Sessions

Keynotes & General Sessions

Keynote: Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype
Jared Spool, Founder, User Experience Engineering
December 11 — 9:00 a.m.
In one part of the world, a software engineer, in his free time, throws together a "mashup" combining Google Maps with Craiglist's house-for-sale listings, allowing people to see the houses listed on a map. In another part of the world, a writer for a trade magazine whips together some quick browser code to look up whether books he's browsing on Amazon are currently available at his public library.

The speed and ease at which these new applications were built is what is getting us very excited about the potential of the Web 2.0 world. Evocative of Dr. Frankenstein building a monster in his attic laboratory using body pieces he found lying around his neighborhood, developers can create new applications using common elements found lying around the Web in almost no time at all. As the skill requirements for building these applications decreases, a whole new world of possibilities opens.

Web 2.0 isn't a "thing", but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs, RSS, folksonomies, and social networking, suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results.

The User Is Always Right: Making Personas Work for Your Site
Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
11:30 a.m.
How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need and deliver results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. Discover the latest techniques for creating personas, including advice on conducting user interviews, new methods for applying quantitative research such as surveys and log file analysis, approaches for generating persona segmentation, and fun ideas for making your personas real. It's time to take personas to the next level.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Fundamentals
Eric A. Meyer, Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting
11:30 a.m.
In this session, we'll take a close look at the core features of CSS that we use every day, but don't always think about: inheritance, specificity, and the cascade. A deeper understanding of these concepts yields an enormous return in writing efficient CSS.

Panel: Deconstructing...You!
Presented by: Jim Heid, WDW Conference Chair, Shawn Henry, World Wide Web Consortium, and Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
December 11 — 4:30 p.m.
Top Web designers join Conference Chair Jim Heid in critically evaluating several of our attendees' sites. Bring your pencil! Your site may be among the ones we examine in this always popular wrap-up session.

Keynote: Internet Explorer 7: The Route To Standards Compliance
Dean Hachamovitch. Microsoft
December 12 — 9:00 a.m.
Why didn't you fix that one CSS bug that drives me nuts? Will IE7 ever pass the Acid2 Test? Getting Internet Explorer to be a truly standards-compliant browser isn't as easy as one might imagine. Maintaining site compatibility and making the lives of Web designers and developers easier are two very important factors in deciding where the future of Internet Explorer goes. We'll look at where IE started back in the IE4 days, and how it helped create some standards and break others. What will be our standards story in the future be — come join us and find out.

General Session: The Dawning of the Age of Experience
Jared Spool, Founder, User Experience Engineering
December 12 — 10:15 a.m.
Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It's become commonplace for organizations that build products and Web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.

However, you can't just hire a couple of "experience designers" and tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today's business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today's needs. See how successful experience design integrates the needs of the users with the requirements of the business; is learned, but not available through introspection; must be invisible to succeed; is cultural; is multi-discplinary; and thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment.

You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

Interface Design Track
December 11

Let the People Speak: How Users Are Changing the Web
Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
2 p.m.
The Web has always been about people, but in a Web 2.0 world, this is taking on new meaning. Giving your users more control and influence over your site unveils a whole new set of opportunities — and a whole new set of challenges. How are user ratings and reviews, tagging, editorial control, user-generated content, and social networking changing the way you should be thinking about your site? How are sites dealing with negative user contributions? What does all of this mean for how you design and build your site? Come take an entertaining tour through the social wonderland of Web 2.0 and learn what it means for you.

Accessibility in a Web 2.0 World
Shawn Henry, World Wide Web Consortium
3:15 p.m.
Web 2.0, Ajax, rich Web applications, blogs, wikis — the Web continues to develop. What are the accessibility issues in this next-generation Web? Scripting, once a no-no for accessibility, is a key aspect. Join us to get the latest on how the W3C's new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines address these Web developments. Learn how to take advantage of current and developing strategies to make dynamic Web content and applications accessible.

Design & CSS Track
December 11

Eric Meyer on CSS: Free Your Design
Eric A. Meyer, Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting
2 p.m.
How much time are you spending overcoming browser defaults with CSS?
No matter what answer you give, it's likely you're doing it more than you know. Find out how (and how not) to zero out the defaults and start with a blank slate.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Sparring Program
Eric A. Meyer, Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting
3:15 p.m.
A browser's handling of markup is a system based on rules. What you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.
Understand? Then hit me if you can.

