2007 Conference Sessions

Each Voices That Matter Conference is designed from the ground up, all new and with your needs in mind. These 2007 sessions will give you an understanding of the themes and topics our speakers explore.

Pre-Conference Workshops

Start your week off with one or two of these focused workshops designed to teach specific skills and prepare you for the core conference.

Monday morning, October 22
JavaScript and Ajax for Designers
Dori Smith, Consultant and Author

Building a Web Site with Photoshop and Dreamweaver
Corey Barker
Education and Curriculum Developer, National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Monday afternoon, October 22
Transcending CSS: Modern Techniques for Designing a Beautiful Web
Andy Clarke, Founder, Stuff and Nonsense Ltd.

Interactive Content with Photoshop and Flash
Corey Barker
Education and Curriculum Developer, National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Core Conference Session Descriptions

Featured Conversations
Join Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel, publisher of New Riders and Peachpit, in informal and insightful conversations with some of the defining voices of our industry. On Tuesday morning, to open the conference, Nancy speaks with Steve Krug, author of the best-selling Don't Make Me Think! and an expert on usability testing. Don't miss this chance to hear Steve's ideas on testing and ask some questions of your own.

On Wednesday at noon, don't miss Nancy and Jakob Nielsen, author of several books, including Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, with more than a quarter million copies in print in 22 languages. You can't afford to skip this conversation with the man The New York Times called "the guru of web usability."

Eric Meyer On...
Eric Meyer, Principal Consultant, Complex Spiral Consulting

Get up early Thursday morning and be a part of an informal and practical conversation with this renowned CSS expert. We'll take a few minutes to ask Eric what he thinks about the necessity of hand authoring markup, the acceptability of iPhone-only sites, and what he really thinks of Internet Explorer and CSS3. We'll also be collecting your questions, so come ready to ask about CSS's past, its future, its challenges, and its secrets!

Sponsor Presentation: Effective Standards-based Workflows for CSS
Scott Fegette, Technical Product Manager, Adobe Systems, Inc.

This session will show you how to streamline standards-based CSS using Dreamweaver CS3. From the powerful CSS panel and browser-compatibility checker to accessible Web site development, Scott will demonstrate how Dreamweaver CS3 can expedite the workflow for professional designers and developers. Dreamweaver is the leading visual HTML authoring application, and provides improved workflows and integration with core Adobe applications.

Desktop to Device: Designing for the iPhone
Kelly Goto, Principal, gotomedia, LLC

This very special session takes place at the San Francisco Apple Store and is an exclusive additional session for our attendees. In addition to a great session from Kelly Goto, you will have a chance to see and touch the newest products from Apple.

With content migrating from the desktop, you need to embrace multiple publication channels. The iPhone provides one of the best platforms for creating a Web-to-mobile app. As a company, team leader, designer, or coder, how do you plan, structure, and educate your team to quickly move to the next level of mobile service offerings? In this session, Kelly will discuss what the iPhone means in the convergence era; how to plan and develop with lifestyle in mind and incorporating rapid research cycles into the process to successfully meet the needs of your audience in a fast, iterative fashion.

Designing Your Next Web Site
June Cohen, Director, TED Media

When the new TED.com launched in 2007, it radically changed not just the Web presence, but the business model and mission of the TED Conference. In this wide-ranging talk, June Cohen looks at all the issues—design and technology, business models and media habits, cultural trends and office politics—that shaped the Web site's destiny. She candidly exposes both the secrets behind its success, and the mistakes made (or averted) along the way. From the innovative video player to the genre-defining sponsorship model to the radically open distribution system, the high-profile redesign offers a focused study in the opportunities presented by new technologies and open business models. Offering hard statistics and practical advice, along with an examination of broad cultural trends, this fast-paced talk will leave you brimming with new ideas to bring back to your own business.

A Perfect Web Page
Steve Krug, Chief Decider, Advanced Common Sense

Is there really one ideal way to do Web pages—a definitive "best practice"? And if there is, does that mean that all pages should basically look alike? What about creativity and innovative design?

For the first time, Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, will explain why he's convinced there actually is a short list of design conventions that make some Web pages inherently better than others—things that very few sites get right, even though they're not all that hard to do. Besides spelling out his vision of the perfect Web page, Steve will also present his brand new Site Navigation Identification Chart: a handy tool that classifies the different ways to do navigation and helps you choose the best one for your site.

Listen to an interview with Eric Meyer

Web to Mobile: Designing for the iPhone
Kelly Goto, Principal, gotomedia, LLC

The iPhone provides one of the best platforms for creating a Web-to-mobile app in a fast, iterative fashion. As a company, team leader, designer, or coder, how do you plan, structure and educate your team to quickly move to the next level of mobile service offerings? In this session, Kelly will describe successful strategies, processes, and platforms that can be utilized to move your app from concept to prototype to reality.

