Author: Ken

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Monday

Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0

Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1000

Liz Danzico, Director, experience strategy,   Daylife
Kristian Bengtsson, Creative Dir,   FutureLab
Chris Messina, Co-founder,   Citizen Agency
Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer,   Yahoo! (http://lukew.com/)
Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder,   Happy Cog

[This was one of the best panels I have been to, yet. Kudos to its organization and the preparedness of the panel members.]

“Stuck” is relative. A team might be stuck, but the focus of their work may have people moving through it. This panel will focus upon the stuck feeling of the team environment only.

Puts all your ideas out there and people may get it.

Try to hear what people are actually saying when they make requests, specs, requirements, etc.

“It’s better to be a flamboyant faliure then a mediocho success” Malcolm McClarran [check]

Put your ideas out there so that you 1) think it through and 2) others see you justification and ideas (e.g., your supervisor). This gives you control of the memes.
If you put it out there early then you get maximum benefit of people’s feedback. They get the maximum opportunities to see into your blind spots.
Like the Republicans, if you articulate a goal in simple terms it brings the story to other people.
Writing the ideas is the personal process that hones the ideas into the soundbites that catch on with the people you need to buy in to your ideas.

Design can be a problem solving process without calling it design.

SMALL groups who have good communication and are in touch with larger whole.

list specific user needs that are backed up and this will keep the business needs from overriding them.

Constrained resources often forces beneficial selection – better, more focused, simplified design.

Zeldman: “I wrote Designing with Web Standards for your boss…”

[research] Apple’s foray into their initial Apple Stores that failed because they were based upon their product lines rather than lifestyles.

Categories
Sunday

Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1700

Cameron Adams, Web Technologist, The Man in Blue
Sally Carson, Interaction Designer, Yahoo!
Dustin Diaz, User Interface Engineer, IMVU
Jonathan Snook

Business – User – Development : The three areas that you need to bring together to get designs to work

If one of these three things fails, the site will fail.

Each of these three needs to know what the other is up to in order to get buy-in.

From the designer’s POV, “naive” questions can get you answers to uncover political currents.
Be ready with facts to support your reasons for your desires.</common-sense>

Generalists may seem out of fashion so specialize, but you need to understand how it all fits together.
Web designers are often becoming “T-shaped people” – broad knowledge, but a depth of knowledge in some areas.

Generalists will become far more important as we move forward.

Small teams are good teams.

Team bonding – Agile development makes people want to contribute.

Making people happy
Agile and extreme programming gets other minds to interact with that are focused upon the exact same issues.
Quick meetings – standup meetings make for fast, focused meetings (“…if this meeting goes longer than fifteen minutes then you are doing it wrong”)

Categories
Sunday

Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1605

Kevin Hale, Co-Founder, Infinity Box Inc

I did not mean to go to this presentation, but it was a great history lesson in Mongolian strategy. Oh, well.

Categories
Sunday

Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1530

Patrick Lauke, Splintered
Ian Lloyd, accessify.com

The first part of this was Ian Lloyd merely talking about the tools afforded at accessify.com. I am downloading something so I do not want to move from any point where the wireless is actually working.

Page heading and document outline are useful in the WebDev Toolbar

Use semantic markup even if it is not, to your knowledge supported by an accessibility tool.

Javascript is not necessarily evil. To check, again, the WebDev Toolbar allows you to turn off js.

alt text:  normal stuff.
Basically, download the WebDev Toolbar for Firefox and use it.

graybit.com – turns your site into greyscale – pretty cool.

Firefox plugin – Color Contrast Analyzer
Tool: FAE

Unobtrusive accessibility: doing the right thing without your boss noticing: hidden skip links and form labels and table headings

Categories
Sunday

Everything You Wanted to Know about the Mobile Web, But Were Afraid to Ask

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1400

Brian Fling, Dir of Strategy, Blue Flavor

[I am sorry about the poor notes. I was taken in by his cool slides and an attack of ADHD.]

His presentation can be found here: http://www.blueflavor.com/sxsw2007/

Check out:

Mobile web will explode because of LBS (location-based services).
This contextualizes the web to a much higher level.

3 Cs of the mobile web: Cost, content and context

Clickstreams: where on a mobile page will the user go based upon clicks

different screensizes – about 500 different devices sold in the world

Do not design for smart phones or PDA – they are such a small part of the market, currently.

In his presentation, he meant “design vertically” when he says “design horizontally”.

Mobile web standards
XHMTL-MP (Extensible HTML – Mobile Profile) – this is the new WAP (old WAP:bad, new WAP:good)
XHTML and MP are VERY similar – standard tools can work with it.
Wireless CSS is more complicated, but his standard advice is to keep it simple
He recommends doc styles over style sheets because of flashing of the page during loading.

