can drive themselves... All of this exist for us to use, now. And among these technology advances has come two more fanciful notions: interaction using gesture and voice. What was once science fiction is now here, now, and we are at the cusp of a breakthrough in how we interact with our electronic devices.
In this presentation, Joseph Dickerson, technologist and user experience architect for Fortune 500 company Fiserv, discusses these newest technology innovations and looks forward, to the potential death of the UI.
What will be covered (and what will be learned):
* A history of voice and gesture interface
* Recent (and upcoming) innovations in voice and gesture control
* Guidelines on how to create apps and products that support these new interaction paradigms
* The impact these technologies will have on user expectations -
Mobile & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm
The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.
Why is all this happening now? Where is it all going? UIE’s own Jared Spool will show you how four driving forces—market maturity, the emergence of experience, Kano’s model, and Sturgeon’s Law—are increasing the visibility and value of design in organizations everywhere. He’ll show you what the next generation of design teams will look like and how you’ll get there.
Friday 28th September 2012
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Opening Comments
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A Future-Friendly Web
by Brad Frost
Our digital landscape includes desktops, laptops, smartphones, featurephones, tablets, e-readers, netbooks and more. But this is just the beginning.
As the digital landscape continues to become even more complex, it's essential for us to start thinking beyond the desktop and embrace the unpredictability of the future. There's no such thing as future-proof, but there are things we can do in order to better prepare ourselves for the era of ubiquitous connectivity. We need to start thinking and acting differently in order to create meaningful web experiences that continue to be relevant well beyond the scope of the initial projects.
This session will cover:
- A better understanding of future friendly principles
- Tips for better supporting today's device landscape while being better prepared for tomorrow's
- How to apply future friendly thinking in your current web projects
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Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization
More and more design organizations actively embrace a range of user-centered methods, including ways of getting input from users: surveys, A-B testing, focus groups, usability testing. But for many teams, when it comes to leaving the office environment and going out to meet and observe customers, there is significant resistance.
In this talk, Steve Portigal draws from his 17 years of selling contextual research into organizations, as well as primary research he's conducted with internal champions and change agents to break down the cultural, resource, and other factors that inform this resistance.
Steve will suggest ways to address these challenges and look at how you can maximize the result of every small victory, turning every fieldwork experience into an opportunity to do more! -
Beyond Usable: Mapping Emotion to Experience
by Kelly Goto
Success in today’s roller coaster economy is tied to connection. On all levels. Products and services must connect with customers in a meaningful way. But translating fuzzy feelings into user experience design is tricky.
Design ethnographer Kelly Goto presents contextual personas--a proven method for mapping experience to emotion--to turn contextual research into usable insights and recommendations. By capturing information about goals and environment alongside emotional indicators, we gain insight into designing user experiences that connect to people’s real needs and desires.
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Trust Me! I'm a Designer: 9 Principles for Creative Credibility
A recent study by Demos (Demos.co.uk) called Truth, Lies and the Internet found that a third of teens polled in the UK believe any information they find on line is true without qualification. Even more staggering is that a 15% of that group admit to making their decision about the truthfulness of the content of a Web page based on appearance alone.
Design serves one primary purpose: to gain the trust of its intended audience. Within the first second of viewing a design — before even reading a single word — we have already determined our opinion about the quality and likely trustworthiness of what we are looking at. Once that basic line of trust is established, it is only then that design can clearly work to help turn data into knowledge and knowledge into understanding.
In this session, Jason will present the 9 principles of trust for design, and look at how you can use them to help clients understand often obscure design decisions.
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CSS3 OpenType: The New Web Typography Frontier
Web typography is changing dramatically thanks to browser support for @font-face and server-based web fonts. Web designers now have thousands of font choices where they once had just a dozen. But beyond @font-face, CSS 3 introduces myriad new OpenType typographic controls, bringing a level of typographic precision to web design previously seen only in print.
Covered in this presentation:
- Quick refresher on @font-face server-based web fonts
- How to tell which web fonts support which OpenType features
- Everyday features for websites: ligatures, kerning, oldstyle numbers and true small caps
- Intermediate features: stylistic sets, calligraphic and script fonts, and more
- “Correct” typographic use of these new features
- Advanced features: fonts that censor naughty words, predict the future, and translate languages for you
- Features in action on web pages, from workhorse everyday typography to the surprising and bizarre, via fonts created by Phinney and friends
- State and near future of advanced typography support in browsers
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From Twitter to the Obama Campaign
by Trammell
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Kickstarting Civic Design: An Overnight Success 10 Years in the Making
If you think there’s a shortage of UX talent in the corporate world, you should see what it’s like in government. The world needs us -- UX people with design skills. But you can’t just walk in the door at City Hall and announce that you’re the answer to their prayers and problems. In civic design, the path to enlightenment goes through public hearings and basement hallways, meeting with and understanding public administrators and their constituents. Want to do good in the world? Thinking about doing UX in the public sector? Come hear Dana’s lessons learned through her campaign to improve ballot design.
