Sessions at WebVisions Portland 2012 on Friday 18th May

As the number of connected consumers continues to skyrocket, brands still struggle with driving core business goals. Learn how some of the most successful companies use push messaging to build a direct, personal connection with their mobile customers.

We’ll offer examples of how different types of organizations are delivering branded, real-time interactive engagement through their apps, dig into the data and best practices that help ensure every push is a good push and detail emerging technologies that bring location and context into the mix for precise targeting.

No matter how small your team, you need a process. It's common for small shops to have one for website design, but less common to have one for website production.

Maybe you've heard of version control, but you're having trouble using it every day. Maybe the workflow is too confusing. Maybe you only have one coder, and don't see the point. Maybe you can't use it on your client's web server. Or maybe you're just a "cat person."

In this talk, we'll focus on how to use the git version control system to build websites. With an emphasis on smaller teams and common tools, we'll talk about how to get started and be productive. We'll talk about how git can help you answer questions like "What code is running on the site right now," "who last changed this part of the code," and "how do I keep track of how we've fixed these issues."

This will be a practical talk with the goal of simplifying, not complicating, your workflow. It is hoped that you'll walk out of the talk feeling inspired, and can put these ideas to work right away. We emphasize the simplest tools (Git, WordPress, Basecamp, Beanstalk, etc.) because we feel they end up being the most flexible.

Demographics have been used to target consumers for decades - because they were they best information we had. But now, knowing someone's age or gender is not enough to create passionate fans. You need to know the psychographics of your customers - their interests, priorities, and concerns. Psychographics will allow you to understand the mental model of your customer, which changes from hour to hour, and give you the ability to target messaging, offers, and experiences to the user in the way that is most relevant for them.

This session will review how to collect and use psychographic information about your users, based on their social network identities. This information can be used to influence every part of the user experience, from initial consideration, to login, to reward your most loyal users. We'll review examples of how to effectively create personalized experiences, and how to avoid the creepy feeling that users are being spied on.

Storytelling is an age-old tradition, because it’s one that just plainly and simply works. As the book Storytelling for User Experience by Quesenbery and Brooks says “We all tell stories. It’s one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race.”

But to be a really good storyteller, you need to understand three basic concepts: Context, Spine, and Structure (CSS). Each is critical and necessary, and all three need to work together.

In this session I will walk through these concepts and how to understand and implement them in your user experience design work to ensure a good story that covers all of the components of CSS—Context, Spine, and Structure—and is compelling, engaging, and memorable.

It’s a Tuesday night. It’s dark and rainy out and you’re job searching. Again. Your roommate all-too-cheerfully asks, “What kind of jobs are out there?” Your response comes out with a glorious (British) flight attendant falsetto:

"Hot startup looking for rockstar designer to sketch wireframes and design beautiful mockups. You'll be responsible for creating our brand identity, overseeing design-related tasks, and writing UI copy. Must know how to run usability studies, prototype, and write production-ready HTML and CSS by hand. Experience with SEO and analytics a plus."

And... scene.

How many times have you read a post like this, and wondered why everyone seems to be looking for unicorns to solve all their problems?

What’s a unicorn, you ask? It's an individual that just doesn't exist. This mythical creature is either something conjured up by an HR Coordinator with no sense of reality, or, a budget-crazed PM trying to merge 3 people into one (like Dr. Jekyll). In both scenarios, poor wizardry is necessary and we all know how disappointed everyone is when they leave a bad magic show.

For both the employer and candidate, the entire hiring process is comparable to finding Nessie- it’s just not gonna happen. Experienced professionals read descriptions like this and immediately banish the hiring group to Crazy Land because it’s clear the author is not familiar with the relative effort behind each of these tasks. Chalk up one point for the candidate smart enough to walk away from “Do-It-All” traps like this.

Filter is here to prevent you from choking on glitter and rainbows. We want to deconstruct this unicorn myth and get down to what’s real. Join us Friday, May 18th for some zesty conversation with Filter’s own magic makers, Dan Williams and Heidi Raynor, while we get the eff out of Crazy Land and back to reality.

Native apps are great, but if you want your app to reach as many people as possible, HTML5 is your ticket. In this session, we'll explore the different ways HTML5 can be used to build and deploy mobile apps, as well as the tools that can make the job easier.

Mobile and HTML5 expert Todd Anglin will show how Kendo UI Mobile helps developers build "native looking" apps that automatically adapt to iOS and Android. He'll demonstrate how tools like PhoneGap can be used to package a HTML5 app for an app store and will reveal tips for optimizing app development with HTML5.

