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WDN Slides

What a great week! Hopefully everyone who came along to WDN this year went away feeling as inspired and refreshed as I did. John has already blogged a big thank you on behalf of all of us, but I think it bears repeating: thanks to everyone — speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees alike — for being a part of it.

I know many of you would like to get your hands on presentation slides and podcasts, and in the coming weeks we’ll be gathering those and posting them. You can bookmark this post, which we’ll update as more come in, or just stay tuned for when we refresh the site with all our post-conference material. Bear with us, it’ll take a few weeks to wrap everything up.

For now, here’s the list of presentation slides we have thus far, with many more to come:

• The 3 Stages of CMS by Boris Mann
• Where’s Your Web At? by John Allsopp & Dave Shea

Posted by Dave on February 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Your conference bag

Just in case you missed our signs about re-using your re-usable conference bag, we whipped together this handy set of folding instructions in English, French, and Cantonese:

(Of course, no one’s stopping you from just cramming the bag inside the pouch it came with and hope for the best.)

Posted by Dave on February 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Thank you

Web Directions North 2008 has just wrapped up - 6 intense days of workshops, conference, skiing, and (for your boss) “networking opportunities” (aka parties).

Thank you to all who came.

Thank you to our wonderful speakers.

Thanks to our sponsors.

The event was wonderful, and we trust that all of you involved felt so too.

Plenty of podcasts and much more to come, but for now, thanks again from Dave, Maxine, Derek and John

Posted by John on February 3rd, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Brian Fling on Canada’s mobile web landscape

Brian Fling, author of the dotmobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, delivered a talk at Web Directions North today about the mobile web landscape in Canada and elsewhere. Across the world, mobile access is revolutionizing the way people access and interact with information in the next two years. Except in Canada, where Fling said the transition will take five years.

The 3 C’s of the mobile web are Cost, Content and Context, and balancing those goals is where you find the mobile web’s “sweet spot,” Fling said. Cost means if you don’t design a site with a mobile user in mind, that user could unwittingly get a big phone bill. Navigation, image sizes and page weight all become more important as content concerns on a mobile device. And context on a phone is much different than when a user is sitting in front of a computer.

some of the benefits of mobile phones is that it is the first truly personal mass media, as well as being always-on and always-carried. It’s also the only mass media with its own payment channel. Payment by cell phone hasn’t taken hold in North America, but in Japan cell phones can be used as mobile wallets.

In fact, Fling said he thought the web is on the cusp of major transformation, driven by mobile devices, and pushed forward by Google, Apple and Opera software. Apple especially has captured the imagination of people as to the possibilities of the mobile web.

But what of Canada, or as Fling said, “what is the the deal with Canada!?!” Canada’s slow wireless growth is due to relatively cheap landlines, which slowed demand for wireless. 67 percent of Canadian homes have a mobile phone, which is actually low compared to the rest of the world.

Growth in Canada is only nine percent per year, and based on past and present growth rates, it could take Canada five more years to reach the market penetration of other countries.

With new spectrum being auctioned off, there is some hope that Canada’s wireless landscape will see some progress, but restrictive regulations that don’t allow foreign competition may again cripple the Canadian market. Fling said unless there’s change, Canada will continue to lag. Right now the three main wireless carriers are dominating different segments of the market, and as a result the total market is stagnating.

Posted by Warren on January 31st, 2008 | 3 Comments »

The Why and How: UI Case Studies by Daniel Burka

Burka used three case studies from his experience at Digg and Pownce to examine challenges that many designers face when designing interfaces. He specifically focussed on the iterative design process and many of it’s benefits and pitfalls.

He began with the overall iterative design of digg.com, beginning with the initial redesign which started as a client project during his time at silverorange. Burka then delved into the recent controversy surround the redesign of the comments at digg.com which lead to him discussing user testing, feedback, and acceptance.

He also stepped through the design process of the recently launched Pownce.com.

