Core Conference SessionsWednesday, June 11Microformats: What Are They and Why Do I Care? 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. For example, data portability is a hot topic right now and microformats provide the simplest infrastructure for transferring contact details and friends lists between social networking sites. 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. Concept Models: A New Design Tool Maybe you’ve done personas. Maybe you've got a stack of requirements. Maybe you've got nothing. All you know is that you need to design a set of interactions around a complex information structure—lots of variables, lots of permutations. It can be difficult to know where to begin. Concept models—a means for representing complex relationships—are ideal starting points for the practicing Web designer. A concept model can jump-start the design process by establishing a strategic foundation and approach for the Web site’s key elements. Yes, Virginia, There is a Perfect Web Page 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? Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, will explain why he's become convinced that 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 using these conventions is not difficult. At the end, Steve will play a brief round of "Stump the Chump": a live review of sites suggested from the audience to see how well they match up to this standard. Seven Core Principles of Social Design Years before Facebook and Twitter rose to prominence, Amazon and eBay were pioneering social design in areas like trust and recommendations. As the social networks grew, our experience with these sites added to our knowledge of how identity and reputation work in social software. Author of the upcoming Designing Social Web Applications, Joshua Porter shares what we've learned from both the early sites as well as the newcomers. He'll share his seven principles, explaining the theory behind them and how to translate them into actual interface details. Building a Compliant CSS Layout from a PSD Digital images in GIF and JPEG format laid the foundation for what the Web is today, a visually engaging place for information and commerce. Yet going from a final design to a refined Web layout can be a daunting task if one doesn't know how to properly design for the medium or know the limitations of CSS-enabled designs. In this session, you will learn about the decision process and steps involved in converting a finished graphic design into sensible Web-based images that can readily be used within a valid XHTML+CSS Web document. Color for the Global Web The perception of color is dependent on gender, culture, race and physical attributes. If you're designing Web sites, you're designing for the broadest audience imaginable. The success of your Web site relates directly to how the colors you use in your designs are perceived through the eyes of the world. Developers, designers and content mavens all are encouraged to participate in this colorful, interactive session. Style Sheet Strategies 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, multi-sheet strategy that builds on semantic markup, leverages the cascade, tames the box model, and lets you enjoy the benefits of great CSS. Make It So: Interface Design Lessons from Science Fiction 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). Designing CSS Layouts for the Flexible Web The Web has been a flexible, user-controlled medium from the beginning, and the use of CSS instead of tables for layout makes that flexibility all the more obvious. Yet, many designers continue to create rigid designs that don't adapt well to the myriad of user screen resolutions, font sizes, and other unique configurations. In this session, Zoe Gillenwater shows you what both liquid and elastic layouts are, what types of sites they work well on, and the benefits (and challenges) that they bring. The bulk of the session teaches you how to design for these types of layouts by presenting numerous visual examples of both real and mocked-up Web sites. You’ll review several design conventions that don’t work well for liquid or elastic layouts and learn how to transform each to be more flexible-friendly, while still keeping the aesthetics of the site intact. You’ll learn how to design with CSS and flexibility in mind from the beginning which makes the later building process a lot less painful. You'll leave the session with a list of things to watch out for while creating your next design comps, as well as ideas for how to tweak the designs of even fixed-width layouts to adapt better to user-controlled font sizes and other flexible Web conditions. Findability: Design Comp to Code Findability—the practice of helping users find the content they seek—is often mistaken as simply optimizing for search engines, but it encompasses so much more. Findability influences the entire project lifecycle, including visual design. Through intelligent use of basic design principles you can help your audience discover content within a page, within your site, and even encourage return visits. The way your designs are translated into HTML code also greatly influences how easily your target audience can find your content. In this session you'll learn by example to use design principles such as color, typography, and texture to direct a user's gaze to important content within a page; help users find what they seek and encourage return visits by highlighting important tools such as search, RSS feeds, and mailing list forms; and translate a design into basic HTML code that keeps your content visible to search engines while maintaining design integrity. Thursday, June 12Sponsor Presentation: From Prototype to Web Page In this session Lynn Grillo will explore the current standards and best practices for Web page prototyping and design. She will also offer a sneak peek at how the upcoming releases of Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks will address some of the challenges facing today's Web professionals. These challenges include adoption of industry standards, enhancing productivity, streamlining workflows, consistency and integration of applications, and designing once for deployment to multiple application platforms. Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads 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, co-author of Web Design for ROI, uses 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 to prioritize Web design efforts by aligning them with business goals, and you'll walk away with practical design guidelines for improving ROI. How to Improve Each and Every Page on Your Site Every page on the Web can be improved, whether it's a marketing page for a new product, a member profile on a social network, or a complicated Web application. But how do we know which questions to ask, which solutions to use, and which principles to apply? Is it even possible to apply the same concepts to every situation to consistently achieve good design? In this informative session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment, reveals the design tests and principles you can use to improve each and every interaction on each and every page of your site to create a powerful experience that truly serves your users and benefits your organization. Ten Tips and Techniques for Web Design Alchemy Just as medieval alchemy blurred the lines between science, art, and