Sessions
Keynote: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
Jeffrey Veen, Design Manager, Google
Monday, July 10 — 9 a.m.
As the buzz and excitement around Web 2.0 continues to increase, much is already changing in how we design and develop online. In this keynote address, Jeffrey Veen will look at how new thinking is being infused into design practices in the following trends: new technology integration with Ajax and syndication; design trends in tagging, progressive enhancement and anticipatory interaction; and philosophical shifts in business towards openness, generosity and collaboration with your users. You'll see detailed case studies of Web sites that are making the shift - and gain insight into how the latest Web trends relate to you.
About Interface
Kelly Goto, Principal, gotomedia, inc.
Monday, July 10 — 10:15 a.m.
Interaction design is no longer limited to the Web. As design migrates from the Web to mobile devices we carry and interact with on a daily basis, our approach to design and development must also shift past our somewhat limited U.S.-based thinking and into a global perspective. In this enlightening session, design ethnographer and Web veteran Kelly Goto discusses the evolution of Web, handheld and product interfaces and their cultural impact. Learn how companies are utilizing ethnographic-based research to conduct rapid, immersive studies of people and their lifestyles to inform the usefulness and viability of interfaces both online and offline.
Designing for Real User Behavior
Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
Monday, July 10 — 11:30 a.m.
What if we knew how people actually scan and read Web pages? Or what types of page elements people are more likely to notice? Or when they really scroll or use search features? Thanks to recent research and a ridiculous number of usability tests, we know a lot more than we used to. Find out about key user behavior patterns that will make a difference in how you design Web pages. When you design for real user behavior, your site feels more intuitive—and your end result is more successful.
Transcending CSS: Designing the Progressive Web
Andy Clarke, Creative Director, Stuff and Nonsense and Molly E. Holzschlag, President, Molly.com, inc.
Monday, July 10 — 4:30 p.m.
While many Web designers have had some experience working in other media, many have only produced work for the Web. Whatever your background, Andy and Molly will inspire and challenge you by exploring sources of creative inspiration beyond the Web. The goal? To encourage new ideas that will help you create fresh, engaging designs and user interfaces. See how to find design inspiration in unusual places. Learn to see through the visual design to the underlying code. And find out how to bridge the gap between what is perceived to be design and what is thought to be development.
Creating Rich User Experiences with Microsoft's Web Platform
Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team, Microsoft
Tuesday, July 11 — 9 a.m.
In this keynote address, Microsoft will share its vision for the Web with designers and developers. You will walk away from the presentation with a better understanding of Atlas, a framework for quickly building cross-browser, Ajax-style Web applications; Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, a cross-platform, cross-browser runtime; and Expression Web Designer, a tool for creating CSS-based, standards-compliant Web sites. These three technologies will enable you to build rich user experiences for the Web.
The Iterative App: From Discord to Design
Kelly Goto, Principal, gotomedia, inc.
Tuesday, July 11 — 10:15 a.m.
Between the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engineers and designers, Web application design has reached a new level of frenzy and discord. You know what we mean, and so does Kelly Goto, who has refined Web process and project management to an art form. In this session, she takes you through the application development process. Learn the behind-the-scenes techniques behind rapid prototyping, and see how to enhance your current process to include iterative usability testing cycles. You'll also discover how to verify development requirements before you code by employing PDF prototypes and HTML click-throughs. With a collaborative mindset and the proper process in place, design and engineering teams can work together and launch the "iterative app" successfully.
Deconstructing...You!
Panel, presented by: Jim Heid, WDW Conference Chair; Andy Clarke, Creative Director, Stuff and Nonsense; Molly E. Holzschlag, President, Molly.com, inc.; Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Tuesday, July 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.
Finding Things My Way: Faceted Navigation
Steve Mulder, Senior Consultant, Molecular
2 p.m.
Web navigation is evolving. Instead of forcing users into a rigid site structure we define, faceted navigation design enables users to create their own structure and their own paths through a site. Creating a more flexible navigation system puts more control in the user's hands, which results in improved findability and better business results. Discover why facets are taking over the Web, what it means for Web site navigation, and how to make a faceted interface that's intuitive and usable.
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 Strategies for Web 2.0: From Markup to Microformats, from Semantics to Ajax
Andy Clarke, Creative Director, Stuff and Nonsense and Molly E. Holzschlag, President, Molly.com, inc.
2 p.m.
When it comes to Web 2.0, designers and developers need a roadmap to help sort out what's hype and what's real. Andy and Molly will provide that map, guiding you with sensible advice and abundant resources to help you in the practicalities of designing and developing today's Web sites with these technologies. Learn the meaning of semantics and why semantics are so important to successful, backward-compatible and future-proof site design. See best practices in HTML and XHTML. Learn what microformats are and how they are helping the Web evolve. And see how JavaScript and Ajax are best used in client-side design.