Coding & Developing Track
December 12

Making Web 2.0 Usable: An Ajax Case Study
Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
11:30 a.m.
Rich Internet technologies such as Ajax change the way the Web works, bringing exciting new possibilities to Web interfaces. But how do we give users a richer, more powerful interface without sacrificing ease of use? A common example of this challenge is product selection. Web sites that help users select products, services or content often use a variety of tools so that users find exactly the right item for their needs. Come see how we applied Ajax to this common challenge in order to create a rich interface that makes product selection easier (and more fun). We'll discuss how users expect these new interfaces to work and what usability issues occur when testing these types of Web 2.0 sites.

Accessibility: Better, Faster and Cheaper
Shawn Henry, World Wide Web Consortium
2 p.m.
Accessibility is now a requirement in many Web development projects. Unfortunately, many designers are struggling and see accessibility as a heavy burden. This session will help you turn that around. Join us for tips on optimizing your accessibility efforts, such as focusing on the black and white areas of accessibility to avoid getting bogged down in the gray murk. Get specific guidance on demonstrating the business case for accessibility, and putting accessibility on a higher level within your organization. Learn how to collaborate with people with disabilities in order to better understand accessibility issues and be more efficient in implementing effective accessibility solutions.

XML: What Web 2.0 Designers Need to Know
Joe Marini, Group Product Manager for VSIP, Microsoft
3:15 p.m.
XML has become a common technology in everyday Web development. In this session, you'll learn how XML works, what it's good for (and not good for), and what you need to know about it as a designer to put it to good use. You'll see how XML can be used to separate content from layout, drive dynamic interfaces and be transformed for display in different ways, and how it enables modern Web services to function.

Building Dynamic Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM
Joe Marini, Group Product Manager for VSIP, Microsoft
4:30 p.m.
Today's modern, standards-compliant browsers provide designers with vastly improved capabilities for creating rich user interfaces. In this session, we'll examine ways of using CSS and JavaScript together to create pages that are responsive, intuitive and more usable. See how these technologies can allow users to control display properties like fonts and colors, create forms with better navigation and validation, and build pages with features like in-place editing, table formatting and data sorting and filtering — and that don't need to round-trip back to the server. We will also examine ways to make use of these technologies so that even if the user disables them, the page content remains accessible.

Strategy Meets Technology Track
December 12

Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business
DL Byron, Principal, Textura Design
11:30 a.m.
What do Boeing, General Motors and a small bag-clip company have in common? They are all blogging about their business. The fact is a conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. You'll learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.

Getting Found: Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
2 p.m.
Search engine marketing (SEM) has long been one of the most cost-effective marketing vehicles available to online businesses. Your site may look beautiful and work perfectly, but if you haven't made a concerted effort to optimize and promote it in major search engines and directories then you are not getting the maximum return on your Web investment. See how your site's design affects search engine placement, learn about the different kinds of search engine marketing, and find out how to develop a SEM strategy that works for you.

From Browsers to Buyers: Designing for Conversion
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
3:15 p.m.
Designers have always known how powerful simple design changes can be. Now learn how minor design and page layout changes can yield big results for your company's bottom line. The secret? Designs that convert more traffic into leads and customers, increasing your return on investment. This session will explain how placement, visual flow, emphasis and even color can affect your site's conversion rate. We'll discuss key landing page design tips, review before/after case studies on how specific design changes impacted business metrics, and view some insightful user testing videos to see how users surf — and how they think.

Tuning into Podcasting
DL Byron, Principal, Textura Design, Inc.
4:30 p.m.
How big is podcasting? Apple's iTunes Store contains a directory of tens of thousands of free audio and video podcasts. A growing number of businesses and institutions are using podcasts to deliver training, employee updates, lectures, and much more — the latest software tools make it easier than ever. See and hear what you need to create and distribute compelling podcasts.

DAY 3 Workshops
December 13

Photoshop Workshop
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Essential techniques to make the most of your pixels

The Digital Darkroom — 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
When working with digital images, you often have to deal with the same four problems — the images are the wrong resolution, too dark, too soft or have a color cast. This session will show you how to make the most of your pixels, whether you started with a traditional scan or captured an image with a digital camera. Whether you are going to print or the Web, you will learn how to put your best image forward.

