Last week I attended the Web Design World conference in Boston. I thought I’d pass along some of the things that that were discussed. I was most interested it the sessions about creating dynamic web applications.
The keynote speaker was Jeffrey Zeldman who wrote “Designing with Web Standards.� His presentation was basically an overview of what he says in his book. He even used ESPN.com as one example of a large commercial content site that is using web standards. Building a site using standards means a site that will load faster, save on bandwidth, be more search engine friendly, more accessible, etc. The slides for this presentation are at: http://happycog.com/lectures/dwws/. Zeldman’s blog is http://www.zeldman.com/, and I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed.
Next up was a presentation by Kelly Goto of gotomedia.com. Kelly is the author of Web Redesign 2.0. Her presentation was titled About Interface. She has spent a lot of time studying mobile user interfaces. She talked about designing for user lifestyle, and forming and emotional bond with users. She talked about companies like JetBlue, Tivo, Google, and how successful companies base their design on what the customer wants, forming an emotional bond. Her mobile design blog is a good resource to follow trends with UI design for mobile devices: http://www.gotomobile.com.
The next session was “Rich Internet Applications: Sampling the Possibilities� By Kim Weller of molecular.com. This was mostly a review of some of the sites molecular has consulted on using Flash or Ajax, and some of the problems they solved with doing more form processing on the client. Some of the RIA sites used as examples included a Yankee Candle product configurator, Broadmoore Hotel, Kayak.com, Mini cars. It was also said that “just because you can build Rich Internet Applications doesn’t mean you should.� Do it well, and know what problem you are trying to solve that will serve users better.
Joe Marini from Microsoft did a session on Ajax Application Development. Again, this was one of the main reasons I wanted to attend this conference. Joe’s web site is http://www.joemarini.com where you can download his power point presentation and code examples he used. Some of the things he stressed were also building apps that also work for the non-ajax enable browser. He had some great examples that gave me a lot of ideas on ways to make some of our forms, and especially admin site tools easier to use.
Steve Mulder of molecuar.com did a session on “Designing for Real User Behavior.� He also talked a lot about the importance of observing users actually use your site. Give them tasks to do, and observer how they accomplish those tasks. He had some photos from thisisbroken.com to illustrate confusing design.
Steve Mulder did a following session titled “Finding Things My Way: Faceted Navigation�. He used pcconnection.com, a site his company consulted on as an example. Faceted Navigation is a way of navigation that basically exposes to the user all the metadata you have about a subject or product, and lets the user create their own navigation selecting any combination of attributes to narrow down what they are looking for. He also talked about conversion funnel analysis. He used kayak.com as another example of faceted navigation.
PPT Slides from Kim Weller and Steve Mulder are at: http://www.molecular.com/webdesignworld-boston/
Day Two started out with Kelly Goto doing another session called “The Interactive App: From Discord to Design�
She talked about mapping out the ideal user experience, and a process for rapid development project management.
The next session was by Dave Shea of mezzoblue.com, and creator of http://www.csszengarden.com. He talked about CSS Project Management. He had some good tips on organizing CSS files for a large site, which certainly could be of help to organizing all of ESPN.com’s CSS files.
Joe Marini of Microsoft did two more sessions. The first was “XML for designers�. A lot of this was review for me, but I didn’t know much about XSL, and he had some great tips and code samples for using XSL to style XML files.
Joe Marini did another session titled “Better Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM: I probably got the most practical ideas in this session of things I can use in my day to day work, like sorting tables on the client using the DOM instead of making a round trip to the server. Sample code and PPT slides can be found at http://www.joemarini.com/downloads/index.php
Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering did a session called “Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of user Happiness.� It was basically tips on designing better navigation. He has slides of a lot of sites that were confusing as examples of what not to do.
Day three had a morning session by Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path titled “Designing the next Generation of Web Apps�. Jeff was a designer on some early sites like HotWired.com, and he has worked on some innovative new sites. He talked about the concepts of “Web 2.0,� and designing apps where users control content, using APIs, etc. This was a really good presentation. His slides are available at http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/workshops/wdw/. He gave a similar presentation at Web Essentials 05 in Sydney. The podcasts from that conference are posted at http://we05.com/podcast/ . I recommend checking out adaptivepath’s publications page for some useful articles: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/
The afternoon had another session by Jared Spool that got more into usability, and navigation design.
I thought attending this conference was a really valuable experience, and I came away thinking more about building a site where users are meeting the goals they are trying to accomplish when they visit. I also discovered some great Ajax and DOM scripting solutions.
Conference Site: http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/webdesignworld/
