Category: SXSW ’12

Sunday, March 11 – 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Stephen Woods Sr Software Engineer Flickr

When working on the desktop, we’re worrying about browsers. You have to cover every case with various browser-specific CSS. On mobile, we worry about devices and not browsers.

Most mobile platforms run webkit, but there are a few other (less used) browsers out there.

Screen Size: Media Queries, Break points, liquid layouts.

We need to concentrate on interfaces that feel good
Modern mobile devices are crappy computers with decent video cards.

How do you make a devices (low powered) feel like it’s high powered – perceived performance. Tivo plays the sound the second you hit the button. On the web we throw up spinners. Touch interfaces are tactile – they need to have immediate feedback. When you touch something, you feel how it works, you have a much better sense of when it doesn’t work.

When interface stops moving during a gesture, it feels like it died.

TouchEvent
One on Android
11 on iOS

Making Gestures Work
Prioritize user feedback
Use hardware acceleration
Manage your memory
Don’t do loading during gestures.

Use native if possible when scrolling
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
Scrolling is very very important.

Don’t use native pinch to zoom – you can’t control it.
Use Matrix Transforms instead.

Dealing With Browsers
Feature Detect
Add transitions, don’t depend on them.
Gesture interaction is an enhancement, clicks should still work.
Be able to disable features per user-agent, if necessary.

Tools
Adobe Shadow
Charles Proxy
Just change the UA in Webkit
Pile of Devices (just test on the real thing)
Weinere
(Device Simulators & Emulators are useless for web development)

http://slideshare.net/ysaw/creating-responsive-html5-touch-interfaces

Sunday, March 11 11:00AM -12:00PM
Alison Moore Sr VP, Digital Platforms HBOGilles BianRosa CEO FanhattanJack Flanagan VP Sales Bluefin Labs IncRhonda Lowry VP Emerging Social Web Technologies Turner Broadcasting

What is Social TV?

• It’s currently in an evolutionary state (HBO Go). You can plug in conversationally no matter where you watch (GO, TV, Xbox etc.). How does it evolve without being disruptive to consumers. It’s all about water cooler stuff – keeping people engaged but also keeping the conversation going.
• 1. Looking for something to watch, people use social to determine where to go with it.
  2. While I’m watching – depends on the content you’re watching.
  3. Talk about it afterwards with you friends.

Why should we care about this? People have been talking about TV forever.

• It pinpoints the buzz and helps us to focus new activities. It is all about engagement – the tools that people expect to have when they watch content.

Impressions vs. Expressions

• Impressions are the ratings – how many people are watching etc.
• Expressions are what consumers are talking about – how many time something is shared etc. What is the level of engagement of consumers of a show? We can now understand what is being said. Evaluate based on the conversations about a certain show.

Studios create brands and then try to link together everything about a certain show (itunes episodes, soundtrack, hulu videos, website, etc.). A consumer should be within one click to get anything they want about the show from episodes to t-shirts.

Don’t push the conversation, but enable the conversation. Don’t just advertise your content.

Saturday, March 10 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Sean McBride Web Dev Adobe Typekit

Taking iconic sign styles and transforming them into the web using web technologies.

Ideas vs. Forms
Idea -> Design System -> Form

Many times we try to go from an original form to a new form without any sort of consideration of where it came from and how exactly to get it into that new form.

@font-face
Call @font-face and point to the URL of the web font.

CSS Transform will let you rotate the font on the page.

@text-shadow
you can add offset and color as well as multiple shadows to text. (this is not supported in IE9)

mask
you can use an image to hide and show certain elements using transparency in PNG images. (unofficial property, so it won’t work in many browsers – currently only webkit browsers)

Slides and visuals from this presentation located at: http://seanmcb.com/sxsw2012/

Saturday, March 10 12:30PM – 1:30PM Jared Ponchot Creative Dir Lullabot Slides available here. Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order. (Victor Papanek) CMS create ways to impose a meaningful order. How a CMS Thinks