Two Kendo UI Complete commercial licenses will be raffled to session attendees.

UX 101. Are you a developer? Do you dabble in design or are forced into making design decisions because there's no one else to do it? Come, my nerdy friend, I'll tell you a story about what words fall out of people's mouths when they're on the verge of a bad decision. We'll clean you up, dust you off and steer you back onto the road of making websites real, genuine people love.

No matter how much we try to put ourselves into a mobile first mentality, it is hard for us to do so fully. Our access to PCs prevents us from experiencing mobile the way many in the world do.

We're currently fighting for parity among experiences. We're arguing that the mobile version shouldn't be a dumbed down version of the desktop site.

But we've set our sights too low. In a true Mobile First world, the mobile version should be the best experience. Mobile shouldn't just match the desktop experience, it should exceed it.

Learn how animation can be leveraged as a key strategy in communicating human-centered research to decision makers, venture capitalists and customers. Animation has proven to be effective at appealing to diverse consumers because studies have shown that people have a heightened emotional response to animation.

Get a comparison breakdown of the advantages of using animation visualization versus video when explaining complex UX data and results, as well as Best Known Methods for the process itself.

Join a panel of government and open data experts for a discussion on how the web and mobile devices - along with open data initiatives - have helped to improve the ability of state and local government to communicate with and empower citizens, build business opportunities and entrepreuerism, promote transportation options, improve livability and more. Panelists will also discuss open data, app challenges and other initiatives that have produced apps that support a city or state's goals.

Ugh, marketing? Always over-promising, annoying and full of spam? No. Marketing is essential to a successful product, so let's make it awesome. Incorporating a marketing mindset during development helps us stay focused on making a real impact on real customers.

This talk will explore key marketing patterns that are applicable to any product or service. We'll see how marketing works at GitHub and New Relic and discuss lessons learned from both companies. Taking marketing beyond work, we'll also discuss how marketing can help our open source projects.

The proliferation of platforms like Pinterest and Instagram and the emphasis on visuals by existing networks like Tumblr, Google Plus, and Reddit mark a continuous shift in content demand by the web. Learn the latest in what businesses are doing to hitch their brands to the visual trends (new content creation approaches, graphic seeding, visual influencer relationship management) and how much of it is actually working.

Attendees of the session will learn:

• Recent trends and transformations in the visual content space (and indications of where things are going)
• How the gap between promotion of visual content and traditional content continues to widen
• Distinctions and nuances between visual bookmarking platforms like Pinterest, Gentlemint, and Gimme Bar
• Why some tactics in visual content marketing that worked two years ago don't anymore
• Tactics companies are using successfully to market products and services on visual platforms
• How to create a visionary visual content strategy as a company or individual

Two professors, eight students, and a laptop arrive in Hong Kong. Thirty days later, large multi-touch multiplayer game and IndieCade finalist "Black Bottom Parade" is created. What are the considerations when developing games on unconventional media?

In the world of touch surfaces, how does one create content appropriate for this particular mode of play? How do we transition creative teams who are used to working on conventional narrative content to the world of iterative design?

The world is drowning in data. It always has been. Making sense of that data and deriving meaningful insights has been left to professional statisticians. Up until recently that is. Info-graphics & data visualisations are popping up everywhere and they don't always make sense. Many horrible acts have been committed in the name of "Making this chart seem a bit more fun".

Getting the right data, and then getting the data right is a significant design challenge that touches on more domains than a UX designer will initially be familiar with.

If you intend to work with large data sets to answer questions about your company or application, or if you are tasked with summarising large amounts of data, or even if you've just been told to "design the new dashboard" then this is the session for you.

It's the 21st century. By now, technology was supposed to have become so smart, convenient and delightful that we hardly had to think about it. It was just going to be there when we needed it, doing what we expected. Or according to some, at this point technology was supposed to have taken over the planet and made us its slaves.
If you're like me, some days you wish it would pick one side or the other and stick with it.

Instead, we seem trapped in a tension between technology's ability to make us happy by attending to our needs, and making us sad and angry, by costing us even more time, effort and tears than we would've spent without it. The Happiness Machines keep turning into Unhappiness Machines. But why? And what can we do about it?

In this presentation, we'll explore how factors like the way we work together and an org's cultural biases get in the way of better design. We'll look at why assumptions about user context, cognition and behavior are behind some of our biggest mistakes. And we'll get at the heart of why User Experience design "is a thing" to begin with, and how, no matter what you call it, it's all about making the machinery of software and services more humane.

Social Content Marketing has become a valuable and accessible capability, and the role of the Social Content Marketer is on the rise, especially as traditional marketing tactics are being disrupted by the social web.