Unifying Web Design and Development with CSS
Andy Clarke, Creative Director, Stuff and Nonsense and Molly E. Holzschlag, President, Molly.com, inc.
3:15 p.m.
You already know that CSS provides many benefits to designers, developers and ultimately, your site's visitors. But CSS can also be used as a rapid prototyping tool, to manage large amounts of documents with ease, and to reduce wear and tear on server load and page load time. In this session, you'll learn how to use CSS for wireframing and how to use CSS to manage sites from 10 to 10 million pages. You'll also see which CSS practices you should avoid and why, and you'll learn how to optimize and organize your CSS documents.
XML for Designers: From Syndication to Web Services
Joe Marini, Group Product Manager for VSIP, Microsoft
11:30 a.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.
Better Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM
Joe Marini, Group Product Manager for VSIP, Microsoft
2 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.
Developing Ajax Applications
Joe Marini, Group Product Manager for VSIP, Microsoft
3:15 p.m.
Ajax has become a hot topic in the Web design community, and for good reason: Ajax enables you to create Web applications that have nearly the look, feel and responsiveness of desktop applications. However, there's also a fair amount of confusion to accompany the buzz. In this session, you'll learn about the origins of Ajax and its main technical underpinnings – and you'll find out how to build your own pages that take advantage of the power of this development methodology.
Strategy Meets Technology Track
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.
Designing for Conversion
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
2 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. If you're interested in improving the conversion effectiveness of your site, email campaign, PPC campaign or other online marketing effort, you won't want to miss this session.
Accessibility: Better, Faster, and Cheaper
Shawn Henry, World Wide Web Consortium
3:15 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.
DAY 3 Workshops – Wednesday, July 12
User Experience Workshop: Putting Web 2.0 into Practice
Peter Merholz, Director of Practice, and Brandon Schauer, Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
As the buzz and excitement around Web 2.0 continues to increase, much is already changing in how we plan, design and develop online. In this full-day workshop, Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer look at how new thinking is being infused into design practices. Merholz and Shauer have authored some seminal essays on Web 2.0 philosophy and opportunities (available at www.adaptivepath.com). In this workshop, they expand on those themes of openness, trust and relinquishing control, and discuss how these traits are not threats to business, but genuine opportunities to be explored.
Next, they'll roll up their sleeves and dig into the details behind designing for the next generation of Web applications. You'll benefit from their experience working on such problems for a variety of clients – experience that, among other things, led their colleague Jesse James Jarrett to coin the term Ajax. They'll also draw from the design and development of Adaptive Path's first product, Measure Map, acquired by Google last February.
Just some of the topics you'll learn include:
- Successful frameworks for planning next generation Web development
- Design strategies for rich Internet applications using Ajax and Flash, including new methods of documentation
- How to take advantage of trends such as tagging, wikis, syndication (RSS) and user-generated content
- When to Get Real and when to Get Realistic
- Secrets to the success of such products as Flickr, Wikipedia and Craigslist
Photoshop Power Shortcuts
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
Shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts! Do you dream in keyboard shortcuts? When you drop your keys, do you think (Ctrl + Z) or [Cmd + Z]? There are so many keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop (over 650!) that someone actually wrote a book just on Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Crazy, but true. This always popular session will teach you the Photoshop shortcuts you can implement into your workflow to immediately improve your productivity. They may not all be flashy, but they are sure to make you smile as you realize how much time and effort they’ll save you.
- Mmm… Scrubby Sliders!
- Changes to window management and the Full Screen Mode
- Interface and navigation tips
- Keyboard shortcuts, and more!
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
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. The 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
- Sharpening 101
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
“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
- Special Effects
- The Advanced Blending options
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
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
Michael Ninness, Executive Director, Lynda.com
Getting a layered Photoshop document into Flash used to be a time consuming and labor intensive process of saving out each layer in the Photoshop document as a separate .PNG file, importing each .PNG into Flash independently, converting it into a Symbol, creating a layer, placing each Symbol on its own layer, and then repositioning all the elements to match the original layered layout as it was in Photoshop. With the Export to Flash (.SWF) feature in the new ImageReady CS, this headache finally goes away. This session will also cover how Flash handles embedded bitmap files and how you can control the optimization of each bitmap independently.
- New Export to Flash (SWF) feature in ImageReady CS
- Using Illustrator to prepare Photoshop files for import into Flash
- Using the PSD2FLA Photoshop plug-in
- How to control Flash’s optimization settings for embedded bitmaps
- How to load external JPEGs into a SWF file at runtime
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