Mastering Perfect CSS Layouts
Stephanie Sullivan, Founder and Principal, W3Conversions

This session will take you step by step through five types of CSS layouts. Stephanie Sullivan, coauthor of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, will show you how to effectively choose the most accessible and effective layout for your site, implement them into your site's design with creative CSS solutions, and discuss a few gotchas to look out for with each layout type.

Effective Standards-based Workflows for Ajax
Greg Rewis, Worldwide Senior Evangelist, Adobe Systems Inc.

Greg Rewis, coauthor of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, will show you how to easily develop standards-based Ajax Web sites using Dreamweaver CS3 and the Spry framework for Ajax. Learn best practices for Ajax development and see how recent enhancements to the Spry framework allow you to implement Web 2.0 capabilities without sacrificing standards. Greg will demonstrate how to do "unobtrusive Spry" and provide a glimpse into where Spry is headed.

You Are Not Your User: Proven Techniques for Discovering Who Is
Steve Mulder, Director, Emerging Interactions, Molecular, Inc.

As user-centered design has gained a foothold in more and more organizations, so too has the importance of doing user research to better understand the people who visit our sites. But how do we know which user research techniques are most useful? When is it best to conduct qualitative vs. quantitative research? How do we ensure a complete understanding of users, both what they say and what they actually do? And how do we make that user research actionable using tools such as personas? Come join the discussion in this interactive session.

The Future of Rich Internet Applications
Dori Smith, Consultant and Author

Every company is pitching its solution as your best way to build the next generation of Web sites. There's Apollo, Flex, Flash, AIR, and Spry—and that's just from a single company. Add in Silverlight and JavaFX, and it's clear that no individual can become an expert in all these products. In this session, Dori Smith, author of JavaScript and Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Sixth Edition, and Dreamweaver CS3 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, will talk about which technologies are right for your needs and how to choose among them. She'll discuss each product's strengths and weaknesses, what each brings to the table, and why you might even think about skipping them altogether.

Authentic Media: Embracing the Wisdom of Communities
Derek Powazek, Social Media Consultant

The audience is taking over! From YouTube videos to Flickr photos to Threadless shirts, communities are now making the media they once just consumed. But how do you empower a community and get great products? Join Internet pioneer and author of Design for Community Derek Powazek for a look at who's doing it right and who's not. In this unique session, you'll learn how to design, implement, and manage Web tools that turn your audience from "users" into "creators."

Making and Breaking the Rules of Web Design Today
Curt Cloninger, Artist, Web Designer and Writer

The insights and practices of key contemporary artists offer a surprisingly powerful way to understand and expand the potential of the Internet. In this session Curt Cloninger, author of Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process, will explore some of the innovative approaches taken by today's artists and see how they suggest new possibilities for Web design. But designers beware: Your goal is never just to be new; rather, it is to see the needs of each project in the context of the ever-developing medium. In this process, you will discover which rules are still applicable and which are just ideological roadblocks inhibiting advances in Web design.

Passion, Risk, and the Exploration of Possibility
Alexander Manu, Founder and Director, Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity

Innovation is in a crisis of purpose: Most innovation happens too late in the design process, when there is a concrete Web design problem to solve. Competitive pressures create a starting point for an innovation process where limits for what can be achieved are already defined for you. In this session, Alexander Manu shows you how to use passion, embrace risk, and imaginatively explore all possibilities at the intersection of technology and unexpressed or unconscious customer behaviors. Understand how you can transform the imagination to help you answer the question, "What could be possible?" Alexander will share a set of useful tools to help you define and conceptualize new possibilities, and develop productive ideas and insightful strategies using imagination.

Designing for the Future: Incorporating New CSS3 Web Standards
Andy Clarke, Founder, Stuff and Nonsense Ltd.

In Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, Andy Clarke laid the groundwork for designers to use meaningful markup in their designs, work with the latest browser capabilities, and use CSS in new ways for creating artistic and usable web designs. Now that additional modules of the CSS3 specification have been introduced, Andy will demonstrate how you can use some of the most exciting new developments in your designs today and what you'll be able to do in the future. As an invited expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group, Andy's insights on the emerging CSS3 specification make this an important session for those interested in the direction of web standards.

Style Sheet Strategies
Charles Wyke-Smith, Director, User Experience Group, Benefitfocus.com, Inc.

Style sheets can be the key to professional page layout, predictable editing outcomes, rapid interface updates, and a distinctive personal visual style, but they can also become sprawling and complex documents where editing can have unexpected results. In this session, Charles Wyke-Smith, author of the best-selling Stylin' with CSS and Codin' for the Web, tackles style sheet management. You'll learn how to adopt a top-down, multisheet strategy that builds on semantic markup, leverages the cascade, tames the box model, and lets you enjoy the benefits of great CSS.

Microformats: What Are They and Why Do I Care?
Jeremy Keith, Technical Lead, Clearleft Ltd.

Jeremy Keith, author of Bulletproof Ajax, is an expert at turning the seemingly scary into the ludicrously simple. In this session, he'll demystify microformats, the remarkably powerful technology that allows developers to use the conventions of semantically correct markup on contact details, events, reviews, and other common pieces of data that lie just beyond the reach of out-of-the-box HTML. You'll learn where microformats came from, where and when you can use microformats today, and how microformats are going to wield even more power in the future.

