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Program | Web Directions North

Program

Web Directions features

• two days of half day (4 face to face hours) workshops on February 2 and 3
• the full day Ed Directions North Education Focus Day on February 3
• a two day, two track conference, with over 20 in depth sessions on February 4 and 5

Trying to convince someone you really need to go? Print our executive summary [400K PDF].

There’s still a number of sessions we are just finalizing, and 3 exciting keynotes we’ll be announcing very very soon. Subscribe to the RSS feed, or our mailing list to be updated when we make further announcements.

Design

• Beyond usability: How to build a culture of customer empathy
• Interaction Design for Web Designers
• Mobile User Experience - what web designers need to know
• Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z
• Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation 2
• Standards based graphics in the browser
• The Designer’s Toolbox 2009
• Tap is the New Click
• The Mobile Web: A Crash Course
• Accessibility beyond compliance

Development

• Website and Webapp Performance
• Building Location Aware Web Applications
• The State of the Web 2009
• JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks Supersession
• Ajax - the State of the Art
• Say What You Mean with RDFa and Web Semantics

Keynote

• Ajax - the State of the Art
• The State of the Web 2009

Accessibility beyond compliance

Derek Featherstone

New technologies for web applications open up interactions to a highly sophisticated level. Learn how these new technologies can help designers move beyond simply complying with accessibility rules to create applications that work for everyone.

Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation 2

Elliot Jay Stocks

In the summer of ‘07 in a flood-soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His presentation, “Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation”, looked at how to reward modern browsers with the latest CSS tricks and punish IE by dropping certain site features; but almost two years on, what has changed? Very little, but there’s movement. Now, Elliot returns to the subject and examines the tools we can now start using for progressive enhancement: font embedding, text shadows, and other features of the CSS2.1 and CSS3 specs, in spite of their glacially slow adoption. We’ll look at the issues surrounding font embedding; the arguments about browser support; the potentially controversial irrelevance of validation; and how we can attempt to reach the future sooner by writing forward-thinking code.

Building Location Aware Web Applications

Ryan Sarver

Location-aware web sites, applications, and devices can provide users with rich social connectivity, useful content, efficient movement around their environment, highly targeted advertising, and more. Major web players understand the benefits of location awareness and have jumped into this space. Google’s My Location (which locates users via cell-towers) and Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle (which brokers a user’s locations) are just two examples.

While most devices now have functionality that make location determination possible, understanding these technologies and how they can be deployed and used by mobile devices and web sites can be complicated.

This session is targeted to all attendees who want to learn more about the tools available to bring location to their web site or mobile applications. We’ll discuss how GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi positioning work, and on which platforms they are available.

BrightKite, a location-based social network, will also join us to talk through recommendations and best practices when it comes to implementing location-based services as part of a mobile or web application.

Tap is the New Click

Dan Saffer

Even though touchscreen and gestural technology has been around for decades, Nintendo’s Wii, Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft Surface have heralded a new era of interaction design where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking.

But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design for web and desktop applications, many are still wondering how to adequately design for interactive gestures. This talk covers the basics: ergonomics, a brief history of gestural technology, prototyping and documenting, and how to communicate the presence of a gestural interface to users.

Interaction Design for Web Designers

Eris Stassi & Jina Bolton

We create Experience when we create web sites. But, despite the growth in technology and tools, a person’s online experience is still very much ensconced in the web-based way of interacting. These limits, real or perceived, are working against web developers. Creating web sites that act like applications means thinking like software designers.

From mental models to dialog etiquette, we can take lessons from Interaction Design and make exponential strides to improve web experiences by learning how software designers determine, define and develop applications. We’ll talk about how to design complex systems that are event-based (web apps) instead of information-based (web sites).

Come spend an hour with Jina Bolton (web design) and Eris Stassi (interaction design) as they take you through core points of HCI and how to translate that knowledge into creating better web experiences.

The Designer’s Toolbox 2009

Dave Shea

The way we create web sites has changed dramatically over the past few years, along with the skills required to build them. Your role may be as a designer who passes on your Photoshop work to someone else for implementation, a markup genius who knows all the latest CSS tricks, a server-side specialist who rarely sees the light of a DOCTYPE, or perhaps something else entirely.

But this is an industry where generalists thrive; having a working knowledge of skills outside your current job description may prove the key to a long and successful career in this business. Freelance designer Dave Shea is here to share some of his experience from diverse projects that have demanded a wide variety of tasks. We’ll be looking at some of the important skills and techniques that make up the modern web designer’s toolbox, including design thinking, content planning strategies, scripted user interface elements, and much more.

Ajax - the State of the Art

Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer

Ajaxian techniques, toolsets and technologies for adding richer interaction, effects, and a more desktop like experience for users have revolutionized the web experience in the last three or four years. No one has tracked this more closely than Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, founders of ajaxian.com.

In this keynote presentation, Dion and Ben bring you a snapshot of the State of Ajax in 2009. From the browsers, to the standards, the libraries, and techniques, they’ll outline where Ajax is at today, and where it is headed. Whether you wear a design or development hat, or manage teams and projects and want to be amazed by what is possible in the browser today, this information rich, entertaining presentation will leave you itching to add even more Ajaxian goodness to your projects.

