Sessions

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.

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.

Fri., Jan. 20th from 8:30am – 5:00pm
Meeting rooms at the Hudson Hotel

The Business Innovation and Education Lab is an all day event connected to the WebVisions conference that features a series of lightning presentations from startups with innovative ideas for digital, interactive and mobile apps, commerce and services. During breaks, speakers and attendees can connect and discuss opportunities to do business, create partnerships and develop new markets for goods and services.

The afternoon will feature a roundtable discussion on the future of education and training for the digital economy with educators and leaders from Parsons The New School for Design, School of Visual Arts, NYU's ITP and others.

Mobile has been described as the wild west of the web. It is untamed. Pitfalls abound. And there are plenty of bad characters ready step between you and your customer to “help” them have a better mobile experience. Choosing the right path can be daunting, but just like the wild west of old, there’s gold in them hills.

Web typography is changing dramatically thanks to browser support for @font-face and server-based 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.

Alice Twemlow and Khoi Vinh will discuss the challenges that designers face to make the transition to entrepreneurs, lessons learned from app development, why it's important to have a distinctive voice, and how user experience affects a product's success in its social communities of use.

The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, repetition, movement and texture (and others) are widely recognized and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience. In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design.

Jim Henson started working as a puppeteer in 1954, a fair 40-50 years before many of us even considered User Experience as a career. He did, however, take it upon himself to apply many of the core principals that UX Designers are falling love with today (or are at least using as part of our everyday lives). Hang out for a quick dive into the life of Jim Henson, with a view into his work from the perspective of how it pertains to what it is we’re doing today, that promises to even leave Waldorf and Statler happy.

Gamification is everywhere these days, and groups with marketing or educational goals are enthusiastically seeking ways to build games into their strategies. Still, after a period of frenzied buzz, it’s becoming clear that efforts to give everyone badges for brushing their teeth have produced a lot more ‘meh’ than ‘awesome!’ and most people are not that interested in achievements for their own sake.

As the pace of change accelerates around our businesses, and the sheer volume of information explodes, we're under incredible pressure to connect just in time with the people and ideas we need to make breakthrough progress. We can no longer research, plan or process our way to success.

Thurs., Jan. 19th from 8:30am – 5:00pm
Hudson Hotel - Gallery B Meeting Room

Join web and mobile experts on Thurs., Jan. 19th  in an all day Hackathon for Social Good. Hackathons are events when programmers and designers meet to work collaboratively to build programs and applications.

The day will begin with short presentations by educators and  non-profit organizations, followed by informational sessions on building sites and web applications to help benefit non-profit organizations.

User Experience Design–have we figured out what this is yet? Or, for that matter, where it is going in the future? What are unicorns, why does everyone want to hire one, everyone claims it impossible to be one, yet still aspire to be one?

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...without using creepy Minority Report-style techniques.

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.

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.

Join WebVisions attendees, speakers and members of AIGA, IxDA, IA Institute, NYC Business Networking Group, NYC Web Design Meetup, NYC AUG and other local groups for an evening of music, film presentations and screening of the third episode from the second season of Portlandia.

From Facebook identity to ubiquitous mobility, technology is changing what what "here" means, and confounding deep assumptions our brains make about perception and meaning. But too often, design efforts don't address these invisible issues of context, sometimes leading to catastrophic failure.

Wouldn't it be nice if your colleague's phone could SMS its location to you? If you know position and velocity, you know when they'll arrive. The result: the interface disappears. No redundant actions or queries. The same software could turn your lights on as you approach the house. Or automatically "check in" to certain locations for you. Or leave a note for yourself the next time you're at the store.

HTML5 and CSS3 are hot, driven by an explosion of new, Internet connected devices.  While they offer many new features that should allow you to do the types of things that you previously did in Flash, actually making it happen is really hard.  Until now. 

Our medium has entered its third decade of existence, and is ready for some growing up. Our definitions and understanding of the web are rapidly getting out of date, as, too, are our practices for building on it. It is time to re-evaluate where things are and, more importantly, where they are going.

In this brave new world of web standards, mobile devices and tablets, what do you need to know to be successful as a designer? It is a fast paced world we work in and this session will demystify the technology alphabet soup of UX, UI, CSS, HTML5, jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch so you can boldly execute on your next project (or at least sound really smart in meetings).

Join Adobe Developer Evangelist Kevin Hoyt for a hands-on walk through of some of the latest and greatest in emerging web standards.  Perfect for the developer who has been wanting to explore all the shiny new toys, but just has not had the time to get around to it.  This workshop will cover Web Sockets, File, Web Storage, Indexed Database, Web Workers, Canvas, Device Orientation, Geolocation, CSS3 Animation and more.  Come with the latest Chrome and Firefox browsers, leave with a bag full of new tricks.

How are “real” web fonts transforming the web, and can you show me exactly how to implement them? How do I pick the ideal font for my web site? How do I know which fonts go together? What are the common crimes against legibility and aesthetics, and how do I escape punishment? How do I set perfect type: color, spacing, line length and size?