Recommendations:

  • only about 5-7 links per page. This gives you more than enough access keys
  • keep forms to a minimum
  • focus on five devices: treo, razr, nokia 40-series, ,
  • mobile stylesheets can detect devices with the handheld attribute

Testing devices remotely:  deviceanywhere.com

Categories
Sunday

Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1130

Elisa Camahort, Pres of Events & Mktg, BlogHer
Dawn Foster, Dir of Community & Partner Programs, Compiere
Annalee Newitz, Freelance Writer
Erica Rios, Internet Project Mgr, Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology

[After leaving the previous panel, I came to this one in progress…]

Myths/Issues:
Lack of support:

  • A major part of choosing an OS solution is the quality of the online community: documentation and peer support.
  • You can actually see a contributors code work before hiring them.
  • Many times you might be able to purchase support piecemeal for OS.

Code inclusion violations:

  • Just know the license under which the code is released.

Lack of security:

  • [insert standard arguments here]

Cost of making it usable/customer service is a hidden cost:

  • This sticks. Free software is free as in freedom and not free beer to paraphrase Richard Stallman.
  • There need to be financial resources dedicated to OS solutions.

OS is anti-capitalist:

  • On the contrary, there is a VERY healthy dose of capitalism fueling OS.

OS as an ethical choice:
“Microsoft is in the Dark Ages of their evil…Google is the new evil, but they use open source so maybe they are a good, new evil” – Newitz

OS is the public library of the software realm. It is all about access to use and contribute. Particularly to groups that have systemic barriers otherwise.

Categories
Sunday

Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1130

Bryan Veloso, Avalonstar
Jeff Croft, Web Designer, World Online
Veerle Pieters, CEO/Graphic/Web Designer, Duoh! nv
Kelsey Ruger, Dir Tech & Creative Svcs, The Moleskin

Playing Unreal Tournament at work focuses your design acumen.
Veerle has a great accent.

[I left this panel because it was lame (at least in the beginning) as they were just talking about what they personally found to be good work environs – not methods, tricks, hints, etc.]

Categories
Sunday

Designing for Convergent Devices

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1000

Ben Combee, Sr Software Developer, Palm Inc
David Richard, Pres, Design For Use LLC
Adam Zbar, CEO, Zannel
Jeff Beckham, Sr Business Mgr-Strategy, AT&T
Denise Burton, Principal Designer, Frog Design

Design considerations: control, branding, standards, and trust

Figure out how .mobi works. Do they just proxy sites or host unique copies or is it merely another domain?

User expectations: From device environment to environment, users expectations change and are dependent upon which direction they are traveling.

Since input limitations differ from device to device, try to minimize the amount of data the user needs to input. For example, pull as much (or assume) information from context. Example: Steve Jobs sending the image to the friend he is on the phone with.

Asking for information should have immediate and visible value for the user. If you ask for a mobile number, the user should know why and how this information will be benefitting her/him.

Europe and Asia are ahead of North America on this.

Categories
Saturday

High Class and Low Class Web Design

Saturday, 10 March 2007 @ 17:00
Christopher Fahey Partner, Behavior
Liz Danzico Director, experience strategy, Daylife
Khoi Vinh Design Dir, The New York Times
Brant Louck Creative Dir Publications, World Wrestling Entertainment

  • Do you design for yourself or for what you can know your audience likes?
  • We generally deal with a much more narrow demographic.
  • User personas: describing the entire person compared to only behaviour (use cases?)
  • My criticisicm of this talk:  What about assuming a rational agent approach? The assumption that every person makes decisions about how they spend their researces based upon intelligent reasons. As designers, we should attribute this rationality or we won’t be able to begin to understand decisions of the other.
  • In pure, results-based design (magazine adverts) the design choices may be limited for the designer (e.g., the 60-point, all-cap header sells better).
  • What about high-end products that undergo very little user-testing (e.g., iPods)?
  • Is what designer’s consider bad design actually comfort design for the majority of the public?
Categories
Saturday

Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad

Saturday, 10 March 2007 @ 16:05
Aaron Gustafson, Sr Web designer/Developer, Easy! Designs LLC
Sarah Nelson, Design Strategist, Adaptive Path

  • Information designer vs. Customer user experience designer – are they/should they be the same? Overlap greatly?
  • Test to see if js is present and unhide standard field sets.
  • Clever idea: .optional field sets can be positioned waaaay offscreen to hide them (for screenreaders).
  • If js is working have it change the tag of the fancy fieldset so that it calls the CSS into play.