Website and Webapp Performance

Nicole Sullivan-Haas

As web sites grow in size and complexity, and add increasingly rich Ajax based integration, maximizing performance is becoming a challenge for more and more web designers and developers. In this session, Yahoo! performance engineer, Nicole Sullivan-Haas takes you though some of the tools and techniques Yahoo! have developed and use to maximize the performance of Yahoo! sites and applications. Whether you are a designer, developer, product or project manager, this session will be guaranteed to help you improve the performance of your sites and applications.

JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks Supersession

Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer

The last two or three years has seen the sudden arrival and increasing maturity of quite a number of JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks, such as Prototype, Dojo, JQuery, more recent arrivials like SproutCore and Cappuccino, and many more. But how do these compare? Which ones are the right choice for your particular needs? What are their stengths and weaknesses? Do they play nicely together?

In this double length Supersession, moderated by Ajaxian.com founders Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, here from founders, lead developers and power users of such libraries as Cappuccino and YUI (the Yahoo User Interface Library) and more.

They’ll show off what these libraries can do, and field in depth questions from the moderators, and the audience.

There’ll be no better way to get a handle on one of the most powerful sets of tools available for today’s web developer.

Whether you are new to libraries and frameworks, or an old hand, there’ll be plenty of insight to be gained from this session.

Mobile User Experience - what web designers need to know

Rachel Hinman

Until recently, the mobile internet was a crippled user experience due to product, interface and technical constraints. Recent innovations are causing an inflection point for the mobile internet, enabling new and exciting opportunities for mobile user experience. The opportunity for user experience professionals to deliver on the promise of the mobile internet is slowly becoming ours for the taking. But how do folks who are well versed in creating PC-based internet experiences begin to engage with mobile?

This presentation is designed to help web design professionals answer that question as well as:

• Provide insight into how to approach the mobile internet space.
• Identify key similarities and differences in designing for PC/mobile internet experiences.
• Provide frameworks and design principles for creating compelling mobile internet experiences.
• Inspire you to hop on the mobile internet wave.

Standards based graphics in the browser

Doug Schepers

For most of the history of the web, rich graphics, and in particular vector graphics, have required proprietary plug in technologies like Flash. But those days are ending.

In this presentation, the World Wide Web Consortium’s Doug Schepers will get you up to speed with two standardized graphics technologies, increasingly available in today’s browsers- SVG and the Canvas.

Doug will

• Demonstrate the capabilities, similarities and differences between these two related technologies
• Demonstrate webapps using each to give a sense of what they can easily help you achieve
• Give an overview of how you author with the technologies
• Give you a sense of where these technologies have come from, and where they might be headed

For anyone involved with the development of rich web sites and applications, this session will be invaluable for helping you understand the state of the art in standards based web graphics

The State of the Web 2009

John Allsopp

The web as a technical platform is constantly evolving. New standards are developed, and existing standards revised and extended. In 2008 alone, we saw the rapid development of HTML5, CSS3, and the GeoLocation API to name a handful.

We’ve also been seeing an unprecedented surge in browser development - with a whole new browser - Google Chrome - and major new versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera all in the last 12 months. In addition, both Adobe and Microsoft released significant upgrades to their Rich Internet Application platforms.

But with all this rapid evolution, even revolution, what really is the state of the web in early 2009? What trends and developments do we need to keep our focus on, and which will be gone and forgotten by Web Directions North 2010?

To help you get a deep understanding of where the web is right now, we’ve assembled representatives of major browser developers (commercial and open source), standards bodies, and other significant shapers of the web as a platform.

In this extended closing keynote session to day one of the conference, hear from these experts as they speak on where they believe the web is headed, and field questions from the audience.

Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z

Dan Cederholm

As the browser landscape changes, so too does our approach to

implementing _flexible_ design. This session will share 26 ways

to help your interfaces become more adaptable, worry-free, and bulletproof.

Say What You Mean with RDFa and Web Semantics

Manu Sporny

Most that have heard about the Semantic web over the last seven years will roll their eyes when hearing the over-hyped prediction that “The Semantic Web is coming!”. “Just one more year and we’ll be there!”. The web has been abuzz once more with talk about Microformats, RDFa and how they represent the true Semantic Web - why is this any different from past failures?

This session will focus on what separates RDFa from the past and will demonstrate that the Semantic Web is rooted in practical applications that we can start building right now. The semantic web isn’t about some utopia where humans and computers frolic in parks and take long walks on beaches. The semantic web is about better user interface design, less time spent searching and more time spent doing, easing the burden of information overload, and other practical rammifications found when computers can finally start to understand the content on web pages.

The Semantic Web is about the real world and making it a better environment for all of us.

Beyond usability: How to build a culture of customer empathy

Juliette Melton

When everyone at your organization cares deeply about the customer experience you will build better, more inventive, and more delightful products. So how do get everyone to really care about and understand not just the usability but the overall experience of your products? Though it takes time, an empathetic corporate culture is not impossible to create and nurture.

In this session Juliette Melton will share several case studies in how to build a culture of empathy at your organization, including best practices for running usability tests, sharing web usage statistics, and developing user personas.

The Mobile Web: A Crash Course

Brian Fling

Brian turns on the fire hose—giving you everything you need to know about the mobile web—in under an hour. At a blazing fast speed, he unwraps the mysteries on mobile strategy, design principles, development techniques, device detection, content adaptation, testing across multiple devices, when to make a web app vs. a native app, how to make money in mobile and loads more. Impress your friends and co-workers by becoming the go to “mobile guy (or girl)” at your company.