• Contexts
  • A context provides conditions and reactions based upon a defined criteria. Conditions might be things like sections, content types or user types. Reactions might be things like display a list of these chunks from this type of content in the sidebar.
• User Types
  • Who is using the site?
  • What are they using it for?
  • Anonymous or Authenticated
  • What can they access or not access, create or not create, edit or not edit?
  • Authors, Editors, Administrators, Moderators
  • Baby Got Backend
  • Put yourself in the shoes of the content creators early and often and you will better understand the correct structure of the content, produce better designs, and increase your likelihood for a successful project and a happy client!
• Content Types
  • What are the types of content?
  • How can we break down these types of content into discreet chunks?
  • Finding out what these types are helps you to model this content first and then style at the end.
  • A List Apart: Future-Ready Content
  • Content types provide a sensible target for creating goals for your website. Set goals for each type of content in your design process.

Why should we think this way?

• We need to know our tool.
• It simplifies the complexity.
• We can’t design for each PIECE of content on a dynamic site! (this is also helpful for responsive design)

Hierarchy!

• Create 3 groups with everything, and begin to put things into groups. Prioritize them with the chunks of each content type.

Gestalt & Other Fundamentals

• Position
  • eye moves top to bottom, left to right
• Proportion
  • we notice big things, it can override position
• Proximity
  • creates visual relationships – too much similarity visually make it hard to tell what something relates to
• Symmetry
  • we perceive objects and tend to perceive them as symmetrical shapes that form around their center – our brain wants to make patterns
• Similarity
  • thins that are similar are perceived to be more related than things that are dissimilar
• Alignment
  • this creates relationships and beauty (grid systems)
• Contrast
  • create visual importance
• Color
  • warm colors stand out, cool colors recede
• Isomorphism
  • similarity that can be behavioral – the brain wants to make things right and create story out of pattern
• Unity
  • things look like they belong together
• Pause
  • awkward silence in our design – a way to really draw something out

Tips & Tricks

• When you blur your eyes you begin to see where the visual weight lies between two similar objects.
• Create a style guide page that shows every single style in the CMS and how they work together. (be sure to include system messages and pagers and form elements etc.) Drupal Style Guide Module
• Style Tiles help to create a visual language.

Ask yourself regularly how can I have fun?

Saturday, March 10 – 11:00AM -12:00PM
Charles Ying Developer Flipboard

Flipboard takes feeds and streams from all over the web and turns it into a beautiful magazine layout (for iphone and ipad).

Flipboard is a hybrid application – it is a mix between a web app and a native app.

Web App
Put a simple "app" wrapper around a website

Native App
Has a native UI with hooks into the device

The idea of a hybrid app is to take the best of both worlds and combine them into something that takes advantage of both worlds. Use the best parts of web and the best parts of native and combine them together.

Do NOT try to emulate native UI – they don’t feel right, and many times have too much overhead.

Bridging Web and Native
Use a UIWebView with javascript calling the native code when necessary.

Save power – do fewer simpler things.

Working with Web Code:
Debugging was difficult, so a simulated HTML environment was created for testing
Move hotspot areas into native code
Pay attention to what your JS libraries are doing, strip out the things you don’t need
Consider what the browser has to draw and composite on screen.

Mobile Graphics
Aim for high frame rates (60fps)
Use the GPU acceleration for animation and UI
Use CSS3 Animation + Transitions
Watch your graphics memory use
Shadows and gradients are typically slower on mobile devices
Consider compositing and overdraw – transparent elements have more overhead

Existing Frameworks

• PhoneGap, trigger.io for UIWebView bridge
• Appcelerator for Custom JavaScriptCore
• Spaceport, ImpactJS, CocoonJS for Gaming

Saturday, March 10 – 9:30AM -10:30AM
Brandon Satrom Developer Evangelist TelerikGarann Means JavaScript EngineerJoe Stagner Sr Program Manager Developer Technologies Mozilla CorporationMike Taylor Web Opener Opera Software
Paul Irish Chrome Developer Advocate Google Inc

Firebug was released in 2006 just viewing the DOM was a big thing at that time.

The Last Year of Developer Tools

Chrome

• Hit the little cog for development tools.
• You can view your JS files individually
• Customize the layout of the tools
• Spoof user agent
• Color picker available when adding/changing colors
• Revision history is created for all changes

Firefox

• You can see a 3D view of a site with web developer.

