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Workshops | Web Directions Roadshow
Workshops
See below for details on all 6 workshops in the roadshow
- Andy Clarke - Visual Web Design Masterclass
- Indi Young - Mental models
- Christian Heilmann - Pragmatic, accessible JavaScript in a web services world
- Brian Fling - Creating Mobile 2.0 Web Apps
- Lisa Herrod - Web usability - a holistic approach
- Grant Young - Engaging social media
Visual Web Design Masterclass
Presented by Andy Clarke
- Monday 20th April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Wednesday 22nd April - Canberra (Rydges Lakeside)
- Friday 24th April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
Sometimes, in all the excitement about AJAX, APIs, frameworks and other technical whizz-bangs, talk about visual design on the web gets lost. This one day masterclass by the the author of Transcending CSS, Andy Clarke, will inspire you to make the best design possible for the web, and show you how to discover new ideas and new ways of working with CSS and standards based markup.
If you work as a web designer, a print designer who wants to know what makes the web special or you are a technical person who is keen to learn more about how visual designers think and work, this workshop will take you to the next level and beyond. Not only will you brush up your skills, it will also inspire new designs, improve layouts with grid-based techniques, improve readability by using better typography and most importantly how to make your website stand out from all the others.
What will you learn?
By the end of the day you will be able to
- create inspired designs using classic typographic theory plus practical ways to accomplish great typography for the web
- improve layouts with classic grid-based techniques
- use small details to big effect
Who is this workshop for?
Web designers, print designes who wants to know what makes the web special, or technical people keen to learn more about how visual designers think and work will all take a wealth of learning from this very full day.
About Andy Clarke
Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include national and international businesses, charities and government bodies.
Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project where he redesigned the organization’s web site in 2006. He is also an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy regularly educates web designers on how to create beautiful, accessible web sites and he speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide. He writes about design and popular culture on his blog, All That Malarkey and is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.
Andy has been called a lot of things since he started working on the web ten years ago. His ego likes words like “ambassador for CSS”, “industry prophet” and “inspiring”, but actually he is most proud that Jeffrey Zeldman once called him a “(triple talented) bastard”.
Now he is pulling his passions for beautiful design and educating people together to create For A Beautiful Web, a unique series of web design master classes that cover topics including visual design and best-practice use of technologies such as CSS, as well as geeky stuff like Microformats.
Mental models
Presented by Indi Young
- Monday 20th April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Wednesday 22nd April - Canberra (Rydges Lakeside)
- Friday 24th April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
There is no single methodology for creating the perfect web product. But you can increase your odds, and one of the best ways to do this is to really understand users’ reasons for doing things. Indi Young’s Mental Models workshop will give you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. If you are a product designer, user experience professional, or design researcher looking to create better web products for your organisation or clients, don’t miss this full day workshop.
There is a difference between reading a requirements document about what a customer needs and understanding what is driving them. Rather than the basic functions, you need to understand the richer mix of philosophies, emotions, and behaviors that flows inside the customer’s minds. Mental models are a method for finding out what goes on inside customers’ minds. Mental models help you let go of your product and what you were hired to do and just empathise. After you have a deep understanding of the customer’s world, then you can fire up your brain and solve problems, but not until you have walked in their world and developed an understanding of it.
In this workshop, Indi Young, author of the Rosenfeld Media book Mental Models, will teach you how to better understand user motivations before making design decisions. You will learn how to collect the data that goes into a mental model as well as make use of the model as a tactical and strategic roadmap for your organization over the next 10 years. The model will serve as the skeleton on which all parts of your organization can hang ideas and services that will support the customer. Everyone from discordant divisions to busy executives can get on the same page with respect to design and strategy.
Mental models don’t represent a whole new approach to user experience. Instead, they tie together many techniques into a cohesive whole. The workshop is full of hands-on exercises to help you get a feel for any aspects you haven’t had a chance to use yet in your own work. Indi uses many examples from a variety of industries to illustrate the process, and further illustrations exist on the book site.