Both for the brand of you and the brand of your company, efficiently developing content worthy of sharing is an accessible skill. Visual content can help convey more complex information in a short amount of time that is more memorable. How this scales up as a strategy for larger organizations is evolving quickly, as marketers face a new sharing imperative to engage people.

Learn how to connect to people through content - whether presenting yourself or your company...

• Discover people through content, and content through people
• The value of visual communication for professionals
• How social content marketing is disrupting advertising

Users expect their experience on a website to adapt across all their devices - including mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop. The demand has coined the industry term - responsive design. The ideal effect is a satisfying and relevant experience to users on every size of display. Is this so much to ask?

What users don't see is the behind-the-screens, starting with the people crazy enough to craft experiences that inherently respond to users demands - designers and developers.

For progressive developers, this is an easy to grasp evolution. For designers, it presents a new host of challenges with some serious digital land(scape) mines.

To create a successful responsive web experience - and not cause any friendly fire in the process - requires design and development be in lock-step, harmony rather. Matt Fordham and Taylor Winters will talk through the fundamental need-to-knows from a developer's and designer's perspective, respectivey and respectfully (well, mostly).

This 45 minute presentation / micro-workshop will benefit all levels of experience. Depending on levels of attention some combination of the following can be gathered,

+ The fundamentals developers want designers to know when designing a responsive experience

+ The cornerstones of a successful process for engineering a responsive web experience

+ A real-time working example for attendees to access on devices during the presentation- we'll review key points of common responsive design layouts and the associated code

Plus, alarming statistics about why a responsive web experience is critical and helpful responsive design resources.

Low-resolution displays. Limited input capabilities. Frustrating voice interaction. Distracted users. A neverending array of devices. The mobile environment in 2012? Or is it how users with disabilities have dealt with technology since the 1970s?

Learn the tips and avoid the mistakes of the past by exploring how experts in the field of disability have approached designing apps and content with everyone in mind, and see how those designers, developers and users are solving mobile problems today.

Attendees will learn:

• How many new mobile technologies were actually designed for people with disabilities;
• What strategies designers have implemented to accommodate diverse user needs and preferences;
• How the principle of situational disability translates to the everyday mobile experience;
• What to do when you're torn between the new hotness and your legacy users.

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. Everywhere you turn, web workers are chattering about a more flexible future. There’s only one little flaw: our content’s not ready for the party. Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is stuck in meaningless blobs that break long before they bend.

We can't keep creating more content for every new device and channel. Instead, we need content that does more for us—content that can travel and shift with its meaning and message intact.

In this session, we’ll start making content go further by discussing:

• Why adding structure actually makes content more flexible
• How to keep relationships and priorities intact as layout and display shift
• What you can do today—without starting from scratch
• How folks in IA, UX, design, and development—as well as content strategy—can help make this happen

Designing and developing WordPress Themes isn't about a paint job on the web. It's where design and content meets the code pavement. WordPress Themes are highly flexible and dynamic, pushed to their limits by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Huffington Post, NFL, Number 10 Downing Street, NASA, Harvard, and more than 70 million websites worldwide.

Join Lorelle VanFossen and a panel of WordPress experts for insider stories, tips, tricks, and techniques to move you away from boring templates and crank up your designs with techniques to create powerful, dynamic websites. This engaging, high energy panel will discuss how WordPress Plugins influence design and functionality, wireframes to frameworks to WordPress Themes, and the future for WordPress Theme development including mobile, HTML5, CSS3, and the new federal laws on web accessibility.

There is a world—no, a universe—of data available to mobile devices that can be combined with location data to generate a much more engaging and personalized mobile experience. Who’s using it? How can you? Get creative!!

This presentation will explore how latitude and longitude can be combined with time of day, sunrise/sunset calculations, weather reports, phases of the moon, alignment of the planets, biorythmic patterns, proximity to family and friends, etc… in order to generate meaningful “lifestyle” applications and immersive gaming experiences--all with novel visualizations and a sense of humor.

Many large providers have recently deployed APIs using OAuth 2, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and more. But since OAuth 2 is technically still a "draft," many aspects of the spec change from month to month and it's sometimes hard to keep up.

This talk will give an overview of the OAuth 2 spec, starting with the various options the standard gives to developers for building web apps and native apps. We'll look at what the end user sees, work our way to what developers using an OAuth 2 API deal with, and we’ll end up at what developers of OAuth-2-compliant APIs will need to know to successfully implement the standard.