magic, conjuring a Web site that's usable, engaging, and memorable requires you to blend technical and aesthetic considerations. If you went to design school, this session is not for you. But if you didn't and you want to better understand how the rules of visual aesthetics intersect with Web technology to make some sites great and other sites...well, not so great, then join Penny McIntire in a discussion of 10 critical tips for creating Web magic using effective layouts, navigation, graphics, forms, text, and color. Designing for Today’s Browsers So you know about CSS, and might even sport serious skills in markup, style and script. But we all share one problem in common no matter our skill level: Browsers are different. Hacking, working and scripting around browser differences is the most time consuming, exhausting and frustrating web design job of all. In "Designing for Today’s Browsers," you'll learn several extremely valuable and practical methods to lighten that heavy load of today's browser woes. Typography on the Web: Beyond Times and Arial (and Georgia) The typography you use in your design will say almost as much to your audience as the actual words on the page, but Web designers have always had an extremely limited palette of fonts to choose from. All design is about overcoming the limitations of the medium, and Web design is no different. In this session, Jason will show you how to use fluid typography, browser-safe fonts, and type on images to create robust scalable designs without having to resort to type in images or Adobe Flash. We'll also take a look at how, in theory, CSS allows you to download any font you want to use in your Web designs, and why downloadable fonts still don't work. Open Up: Brand Relevance in a Web-Made World Many of today's best brands are powered by the technologies and trends of the digital channel and brands are faced with the reality that old mass-marketing push tactics are being superseded by the pull of an online population prolifically creating, sharing, and influencing each other. A radical business imperative has emerged: open up to consumer involvement in your brand’s messages and offerings, or lose out more inviting competitors. The objective of this session is to illuminate a framework for creating on-demand, personal, networked, and engaging experiences that ensure brand relevance in a Web-made world. Tagging: What's Next? Tagging has been the subject of much discussion among Web designers and information architects over the last several years. Recent trends show that tagging is evolving quickly and today’s conventional wisdom might not be accurate for long. This session will explore five counterintuitive tagging trends that provide a glimpse into the next generation of user-generated classification. These trends include: more structure, layered approaches, communities matter, auto/manual folksonomies, and user-generated innovation. You'll learn about how the next wave of tagging systems—including those from Wesabe and PhotoShelter—impose more structure and accept less ambiguity in tags; how active communities can help create robust and useful tag sets; how new approaches to folksonomies mix manual and automatic approaches to yield better results, and more. You'll come away with a heightened understanding of how tags enable you to create new features and extend the application. Fresher Styles for Web Designers: More Eye Candy from the Underground This session surveys ten innovative, contemporary visual design styles that break the mold and offer creative solutions to a variety of interactive design challenges. You'll learn practical ways to incorporate these design approaches into your commercial work, using specific online examples as illustration. Since Curt’s 2001 book, Fresh Styles for Web Designers, styles and technologies have evolved, but clients still expect sites that both function well and visually entice. This session will inspire you to deliver sites that do both. Friday, June 13Easy Usability Tests for Designers What if you could inject usability test results directly into your design process—and do it quickly and easily? Sounds great, right? Web and interface designers are in a unique and powerful position to serve as user advocates and help ensure the user-friendliness and effectiveness of the end product. But how can you do this, practically speaking? Getting from the theoretical to the applied can be a challenge, and best practices are not always sufficient. Ideally, each unique design is tested with representative users to validate whether it really accomplishes what’s expected. This presentation covers a number of quick, easy usability tests that you can conduct in very little time and at low or no cost. The end result? You'll end up with validated designs, better end results, and a growing understanding of the complex, powerful relationship between usability and design. Beyond Web Standards: Crafting Design and Development Standards When we talk about Web standards, we discuss coding for compliance, portability, and accessibility—but Web standards alone won't give you a quality user experience. Any time you collaborate on a Web site, some additional design and development standards must be crafted and followed in order to achieve consistency, both from a code and a design perspective. Join Kimberly Blessing, a professional standards manager, to learn how companies big and small develop internal standards and best practices to help manage the work generated by designers and developers. Design Zen: Bringing Simplicity, Clarity, and Beauty to Web Design What does the Japanese bento (lunchbox) have to do with a well-designed Web site? Both contain appropriate content arranged in a most efficient, graceful manner. Both are presented in a simple, beautiful and balanced way. Nothing lacking, nothing superfluous. Not decorated, but wonderfully designed. Coming to Nashville all the way from Japan, presentation master Garr Reynolds will share his Zen-like approach to design, with some insights that may run contrary to conventional wisdom. As Garr says, "the first step to change is letting go of the past." Redefining Search Engine Friendly Design Many usability professionals, interface designers, information architects, accessibility experts, and even search engine optimizers limit their definition of search usability to only mean querying behavior. In reality, search usability encompasses a wide variety of behaviors that all Web site interfaces should address. In this session, Shari Thurow, author of Search Engine Visibility, takes you through important search behaviors and shows you how to architect, format, and design Web sites that meet user expectations, convert visitors into buyers, and achieve business goals. |
Thoughts on the 2007 Conference The conference exceeded my expectations. I feel a renewed energy to approach Web design in new ways and learn new skills. Every session had its charm and provided enormous learning opportunities. I was pleased to find so many interesting sessions. The keynote presentations exceeded my expectations mostly because of quality of the speakers, but also because of the content. They were thought provoking and inspiring. The speakers' expertise was amazing. The interesting arrangement of the networking luncheon really helped to break the ice with other attendees. |
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