Make It So: Interface Design Lessons from Science Fiction
Nathan Shedroff, Experience Strategist

What can we learn from science fiction? Nathan Shedroff, author of Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, will take an authoritative look at how science fiction has influenced interface design and the vision it still offers designers, highlighting lessons that designers can immediately use in their own work. But it won’t get too serious—he'll also look at humorous goofs that make our lapses in judgment painfully obvious and further sharpen our view of what truly matters in the interface (and the future).

It Isn't Necessary to be Understood: Risk Taking for Web Designers
Brendan Dawes, Executive Creative Director, magneticNorth Interactive Ltd.

When Brendan Dawes first started playing with the Internet back in 1995, it was its eclectic nature—not just the content but also the experimentation that took place as people grappled with this new way to express themselves and their ideas—that he found appealing. But with the rise of the ubiquitous blog and cool publishing systems such as WordPress, are we in danger of creating a web that pretty much all looks the same, free of risk taking? Inspired by people such as jazz musician Thelonious Monk, composer Richard Wagner, and mountaineer Reinhold Messner, Brendan, author of Analog In, Digital Out, will share how he's exploring other alternatives when it comes to twisting the humble blog into new forms.

You Can Have It All: Designing to Please Users and Search Engines Alike
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, Inc.

Imagine design without compromise. In this session, Lance Loveday, coauthor of Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads, will demonstrate why showing up in search results (through search engine optimization, aka SEO) is important, but he'll also go under the hood of sites that have achieved beauty and usability while attaining top rankings in the major search engines. You'll leave with practical tips on how to structure, design, and code sites in ways that please both users and search engines.

Listen to an interview with Lance Loveday

Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads
Sandra Niehaus, User Experience Architect, Closed Loop Marketing, Inc.

Few organizations have a bottomless web design budget or the time to leisurely experiment with web page layout variations. You need to present a winning solution ASAP—one that not only looks great but generates a positive ROI (a return on your investment of money and time). In this practical session, Sandra Niehaus, coauthor of the book of the same name as this session, will use case studies to focus on the most important concepts and elements for creating effective landing pages, home pages, detail pages, and the checkout process. You'll learn how to prioritize web design efforts by aligning them with business goals, and you'll walk away with practical design guidelines for improving ROI.

Listen to an interview with Sandra Niehaus

Translating Customer Triggers into Meaningful Experiences
Nathan Shedroff, Experience Strategist

Creating meaningfully engaging experiences can be a mysterious process; it encompasses a variety of sensorial media, an advanced understanding of interaction, a respect for storytelling and designing through time, and a transmedia orientation. As he did in Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, Nathan Shedroff will use this session to demystify the dimensions of experience. You'll learn how to integrate design research with development, how to approach ethereal issues of emotions and values, and how to gracefully muscle your way into corporate strategy to have more influence on the projects that get developed.

Redefining User-Centered Design
Robert Hoekman, Interaction Designer and Usability Specialist

Traditional user-centered design isn't right for Web 2.0, much less Web 3.0 and beyond. In this session, get ready to argue as Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, tries to reshape your design workflow. He'll discuss why you should question the almighty persona, how designing to support an activity instead of an audience puts you in the driver's seat, how to establish product requirements and designs at lightning speed, and how the new rules of user-centered design will turn your next project into a fast and efficient resounding success.

Listen to an interview with Robert Hoekman

Advance Design Techniques: JavaScript to the Rescue
Peter-Paul Koch, Web Developer

Advanced CSS techniques often require a few components that CSS alone can't deliver; instead, you need to use HTML or JavaScript. In this session, Peter-Paul Koch, founder of QuirksMode.org and author of ppk on JavaScript, will discuss specific JavaScript solutions to CSS problems, such as rounded corners or changing resolutions. You'll get an idea of when a JavaScript solution might be called for and how to make sure your site remains accessible nonetheless.

Beyond the Limits of Wireframes: Challenges Facing Design Documentation
Dan Brown, Founder and Principal, EightShapes, LLC

In the web business, nothing is stable: With new interaction paradigms, the fragile conventions of documenting user experiences (wireframes, flow charts, and personas) are no longer as effective as they need to be. But all is not lost—in this session, Dan Brown, author of Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, will dissect the new challenges and offer a model for addressing them head-on. You will come away with ideas on how to adapt documentation to different situations and design problems.

Gaming the Web: Using the Structure of Games to Design Better Web Apps
Dan Saffer, Senior Interaction Designer, Adaptive Path LLC

Human beings play games all the time, some of them serious, some of them just for the pure fun of it. But games have deep structures that designers can exploit when building web applications. By understanding how games work and tapping into the power of play, you can make your web designs and applications more engaging and even more fun for your users. In this session, Dan Saffer, author of Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, will examine the structure of games and then give pointers as to how to apply that architecture to your next Web app.