Human physiology translates every experience, including online experiences, through our senses, intellect and emotions. Contrary to current usability wisdom, we do not require, or even desire, an effortless experience. What we want is a satisfying experience. And it isn’t necessary to strip away complexity to be satisfied.
Humans are extremely good at processing complex information. In fact, satisfaction comes with overcoming a challenge and gaining a reward.

There is a rhythm to experience that can be frustrating or deeply satisfying. By closely matching web design patterns to the common ways we relate to the world, we create online experiences that go beyond effortless to extraordinary.

In this session, Corinne Erly Brown will explore recent research in the realms of physiology and psychology and will connect these topics to online experience, including:

• Pie-belly - Refine visual display techniques by understanding the experience of appetite and satiety
• Colonoscopies - Order screens in a checkout process through understanding the timeline of pain
• The Doorway of Forgetfulness - Connect lists and transitions to the function or failure of memory
• And more…

The question: Why is it so difficult to predictably build great products?

As with most $64,000 questions, a simple answer doesn't suffice. The interesting part isn't the answer itself, but, as they say, the journey. And as such journeys go, ours is filled to the brim with unexpected twists and turns, as it meanders in and out of our world of the web into the seemingly unrelated worlds of behavioral economics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, even religion.

Unraveling clues en route, it sheds new light on the causes, effects, and remedies for some of the most irksome dilemmas of our profession. And somewhere along the way, an elusive answer takes form: one that promises to make our products better, our projects smoother, and our lives happier.

Join Nishant Kothary as he takes on The $64000 Question.

The most powerful form of recognition on the Web is having your content selected to display on curated websites. Unlike the museums of the analog world, these online properties provide the jumping off point for high-volume sharing, re-publication, and appreciation from a larger audience than you or your business could ever reach alone.

Even if you are designing, writing, or recording high-quality digital artifacts, they still need to catch the curator’s eye. We’ll examine what goes through a Web curator’s mind in the few seconds your content is under review. And share seven design tips that will help your content rise to the top.

You know the right way to do things. You've got strong opinions on source order, indenting, and comment styles. What happens when your wolf pack of one has to expand, and you add things like version control to the mix? I'll teach you how to work on a team without resorting to swearing or eye-gouging.

You and your teammates may not be best friends, but you can stop fighting about tabs versus spaces and get back to what matters: Who put Lady Gaga on the office stereo?

The social web has impacted the way our customers interact not only with our brands but with individual items. Products are starting to participate in social networks in a meaningful way, developing their own personas and stimulating conversation from user conversations online to images tacked on a pinboard. As such, brands need to understand the difference between a brand being social and a product being social.

For example, what has worked as a branding experience on Twitter for example, is not the same as creating a point of sale for customers in the channel where they are and at the exact time they are most likely to purchase.

It's here! We introduced a new product on Adobe Labs — Adobe Shadow — a new inspection and preview tool allowing front-end developers and designers to work faster by streamlining the preview process, making it easier to customize websites for different mobile and tablet devices. Come join us for a live demo and check it out yourself. You can also download Adobe Shadow here!

Getting a user experience team bootstrapped in a startup requires experience and know-how. Dylan Wilbanks had none of these things. What he did have was a passion for users and a willingness to try anything and iterate relentlessly in a fast-growing organization that didn't know what it wanted out of UX.

Dylan will confess his many heresies against the UX conventional wisdom, explain how Agile Scrum isn't the evil UX designers make it out to be, and offer ideas for bringing UX into growing startups (or any company) hungry for user-centered development.

Attendees will learn:

• How to get UX started and adopted in startups and small organizations
• How to work lean software methods (like Agile and Extreme Computing) to UX's advantage
• How to "win early and win often" in the adoption effort by focusing on advancing rather than dictating
• How to know when it's time to move from a small, general UX team to a larger, more focused UX department

It does not matter how big or small your organization is, if you collect information on your donors, visitors, members or just about any other person or organization, chances are you have run into a few data nightmares.

In this hands-on session we will talk no-nonsense about data hygiene, collection methods, how to update and keep your information in tune with your organizations needs as well as industry standards on storing and creating simple and complex relationships between donors, alumni, constituents and members and more.

It doesn't matter if you're managing your data in Microsoft Excel or using a robust Contact Relationship Manager (CRM), this session will provide your organization with real-world data management tools and techniques.

Attendees will come away with:

• A base understanding of relational data structures and why it is key to define how your organization will track intimate and complex relationships such as Families, Couples and Affiliates.
• More confidence in making decisions on how to add and manage data growth.
• Understand the pros and cons of using more comprehensive solutions such as CRM’s vs. flat Excel files and offline systems.