“Wait a minute. I’ve heard the term ‘mental model’ before.” Those in the field of cognitive research have been defining mental models for a few decades. The term “mental model” has come to mean “a mental representation.” The mental model diagrams in this workshop represent the way a group of people think about a particular situation, regardless of which tools they use. (A fancier name for them might be “mentation models,” but who wants to use the word “mentation?”) Aligned with the ways you support users, mental models provide a clear roadmap of where your organization should invest its energies, and also where it shouldn’t, allowing you to stretch your limited resources.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for product designers, user experience professionals, and design researchers. It is as applicable in designing processes and manufactured items as it is for designing for the web. People from non-profit, government, and educational agencies derive as much value from the simple data-driven models as those from the corporate world.
What will you learn?
Through a series of in-class exercises, you will create behaviorally-differentiated audience segments, practice interviewing techniques, get a feel for what it is like to work with real transcripts, work with a team to pull a mental model together, and then use that model to brainstorm ideas.
About Indi Young
Indi began her work in Web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, she has worked with an impressive collection of clients, including Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. Since 1995, Indi has constructed over 30 interview-based research projects, 22 of which included mental model diagrams. She considers this methodology she has developed another good way to be a “problem solver”.
Indi is the author of the Rosenfeld Media book Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior.
Pragmatic, accessible JavaScript in a web services world
Presented by Christian Heilmann
- Tuesday 21st April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Thursday 23rd April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
JavaScript is an amazing amount of different things to different people. There was a time when it was a plaything to make web sites shiny and interesting. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to think of any web product that does not use it. Using JavaScript is easy. Making it mesh with other technologies like the backend, CSS and HTML less so. We’re moving further and further away from a world where you’ll be asked to code something from scratch. Instead we’re using frameworks and APIs, and consuming web services.
In this workshop we’ll start from an everyday situation - a rather messed up old web product. We’ll clean it up to make it accessible for everyone, easy to maintain and hand over to third parties, and always up-to-date by piggy-backing on web services like Yahoo’s YQL and Pipes, and social systems like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious. You’ll walk away with a new enthusiasm for Javascript, but also armed with a whole collection of rock solid techniques that will let you save your company time and money by doing the job right the first time.
Who is this workshop for?
To get the most out of this workshop you need to know some JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but you don’t need to be an expert. You should be ready to write some code and play with systems and be handy with a text-editor.
What will you learn?
By the end of the workshop you’ll be able to
- spot bad code in old products and find ways to clean it up
- understand structuring JavaScript solutions without needing to write a novel that explains them
- use and understand third party code like JavaScript libraries and web services like Yahoo’s YQL and Pipes that provide you with user generated data
- build systems that work for users with different abilities and access options
- write code that allows for customization and internationalization
- find, filter and remix content from the web and re-use it in your own products
- write solutions that use web standards to their fullest - make each of them do the job they were meant to do
- build a web site that is maintained in third party applications like twitter, flickr and delicious and still brings them all together in a single interface.
About Christian Heilmann
Christian Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. He’s been a professional web developer for about eleven years and worked his way through several agencies up to Yahoo where he delivered Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s written two and contributed to three books on JavaScript, web development and accessibility, lead distributed teams as a manager and made them work with one another and released dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years. He’s been nominated standards champion of the year 2008 by .net magazine in the UK and currently sports the fashionable job title “International Developer Evangelist” spending his time going from conference to conference and university to university to speak and train people on systems provided by Yahoo and other web companies that want to make this web thing work well for everybody.
Creating Mobile 2.0 Web Apps
Presented by Brian Fling
- Tuesday 21st April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Friday 24th April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
Mobile is one of the most prolific communication and information mediums mankind has ever seen. We’ve all heard those mind boggling statistics. More mobile devices can access the Internet than there are desktop computers. More people can watch videos on a mobile device than have televisions sets. More people can make purchases with a mobile phone than have credit cards. But how do you build for it? And how can you make money doing it?
In this full day workshop we will find answers to both these questions by creating a mobile application together. Led by Brian Fling, mobile expert and author of the O’Reilly book Mobile Design & Development and the free dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, you will understand not just principles and techniques of mobile design and development but we will apply them to a product that we will build over the course of the day.
Who is this workshop for?
Any web developer with an understanding of standards based web design is ready for this workshop. Just bring along an enthusiasm for making it mobile.
What will you learn?
By the end of this very full day you will be able to
- identify the advantages of the mobile medium
- understand and build products around the user’s context
- architect and design a great mobile experience
- adhere to mobile standards and best practices
- adapt your approach for the many devices including the iPhone, Android and the Palm Pré
- make mobile products backward compatible without sacrificing quality
- create both a mobile web app and a native application that takes advantage of device features.