• Perform tonal corrections without sacrificing details
• Instant color cast removal
• Match color and lighting schemes across multiple images
• Why Adjustment Layers are your friends
• How to remove or reduce dreaded digital noise
• Selective sharpening techniques

Blend Mode Magic — 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.
"Was it Multiply? No. Was it Difference? No. Was it Color Dodge...?" Admit it — the layer blending modes in Photoshop are a big mystery, right? Unless you're a geek, no one really knows what the heck these things actually do. If you are one of those designers that cycle through the different blend modes in the pop-up menu until the image looks the way you want it, then this session is for you. You'll learn which blending modes you must memorize, and more importantly, how to incorporate them into your daily workflow in ways you've probably never thought of.

• Instant image correction
• Painting with light
• Reveal hidden details in blown-out images
• The Advanced Blending options

Size Matters: Power Optimization Techniques — 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Learn the essential parameters of designing Web graphics that look great, load fast and encourage return visitors. See how Photoshop and ImageReady combine to combat the evils of bloated graphics. This session will reveal the hidden optimization tools and techniques to squeeze out every extra byte while retaining image quality.

• Resizing vs. Resampling and Crop tool tips
• Channel-based (selective) optimization
• Preserving crisp type edges when saving to JPEG
• Controlling color when saving to GIF
• Automating production with ImageReady Droplets
• Handling Photoshop to Flash Gotchas

Microsoft Mini-Workshop
Pete LePage and Arturo Toledo
2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Internet Explorer 7 from CSS to RSS: How to Take Full Advantage — 2 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.
Now that Internet Explorer 7 is available to the world, find out how to take full advantage of it. You've likely already seen many of the CSS fixes, but we'll take a deeper look into what's changed and how it may have affected your site. We'll show you how to easily create your Web sites to work with IE7, but not leave your visitors who haven't upgraded out in the cold. We'll then delve into some of the new features like adding RSS support to your site, and creating your own search provider, so your customers can search your site from within IE.

ASP.NET and the Microsoft Ajax Libraries — 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Take an in-depth first look at the Microsoft Ajax Libraries, a new set of technologies that will build on innovations in ASP.NET 2.0 and make it easier to build Web applications that deliver rich, interactive and personalized experiences in the browser using technologies such as DHTML and XMLHttp. The Microsoft Ajax Libraries include a 100% JScript cross-browser client script framework that allows you to easily build browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to Web services, full integration with ASP.NET application services such as user profiles, a set of ASP.NET server controls and a set of client application services.

Developing and Designing Standard-based Web Sites with Expression Web — 4:15 p.m. to 5 p.m.
In this session you will be introduced to the new Expression Web tool which will help professional designers collaborate with developers to create Web sites by providing full access to industry standards like CSS, XSL, XML and XHTML. Expression Web also provides access to ASP.NET 2.0 for designers, allowing them to easily and intuitively incorporate controls into their Web design. Designers can then deliver VS compatible projects to developers which can then add advanced functionalities like security or database connections using Visual Studio.

Head To Head: How Expression Web and Visual Studio Work Together — 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Now that you've seen what the new Expression Web tool does, and how it can help professional Web designers collaborate, check out how the designer/developer interaction can work. In this session, a designer and a developer will work together, each using their own tool, to create a well-designed, fully functional, standards-compliant Web site.

Interface Design & CSS
Cameron Moll, New Media Designer
9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
This full-day workshop is aimed at designers seeking to improve their interface design skills. You'll leave with a comprehensive understanding of how to design interfaces that are a savvy blend of graphic design, human computing and visual communication.

Taught by one of the Web's leading designers, this workshop will uncover the tenets of effective navigation schemes, dashboard design, grid usage and other important principles. You'll learn to avoid common UI pitfalls and to embrace worst-case scenarios. The material will cover interface design for Web applications, but also for less functional layouts that make up the everyday corporate or institutional Web site.

Before the day's over, you'll dive into Photoshop and CSS tips and techniques that will help you refine and polish beautiful, usable designs. You'll be taught how to draw inspiration from on- and offline sources, and you'll gain access to top resources for icons, code snippets and more.

Cameron never shies away from sharing what he's learned through experience and continuing education for the benefit of others, and this is your opportunity to spend a full day of training in an engaging and fun environment.

Topics Will Include:

• Interface principles defined during the early stages of operating system development, and how they apply to the Web
• Rapid prototyping, iterative design and wireframes: what works and what doesn't
• Ajax as a critical and non-critical component within the UI
• Common and uncommon navigation techniques
• Designing organized, effective application dashboards
• Copywriting and color, and their roles within the UI
• Leveraging CSS across an entire Web site, and avoiding common CSS mistakes
• "Bulletproofing" the design of a layout
• Case study: dissecting the process from image comp to coded layout