Posted by Jeff on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Anil Dash on putting social media to work

Anil Dash, the chief evangelist at Six Apart, gave a presentation to Web Directions North attendees today about how to put social media to work. He pointed to the web publishing cycle of publication, syndication and reaction and how it is necessary to show businesses how this cycle applies to them. At present, business tools don’t even mention relationships, Dash said, and the technology industry is partly to blame, as it assumes that people are different at home and at work. Things are well designed at home, yet at work people are forced into different restrictive behaviours. For example, one of the key selling points of a Blackberry is to allow corporations to restrict their employees from using certain features.

OpenID, by contrast, is a good example of how the “web” model can work in the corporate world. It’s partly as simple as having a normal, accessible name. While openness and accessibility is a foregone conclusion in the web world, it’s only now becoming a principle of the business world, Dash said.

Reliability, scalability, measurability and manageability are all vital to a corporate environment, but web technologies are sometimes not robust enough for their needs.

In purely pragmatic terms, Dash said email is your “best enemy” to convincing business to adapt a web-like model. Identify where email is failing (spam, irrelevant emails) and offering web services as an alternative. Explain how using wikis, blogs, and other tools allow for serendipity, whether its creating new business connections or finding new ways to interact with clients.

Dash also stressed the importance of permanence, such as ensuring that messages are not lost when moving to new technologies. But impermanence is also important. No-one gets a gold watch after 50 years with a firm anymore, and a far more likely dynamic is a small team coming together in an ad-hoc manner and then dissolving when a job is done. In practical terms, that means permissions to access data may change over time.

Iteration is also important. Technology deployment shouldn’t be flipping a switch and using the new version of Microsoft Office….and then finding that half of the people in a firm can’t send email. But time and again this scenario plays itself out in the workplace, and Dash said the only way to solve the problem is to iterate instead of accepting rapid change.

Playing nicely with others and patience are also important. On a macro scale, blogging went from obscurity to ubiquity in the business world in five years. But on a personal scale, such changes can appear to be glacial. But it’s important to remember that some people in an organization will need to assimilate change slowly. By the same token, Dash said to find the advocates within an organization, because there are always individuals who think in the same way as a webcentric worker…they just don’t know it yet.

Changing business means the blog world has to change itself. Stop rewarding people who shout, Dash said, which has been a route to success (or at least to notoriety) in both the blogging world and business.

New tools, such as Facebook news feeds, Jabber, Twitter and OpenSocial will all be able to bring in new users from the business world that the older generation of enterprise software just can’t do, Dash said. But those who work in the web world have the ability and obligation to bring those tools to the enterprise, and not just exist in their own milieu, Dash said.

Posted by Warren on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Where’s Your Web At? by Dave Shea & John Allsopp

• We often assume a certain setting and specific device for our users.
• We also often assume OS platform, browser selection, user input device, and screen real estate.
• Mobile devices:
  • Mostly ubiquitous connections, speed varies.
  • Different user input types: virtual keyboards, etc.
• On the TV:
  • Still under-represented.
  • Wii & PS3 do offer good to excellent browsing.
• Other devices:
  • LG fridges, watches, remote controls, etc.
• Web is starting to be used in other places than traditional offices, living rooms, etc.
• Designing for the physical location of the user:
  • Amount of attention.
  • Viewing conditions.
  • Privacy.
  • Motor skills possibly comprimised.
• Design:
  • Vast range of screen sizes.
  • Media profiles in CSS to help cope with this.
  • Should we be designing specific layouts for all the different devices?
  • Reference to the ALA article on adaptive layouts (not necessarily the best solution): http://www.alistapart.com/articles/switchymclayout/.
• Interaction:
  • Text input on virtual input devices:
    • Typing is slower.
    • Undo is costly.
    • Cut and paste not available (for the most part).
    • Switch between numeric and alpha keyboards.
  • Text input strategies:
    • Use short URL’s.
    • ECML – schema for naming form fields/elements (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2706.html).
    • OpenID.
    • QR codes.
  • Try to make interactions passive and easy.
  • Beware of design patterns that require fine motor skills.
  • Assumed events:
    • WIMP:
      • Windows
      • Icons
      • Mouse
      • Pull down menus
    • No hover event
    • No mouseover event

Posted by Jeff on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Eric Rodenbeck explains information visualization as a medium

Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design has a long history in the field of interactive design, and he was able to distill some of his insights to attendees of Web Directions North on Thursday. Rodenbeck pointed to the New York Times and their interactive maps ranging from the red and blue state breakdown of the 2004 US election to oil supply across the world.

