Design & User Experience Tracks

Usability Isn't Just For Users: Designing and Deploying a CMS-Based Website

Evan Gerber -Senior Consultant, Content Management, Molecular

Ease of use is crucial to the success of any Web site. But what about the ease of use of your content-management system? Taking the time to develop a usable administrative interface for your CMS can cut total cost of ownership and streamline maintenance.

This session is based on practical experience gained from multiple CMS implementations. Learn the best practices for assessing who your audience is and how to design for them. You'll learn how to select a CMS that's suited to the needs and abilities of the admin users; how to design and implement the simplest possible workflow; how to develop a site that can scale for growth but remain useable; and how to maintain the system over time.

Designing for the Rich Web Experience: Design Patterns & Principles

Bill Scott - Engineering Manager/AJAX Evangelist, Yahoo!

Technologies such as AJAX and Flash have made it possible to create richer user experiences on the Web. One of the hallmarks of this experience is the demise of the page model: the necessity of always having to refresh the page for interaction. Instead of a standard page-to-page experience, we now have the opportunity to more closely model the real flow of the user.

But most web designers are used to working with a page-based model, and information architects have traditionally embraced the page model in design artifacts such as wireframes. In this session, you'll survey these interaction styles, learn why they work or don't work, and explore a set of eight design principles that can inform the design of future products. See examples of good and not-so-good design patterns that are currently in vogue, and learn how to apply the best options to your efforts.

The Right Tests at the Right Times

Lance Loveday - CEO, Closed Loop Marketing &
Sandra Niehaus - VP, User Experience & Creative Director, Closed Loop Marketing

Conducting user tests at several critical stages of a Web development project can save time and money that you would have otherwise spent on panicky late-phase fixes. And you don't need a testing lab to do it. Learn how to use a variety of usability tests—design feedback, paper prototyping, card sorting, task and timing analysis, and multivariate testing—to iteratively shape your project and get great user feedback.

Best Practices for Social Web Design

Joshua Porter - Principal, Bokardo Design

Time was when you could build a web site indented for use by an individual. No longer. Software is used by groups of people for work and for play. As a result, designing web sites and applications has become another degree harder, as our focus is now on the experience the many instead of the one.

In this session, social web designer Joshua Porter illustrates important best practices culled from the early years of the Social Web. Best practices include: How to handle an audience uprising, What a first-rate community manager actually does, why you shouldn't listen to anybody but users -- and what to do when nobody is using your social web application.

Designing for Discoverability

Steve Mulder - Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular
Joanne McLernon - Consultant,Molecular

When it comes to creating successful sites, half the battle is making things discoverable. If users don't notice what we want them to notice, they'll never be satisfied (and neither will we). How do people scan Web pages? What makes some things on a page more visible than others? How do we make sure critical content and functionality are actually seen? Come discover practical tips and tricks for taking advantage of what we know about the human eye to make your site more effective.

Best Practices in Flash Interface Design

Dave Nelson - Senior Experience Designer, Adobe Systems

With its mature development environment and ubiquitous player, Adobe Flash is an excellent choice for many types of rich Internet applications. But a Flash-based interface requires a different approach than the traditional, page-based model. And there are performance factors to consider: it's critical to implement the interface in a way that leads to a smooth, fluid user experience—not a lot of "loading" messages. In this session, you'll learn the best practices in Flash interface design. See how some top Flash designers are approaching the opportunities and challenges of Flash design, and learn how to create Flash applications that look great and work great, too.

Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site?

Joshua Porter, Bokardo Design

The idea is simple. Just ask users to free-associate words and phrases with every piece of content you have. Soon you have a site organization that's completely user-driven, making it easy to find everything in a heartbeat. This is "tagging" – letting users decide the categorization of the content on the site. Sounds straightforward, but does it work?

Sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered the use of tags, demonstrating they their usefulness in several different settings. Even established players, including Amazon and Google, are using tags. Is tagging right for your site? Find out in this session, as you learn how tagging can help alleviate content challenges by allowing users to organize information all by themselves.

Pixel Perfect: Photoshop Production Tips for Flash Designer

Michael Ninness - Senior Product Manager, InDesign, Adobe Systems

Photoshop and Flash work beautifully together—especially now that each is flying the Adobe flag. In this session, one of our most popular speakers will show you as many tricks as time allows on how to make your pixels look their best before bringing them into Flash. You'll learn the best ways to import PSD and AI files into Flash CS3; how to control Flash's optimization settings for embedded bitmaps; how to load external JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs into a SWF file at runtime; how to instantly remove color casts; how to remove or reduce dreaded digital noise; techniques for selective focus and sharpening; how to resolve color conflicts between Photoshop and Flash; and more.

Your Home Page is Obsolete: Finding Your Way in Web 2.0

DL Byron - Principal, Textura Design

The Web has changed the way we socialize and do business. And Web 2.0 has changed the way we design and browse. Truth is, no one cares about your home page—they're coming into your site directly from a search and want to get right to the content. In this session, Byron will show you how to design for findability, address a searching user's needs, and give your users the content they want.

From Print to Web: XHTML Export from InDesign to Dreamweaver

Michael Ninness - Senior Product Manager, InDesign, Adobe Systems

What do you do when your clients ask you to put the annual reports you designed for them online? The gap between web and print is a big one. Fortunately, Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver CS3 have features that help smooth the journey. This session will walk you through the ins and outs of passing your print-based content over to Dreamweaver for web publishing. You'll see how the Export XHTML workflow works; learn best techniques for exporting images and text; see how to map InDesign styles to CSS styles; and learn the key issues to consider when converting documents.

Second Life: Business Boom, Bust, or Both?

Steve Mulder - Molecular, Inc.