Opera

• Dragonfly (dev tools)
• Remote debugging allows you to debug your site on other devices. You can send your site to another device via ip address, or it will detect your device on the network.
• Color picker gives you a lot of detail when selecting colors from an image or screen. It will also give you related colors or workable palettes.
• CSS Profiling: It shows how the CSS loads on the page visually and allows you to go in and see where things get held up.

Internet Explorer

• Format Javascript will provide a more visually appealing script (no wall of text) to work with.
• Browser Mode can do full emulate older versions of the browser inside IE10.

Remote Debugging

Adobe Shadow sends stuff to your mobile device as well as open dev tools.
The new Chrome for Android also provides remote dev tools (connected via USB).

Opera Mobile Emulator will launch a profile for a number of phones to show you what your site/code looks like on that device.

Friday, March 9 – 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Deborah Maue Asst VP DePaul UniversityLiz Gross Dir of University Mktg & Comm University of Wisconsin-Waukesha

This session was a core conversation – a room full of peole in higher education talking about topics related to social media. These are a few of the take-away notes.

• The tendency in social networking is to try everything when new social networks come up – doing one thing really well is better than many things only partially.
  (my thoughts are to have at least a presence in the areas where your audience is, but to focus and prioritze the areas where most people are.)
• Engage existing groups to participate in official events and they will help to promote your information and be active in your ofiical things.
• UW Madison has a social media user group made of social media managers across campus (experts and beginners). They hold monthly meetins to talk about what is being done.
• Penn State started a national chapter of the PRSSA Social Media Club.
• Your number one goal with social is enagement.
• Social media style guide base on the media. This guide may be very very diferent from the official university style guide. Social media is much more conversational.
• Being geninune is very important

Friday, March 9 - 2:00PM - 3:00PM
Andrew Crow VP, Experience Design GEBen Fullerton Director, User Experience Method
Leah Buley Design Strategist IntuitNate Bolt Pres Bolt|PetersRyan Freitas Co-founder AOL/About.me

Slides: http://dforc.org/

Design for different locations, environments and relationships and product ecosystems. What problems exist in all of these areas, and design for those problems.

Examples of Crazy Design Context:
Astronauts in space. Design applications that could be used in the shuttle and on a space station. Zero gravity was a challenge for design.

Browser-based is typical, and moving that to mobile. Desktop/browser first is very different than mobile. Push the behaviors you want to represent first. Don't just map the typical experience into the new context.

Important themes when designing-

Time
Designing interactions for different lengths or instances of time.
How are people using your design? They use it, go away, then come back to it. People live their lives outside of your app or design. Make sure that you design tasks based on the amount of time people have (surveys, etc.).

Ecosystem
What is the bigger picture? How does your product fit into the whole ecosystem? Be sure to take a look at how your product fits in with brand, or social, or other technologies. For many products, the majority of users are entering through mobile interfaces, so a good amount of people don't even see the rest of the ecosystem. You need to make sure that you've created something that can stand on its own in just the mobile environment. You also have to look at the difference between a tablet environment and a mobile phone environment. They're both mobile, but very different environments.

Location
How do we accommodate and embrace various locations? Provide different tools for your mobile phone that you always have with you. This was used in a Victoria Secret app on the phone that was not in a tablet version because people likely don't have their tablet with them when they are in the store.
Tax Online Accountant app uses mobility in the workplace so that someone doesn't have to stop what they are doing and run to a computer and look something up. This app allows someone to pull up information they need regularly quickly on their mobile device (e-file status). It doesn't need to be out and about.

Form & Technology
What about screen size, input methods, technical constraints?

Brand & Relationships
One conversation... Make sure you are having the correct conversation that your brand represents.

What have we learned?

• Make sure your users can engage with your products that give them the most value and experience your product in the best way.
• Be sure that you are aware of your audience and how they are accessing your product and design for that audience and context and the environment they are accessing your stuff.
• Find quick easy ways to get on your users timeline.
• Design for the ideal intended experience. Be comfortable with the fact that you might miss something. Just be the best designer you can be for your users.