Data visualization is a medium, Rodenbeck said, and can be live, vast, and deep. He pointed to a project he worked on called cabspotting, which used GPS data from San Francisco taxi cabs. Users were able to watch swarms of cabs in real time, and real-time analysis could also be applied to the data, with the end result that it was possible to chart out the most intensely used cab routes, as well as examine cab routes over periods of time.

Rodenbeck also showcased Oakland Crimespotting, which applies crime statistics to maps and allows users to chart out what crimes happen in which neighbourhoods, as well as charting out crime rates over time.

Other apps that use innovative visualization tools are Digg Swarm and Digg Stack, which chart out how Digg users pick top stories and which topics are more likely to be dugg.

Posted by Warren on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Cameron Adams discusses the future of web interfaces

Author and designer Cameron Adams explained to a packed house at Web Directions North today how web interfaces are moving forward from its current static state to a “dynamic interface” model. Flexibility, in terms of font size and availability, use of Javascript and other features are already available to customize the user experience, but as of yet custom layouts for end users have not been widely implemented. Designing these interface isn’t easy, Adams said. Creating a customizable interface means making smart decisions at every step to make sure the user gets exactly what what they want.

Adams highlighted several trends that are driving interface design. The first is the rise of user-driven content, such as people putting their lives online and participating in social networks. People are also becoming information omnivores, going straight to data sources and bypassing anything that gets in their way. Customization can go out of control, and Adams cited Myspace as an example of bad customization. Twitter, which allows for modifying wallpaper on a page, and Flickr, which allows custom layouts of photos, were cited as good design choices.

Adams also cited iGoogle as an example of a site that allows users to create a customized home page. Widgets also allow for customization, though current offerings are more “expand-o collapse-o” than truly functional, he said.

XML allows for much in the way of customization, as does CSS, so the technology is already in place, Adams said. Javascript also serves to fill the gaps on different browsers.

On the server side, more granularity is needed, as well as noting user behaviours and adapting accordingly. Adams also noted that the usefulness of dynamic interfaces changes depending on how you use a site. If a user uses a site regularly and decides upon multiple visits how they need to use the site, a dynamic interface becomes increasingly important.

Game design is a good example of how to approach the web, Adams said. Current games have destructive environments, which totally changes the way games are played from earlier “point-and-shoot” environments. In the same way, bandwidth prices fall and browsers improve, so technology isn’t a barrier for long. It’s more important for designers to mentally challenge themselves and adapt interfaces to the needs of users.

Posted by Warren on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Ajax Security by Douglas Crockford

• The browser is not a safe programming environment.
• An attacker can load additional, external scripts and make requests of your server.
• An attacker can see everything your users see.
• They can send that information to any server in the world.
• These are not new problems.
• How you encode data can prevent a lot of common/simple issues i.e. convert < to &lt;.
• JavaScript’s global object is the root of all XSS (cross site scripting) attacks.
• The DOM is another source. All nodes are linked to all other nodes on the page and to the network.
• If code is clean and readable, it is less likely to contain insecurities.
• JSLint.com is a tool to define a professional subset of JavaScript that will help identify insecurities.
• Web 2.0:
  • Mashups are a great innovation, but are insecure.
  • Advertising is a mashup.
• Competition to displace the traditional web:
  • Silverlight
  • Adobe AIR
  • JavaFX
• 3-prong strategy to fix the web:
  • Safe JavaScript subsets: by using JSLint and ADsafe.
  • Small browser improvements: event simple improvements can take a long time to distribute.
  • Massive browser improvements.
• We need to replace JavaScript and the DOM with something more secure e.g. a secure subset of JavaScript.
• Be rigorous in your coding practices to help your security measures.

Posted by Jeff on January 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

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