It's 3D, it's buzz-worthy, and it could be the next-generation Internet. But is Second Life good for business? A growing number of companies think so. How are organizations using virtual worlds like Second Life for marketing, product development, ecommerce, customer service, and more? Hop aboard this entertaining tour of Second Life as we demystify what's actually happening in the metaverse. We'll uncover what's working and not working for businesses that are experimenting in the Internet's latest Wild West.

What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?

Jared Spool - Founder, User Interface Engineering

Everyone wants an "intuitive" interface: users, designers, and content publishers. But building them is hard. To build an "intuitive" interface, a designer has to do two things: take complete advantage of what users already know, so what they see is completely familiar to them; and make the act of learning anything new completely imperceptible. If the interface requires users to realize they are learning something, the "intuitive" label disappears instantly. Learn the two types of knowledge—tool knowledge and domain knowledge—that users need to complete their tasks, and see case studies of what successful teams are doing to create user experiences that delight.

Anti-Patterns: Designing for a Poor Web Experience

Bill Scott - Engineering Manager/AJAX Evangelist, Yahoo!

Sometimes it's instructive to look at design patterns in reverse--as a set of anti-patterns. In this session, Bill Scott will explore the common mistakes that designers and developers make when attempting to craft a rich Web experience. You'll see counter-examples from consumer-oriented Web sites (both inside and outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise Web applications. By the end of the hour, you'll have explored fifteen anti-design patterns ranging from the Borg idiom to pogo-sticking navigation to metaphor mismatch, animation gone wild, missed moments, and more. By seeing what not to do, you'll learn exactly what to do.

Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions

David Verba - Director of Technology, Adaptive Path

As AJAX and rich Internet applications become ever more common, we increasingly hear about the value of prototypes for design and development. But choosing the right prototype can be an exercise in uncertainty. To help you get a better handle on the prototype process, this session surveys several different types of prototypes, with special focus on the appropriate audiences and uses for each. Learn the advantages and disadvantages of using interactive prototypes, whether you're incorporating them into your development process or using them as a self-documenting deliverable. We'll explore several prototyping techniques, provide examples, and discuss the skill sets required for each approach.

Strike Up the Brand: Designing for Branding

Jared Spool - Founder, User Interface Engineering

What's the most effective way to strengthen a brand on the internet? Traditional branding techniques may not work. Indeed, if implemented poorly, those tried-and-true methods can actually hurt your brand.

In this session, Jared Spool discusses how User Interface Engineering's usability research has uncovered some fascinating truths about how people perceive brands on the Internet. Learn how "affinity branding" differs from "dispositional branding." Find out why how "message branding" doesn't work, but "experience branding" does. See how your users' experience dictates their perception of the site, and learn how "seducible moments" can dramatically increase sales traffic.

YUI: The Insider's Tour

Nate Koechley - Senior Engineer & Designer, Yahoo!

The YUI Library is an open-source, a la carte JavaScript library for building richly interactive Web apps using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. This library, free for the world to use, is the exact same code that is used globally and at massive scale on scores of Yahoo! sites. In this session, Yahoo!'s Nate Koechley will talk (and answer questions) about the design and technical philosophies behind the YUI. You'll learn what the library can do for you today, where it's heading, why and how Yahoo! decided to open-source it, and examples of its use in the wild. You'll hear why you might like using it (and how it stacks up with the other leading libraries), and discuss examples of how it can help you provide an improved user experience for your visitors.

Unpacking the Usability Toolbox

Christine Perfetti, User Interface Engineering

Design teams have many tools in their usability toolbox: usability testing, personas, focus groups, surveys, server log analysis, field studies, and more. But you have limited resources and can¹t use every tool in every project -- and choosing the wrong tool for the job wastes resources.

Over the years, UIE has studied how the most successful organizations move their designs from concept to launch. In this session, you'll learn the strategies of these successful organizations.

You'll learn when cheap-and-dirty usability testing will work just fine and when you need to stick to a rigorous scientific methodology, collecting precise data for meticulous analysis and reporting. You'll see how to use five-second tests, inherent value tests, surrogate tests, and field studies to fill in the gaps in your knowledge of your users.

Building and Designing with YUI

Nate Koechley - Senior Engineer & Designer, Yahoo!

In this second YUI session, you'll see how to build powerful interfaces with YUI. It's a powerful, broad, well-documented library, but, like most things, taking the first step is the most difficult. It's easier than you think. Did you know that AutoComplete—which gives the user the most powerful tool of all for navigating large data sets: human language—takes just three lines of code to use? Did you know that the famously intuitive programming interface for the Animation library reads like English? At the end of the session, you'll be familiar with the style of JavaScript used in YUI, the syntax of library's constructors and APIs, the interesting moments and custom events provided, and the wide range of optional features that are hidden below the surface of YUI. As a bonus, you'll get introduced to new tools for communicating interface and project requirements between designers and developers, and ways to make sure that what you build is what you planned and designed. JavaScript cut-and-pasters are welcome, though familiarity with JavaScript syntax will allow you to get the most out of this session.

Deconstructing... You

Steve Mulder - Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular; and
Jared Spool - Founder, User Interface Engineering

Watch as two user experience experts critique our attendees' sites. We'll talk about what we liked and about things we think could be improved. Bring your pencil! Your site could be one of the ones we evaluate in this lively wrap-up session.

Web Site Searching and the User Experience

Avi Rappoport - Principal Consultant, Search Tools Consulting

Face it: visitors to your site want to conduct searches. That means providing a search feature, and that means dealing with an array of usability issues. Learn how to create effective search forms that let you balance simplicity and the need for advanced searching features. Find out the best ways to present search results, and learn how a coherent site architecture will make searchers more comfortable.