Session Detail

Keynote: Diving into Experience

Peter Merholz , President, Adaptive Path

Go on a deep dive into the importance of user experience with one of the pioneers of the field. Adaptive Path cofounder Peter Merholz will start with some historical perspective and a look at the evolution of experience and product strategy. Then, he'll demonstrate the competitive advantage that a positive user experience provides. Learn how to think about your products in a systems fashion, and see how developing an experience strategy can provide a star to sail your ship by.

General Session: The Dawning Age of Experience

Jared Spool, Founding Partner, User Interface Engineering

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-disciplinary; 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.

Strategies and Techniques for Web Mashups

Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company

Can you really build a business model based on mashups? What are some of the current best practices? What are some of the pitfalls encountered by those who have tried to build a business model based on a mashup product? This management-level session will provide a tour of current trends in mashups to find out who's doing what in the mashup space, as well as the leading mashup tools for the enterprise. The session also includes a discussion of monetization strategies behind mashups and provides real-world information about how a business model can be built. Presented by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Ajax Frameworks & Design Patterns Survey

Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company

Ajax and other Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies are fast becoming one of the most in-demand skill sets for Web developers, Web designers and other Web professionals. This session will be an in-depth, practical tour of the latest Ajax frameworks — their features, strengths and weaknesses to help today's Web professionals understand better how to begin to choose and then use one of the Ajax frameworks. The session also provides a tour of Ajax design patterns' emerging story, as well as the most popular design elements in Ajax applications today. Using the "design patterns" metaphor of Christopher Alexander — i.e., "common, recurring problems" — we will examine Display Manipulation, Web Remoting, Dynamic Behavior, Web Services and Performance Optimization, among other popular Ajax design patterns.

Talk Amongst Yourselves: How Blogs, Wikis and Social Media are Transforming Business

DL Byron, Textura Design

Blogging on the public Internet is mainstream. Now comes the next revolution: blogging within an organization. A growing number of corporations and institutions -- including Boeing, Intel, and NASA -- are using blogs and social media to foster internal collaboration and improved knowledge management. Learn the unique uses of internal blogging, see how standards and blog technologies have made intranet user experiences richer, and discover the potential for RSS workflow. We'll conclude with a discussion of blogging strategies aimed at helping you to start the blogging conversation at your company or organization.

Blortals: Blog Portals for Your Intranet

DL Byron, Textura Design

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. In this survey of the field, we'll start with an overview of podcasting tools and techniques. Then, we'll launch into strategy, with a critical look at how to connect your business or institution with new markets, online communities, and social media.

Interface Design and CSS Workshop, Parts I-IV

Cameron Moll, Principal Interaction Designer, LDS Church

This four-hour 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. Attend all four sessions, or pick and choose as the day progresses.

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.

Topics 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

Keynote: Good Design vs Great Design

Cameron Moll, Principal Interaction Designer, LDS Church

It’s easy to poke fun at bad design, but it’s far more challenging—and rewarding—to discern differences between good design and great design. This session will teach you practical design techniques for tipping the scales of greatness in your favor, using a blend of graphic design theory, human computing principles, and a communication-centric approach. Learn the difference between a solution-focused vs problem focused approach, influence vs. inspiration, homogeneity vs. hierarchy, machine efficiency vs. user efficiency, and more.

Making Web 2.0 Usable: An Ajax Case Study

Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular;

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.

Pleasing Users and Search Engines Alike: Balancing Design, Usability, and SEO

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Traditionally, Web designers were taught to focus on aesthetics. More recently, their scope has expanded to include usability and search engine optimization (SEO). Conventional wisdom says focusing on one detracts from the others. So designers often feel like they compromise – and end up with a mediocre design. But do you really have to choose? What if you could do it all?

Deconstructing... You!

Panel: Jim Heid, WDW Conference Chair, Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, and Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular

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.

Inside the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library

Nate Koechley, Senior Engineer & Designer, Yahoo!

Inside the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library Nate Koechley, Senior Engineer and Designer, Yahoo, Inc. 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, contains 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 the design and technical philosophies behind the YUI. Learn what the library offers today ‹ and where it's heading. See examples of its use in the wild, and get insights into why and how Yahoo! decided to open-source it. There's no shortage of better things to do with your time than reinvent the wheel ‹ learn what the YUI offers and get ideas for what you might build using it.

CSS Mojo: Techniques that Make Visual Designers Happy

Leslie Sommer, Front-end Developer, Yahoo.com

CSS Mojo - Techniques that Make Visual Designers Happy Leslie Sommer Have you ever gotten a design specification that makes you want to quit your job and become a zookeeper? You aren't alone, but there's no need to start feeding tigers just yet. Leslie will demonstrate a few easy and markup-light methods for adding some shine to your pages, including rounded corners, drop shadows, glow shadows, and gradients. She'll also cover cross-browser CSS coding issues, themeability of elements, and how to compromise with tigers — that is, visual designers.

Dynamic User Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

Joe Marini is back for 2007 with a set of updated and all-new examples of how you can build responsive, dynamic, interactive user interfaces and web page features using a pinch of CSS, a dash of JavaScript, and a smattering of DOM. In this session, you'll see how to give your web pages automatic features like adaptive layout, data filtering, and content navigation.
You'll also see how to make forms more usable and how to write your script so that these features gracefully degrade when JavaScript is disabled.

XML in 2007: A Survey of Tools, Technologies, and Strategies

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

XML has entered the mainstream of Web design and development, and has brought along with it a host of associated tools, technologies, and design problems. In this session, all new for 2007, we'll take a survey of the XML landscape with a look at each of these categories. You'll learn about the important XML technologies you need to know, the tools that will help you work with them, and some guidelines on designing and developing with XML data.

Let the People Speak: How Users Are Changing the Web

Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular

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.

Designing for Dollars

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Few organizations have a bottomless web design budget. That means few designers have the luxury of leisurely experimenting with web page design variations – they're tasked with producing a winning solution ASAP. If this sounds like you or your organization, this session is for you.

Learn how to prioritize your design efforts by identifying the elements with the greatest impact on Web page effectiveness. In a practical, how-to approach to design, we'll discuss the most important concepts and elements to address for effective landing pages, home pages, category pages, product pages, forms, shopping carts, and the checkout process. We'll share guidelines, show case studies, and look at current examples to illustrate what works -- and why. When it's your job to make your site beautiful and profitable, you'll want to start here.