Dana - with a band of merry helpers, including Chad Butterfly - is the editor of Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. Each Field Guide holds brilliantly researched, guideline gems and examples about a specific and far-too-common election design problem. The first 4 Field Guides were funded by a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in Spring 2012 and were published in June 2012.
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Thinking Beyond the Device
Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.
In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.
After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work. Salivating. They were practically salivating.
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Exploring Canvas: 14 Practical and Impractical Examples at a Break-Neck Pace
by Kevin Hoyt
What can HTML5 Canvas do for you? Coupled with a number of emerging web standards, probably a lot more than you ever thought possible! In this session you will get an introduction to using canvas while reviewing both practical and impractical examples at a break-neck pace.
Come along for the ride as we look at the types of interactions canvas can offer your content including…
- Drawing shapes that are not part of the canvas specification
- User-generated drawing with a mouse
- User-generated drawing with your finger on a tablet
- Path interpolation for smooth gaming effects
- Dynamic charting with real-time data (from an Arduino!)
- Custom charting the flavor profile of your favorite beer
- User-generated drawing with an image for a paint brush
- Slicing and dicing image pixels at runtime
- Take apart an image and brute force it into CSS
- Creating stereogram 3D visualizations on an image
- Turn an RGB LED to a color selected on the canvas
- Level the horizon of an image and crop to fit
- Extract and display image Exif data via drag-and-drop
- Use accelerometer data to control a golf game
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The Complexity of Simplicity
by Dan Saffer
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." So said Albert Einstein. But how? How can you take complex pieces of functionality, put them all together and make them as simple as possible...without alienating experienced or power users? This talk will outline the barriers to simplicity—and how to overcome them—as well as looking at the designers' toolbox for how to create designs that feel simple. Creating simplicity is, as it turns out, pretty complex.
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Cultures of Effective Learning
by Jeff Cohen
How can you learn to build a web application if you’ve never built one before? And once you have grasped the essentials, how can you elevate your game to the next level? In an era of a seemingly permanent talent shortage, how can organizations sensibly invest in less-experienced developers and help them grow?
There are practical things we can do as individuals, organizations, and open source communities, to continually grow in both skill and perspective. In this talk I’ll explore time-tested strategies that create a culture of learning, enhance a developer’s skills, and help beginners move into environments where they can be most productive.
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The Business of Play
Play isn't just for kids and heavy gamers. Anyone with a FourSquare account knows that - and the stickiness of a badge and a leaderboard. But a good, playful user experience isn't about those surface elements either- it's about creating an environment with well-understood rules, meaningful objectives, and a sense of fun. Whether you're trying to encourage people - or yourself - to save money or to lose weight, a focus on game mechanics and play could be trump card you're looking for.
In this session we'll discuss case studies in playful design, to show how it's been used for a variety of goals:
- Connecting customers with brands by providing a story they can participate in
- Engaging children in self-motivated learning, at ages where many are at risk of dropping out
- Increasing personal health and wellness
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Keynote: Waving Arms and Yelling: The Future of Systems is Gesture and Character
We've all seen Minority Report and routinely swipe, pinch, and tap our iOS and other devices. Siri and other voice-activated interfaces lurk in our pockets, our heads, and soon our cars and televisions. Is this where we're going? If so, what do we know about gesture and chracterized interfaces or, better yet, what can the past tell us about the future.
In his keynote presentation, Nathan Shedroff will show what science fiction has already taught us about gestures (since 1951!) and anthropomorphism in the interface.
Saturday 29th September 2012
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How to Build Awesome HTML5 Games
by Alex Porter, nsbingham and Coop
HTML 5 Gaming is rapidly evolving and there has never been a better time to give it a try. This workshop focuses on using Impact JS and other libraries and tools to create amazing games in the browser without any plugins. We’ll be taking advantage of the HTML5 Canvas, JavaScript, and modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, FireFox, IE 9+) to deliver fast, fluid games directly in the browser.
We’ll be covering the basics of building an HTML5 game from the ground up, as well as touching on some more advanced topics to inspire developers to push HTML5 gaming to its limits.
WebVisions Chicago 2012
United States United States, Chicago
26th–29th September 2012
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