Creating consistent web form designs is hard to achieve on desktop browsers. Couple that production challenge with the explosion of iPhone and Android smart phones with the emergence of HTML5 form elements and you have created yourself one hell of an all-nighter fraught with Red Bull and In and Out Burger runs.
In her session on “(More) Designing Our Way Through Web Forms,” Kimberly Blessing (and co-presenter Christopher Schmitt) return to WebVisions to explain the state of forms and how to design around the problems – this should be required material for every web designer and developer.
Erin Malone is the founder of Tangible UX and has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences for the web. Prior to Tangible, she spent four years at Yahoo! where she founded the Yahoo! Pattern Library, and we’re excited that Erin will present a workshop on “Designing Social Interfaces” with her cohort, Christian Crumlish.
In their three-hour workshop, they’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.
So, in brief: take their workshop, look smart and do great work.
In his session on “The Future of Work,” Raymond King of AboutUs.org discusses how the art of working with total strangers requires new rules of engagement. First, Assume Good Faith—planning for constructive collaboration is a better strategy than building walls to keep the bad guys out. Then work transparently and, better still, use your real name. Do work that matters and find others who wish to do the same. Be bold and remember, that change is cheap. Using various examples from the wiki world, Raymond will examine changes in the way we work today and make some predictions for the future.
Vanessa Fox, the creator of Google’s Webmaster Central, rolls up her sleeves and digs into the crunchy “Future of Organic Search” in her Thursday, May 21 session. She’ll illustrate that being found in search engines is quickly moving from being a bonus acquisition channel to being a primary one. If you aren’t found in search engines, then you don’t exist for many potential customers. Learn about where search is going next: blended search results, personalized search, enhanced search results, browse within search, and searcher input are just the beginning. Get the scoop on where search is heading and ensure you’re not left behind.
Hiring consultants, renting expensive lab equipment, and taking months to analyze results are not in the cards for most teams. Fortunately, they aren’t the only option for cooking up a great experience. There are very inexpensive and fast techniques and tricks that teams can use that will help them see great improvements to their designs.
In his Thursday morning keynote presentation, Jared Spool will share these “fast-food budget” techniques, showing you cost and time effective methods for extracting the core benefits of any user experience design process. You’ll learn simple ways to gather information about your users, the tasks they are doing with your designs, and how well the designs meet their needs. In turn, you can use this information as you continue to make changes, thereby making each new release that much more delightful.
In Raven Zachary’s (Twitter: ravenme) session on “iPhone Intelligence,” he muses that 2008 marked the release of iPhone 3G and with it, Apple’s launch of the App Store, an online marketplace of downloadable applications for iPhone and iPod touch. In less than a year since the debut of the App Store, more than ten thousand third-party native applications are already available and the numbers continue to increase rapidly. 2008 will be known as the year that mobile computing changed forever. We are witnessing the birth of a new class of technology—pocket-sized devices with always-on broadband that understand who you are and where you are.
Communities have been self-organizing on the Internet long before there was a Web layered upon it. In Chris Pirillo’s session “The Future of Web Communities“, he explores the way in which online interaction changes incrementally on an annual basis, and with brand becoming increasingly decentralized, why it’s important to discuss these trends before they get too far ahead of us. The best community tools can’t be built, and Chris aims to lead a discussion in the future of these Internet communities.
Too often excellent conceptual ideas suffer during the process of realization, in large part because the designer did not understand the essential visual principles. Kimberly Elam’s presentation on “Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography” explores these elements and how they work by examining how the use of visual principles informs—even creates—beauty in typographic design, but more importantly, how you can use these techniques to create cohesiveness in your own design.
There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing things. Indi Young’s half day workshop on “Mental Models” gives you the tools to help you grasp and design for those reasons.
Indi observes that cognitive researchers have been describing and defining mental models for several decades. Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users’ behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user — they represent people’s behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use.
In addition to her workshop, Indi will also present a session on “Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy.”
Lane Becker and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction will team up again for their session “The End of Obsolescence: The Web as Ground Zero for the Post-Consumer Economy,” which explores the transformation our consumerism into something sustainable via web based mechanisms that allow the renewal of a “repair culture” that supports long term ownership of products, reputation systems that encourage companies to produce products that last and digital products that replace hard goods…view session