And if our app starts making $10,000 a day, we’ll split the profits equally :)
About Brian Fling
Brian Fling has been a leader in the web and mobile user experience. He has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to help create next generation interactive experiences. Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web, mobile web applications and the mobile user experience.
Brian is very active member in the mobile community. He co-authored the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first free publication to cover mobile web design and development from start to finish, he co-created a series of iPhone web applications called Leaflets to showcase the concepts of “Mobile 2.0” just a few weeks after the iPhone launched. He also runs one of the largest online communities focused on mobile: Mobile Design.
In 2005 he co-founded the interactive agency Blue Flavor, where he helped companies both big and small develop their interactive strategies. In early 2008 Brian and his wife Cyndi left Blue Flavor to form Fling Media with a more exclusive focus on the iPhone, mobile design services, mobile web applications and next generation interactive products.
Web usability - a holistic approach
Presented by Lisa Herrod
- Monday 20th April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Wednesday 22nd April - Canberra (Rydges Lakeside)
- Thursday 23rd April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
Creating a great ‘User Experience’ is now expected not only of the Usability Specialist, but also of the entire project team. More than ever, web practitioners across all roles within a team are required to have knowledge of and even experience in conducting user research and usability testing. The current economic climate adds to this pressure as businesses strive to get the best from their online investments.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for people who need to understand usability in the context of their role, who want to improve their skills and take a more professional approach to it in their work. This is a hands on practical workshop combined with discussions on a variety of methods and approaches to implementing usability in the real world.
The purpose of the workshop is not to train you to be a Usability Specialist, but rather, to provide the tools you need to incorporate usability into your personal workflow. To achieve this, we will consider individual roles and see how they each interact.
What will you learn?
By the end of the workshop you will have a solid understanding of
About Lisa Herrod
Lisa is the Principal User Experience consultant at Scenario Seven, with over ten years of hands-on experience on the web. With a background in standards focused design and development, the past 5 years of her work has centred on design research, usability, accessibility and user experience strategy. Lisa believes in an inclusive, holistic approach to user experience design that permeates every layer of a site and every role on a team.
Her clients range from small, non-profit organisations through to large multinationals such as Macquarie Bank and Microsoft.
Lisa is a qualified trainer, experienced lecturer and conference presenter, having spoken at the best of Australia’s web conferences. She writes on the user experience for Sitepoint, A List Apart and for anyone who stumbles upon her at Scenariogirl.com.
Presented by Grant Young
- Tuesday 21st April - Melbourne (MCG)
- Thursday 23rd April - Sydney (Australian Technology Park)
Register now
Social media - blogs, wikis, social networking services, online communities - are reshaping what the constituents expect from organisations - both in terms of service delivery and communication. Perception of brands is no longer in the hands of the marketing department and advertising budgets, but instead in the conversations happening in myriad gathering places across the web.
Engaging in social media requires a different approach to traditional marketing, PR and advertising. This workshop aims to augment your existing skills with an understanding of strategies and tactics appropriate for engagement in social networks.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is ideal for anyone considering engagement in social media on behalf of an organisation, either at a strategy or tactical level. This is not a technical session and although we will briefly touch on some popular sites, the focus will be on how you and your organisation can effectively and authentically engage participants in the social media world.
What will you learn?
By the end of the workshop you will
- understand what constitutes “social media”
- understand the unique opportunities and ways to measure “success”
- recognise, avert and mitigate the associated risks
- be aware of resourcing requirements
- have specific case studies of other organisations’ use (both successes and failures) to support your work
- be able to select the tools and spaces most appropriate to your overall goals
About Grant Young
Grant has worked for over a decade in web and media roles, more recently focusing on social media and networking opportunities for non-profits and NGOs.
In early 2008 Grant founded Zumio, a consulting business with an emphasis on online strategy and tactics, working with the organisations including the Inspire Foundation, UNSW and Amnesty International on social media and website development.
In previous roles as Online Communications Manager at WWF-Australia and Senior Producer at award-winning design agency Digital Eskimo he advised on and produced projects incorporating a variety of social networking tools and approaches, including weblogs, wikis, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.
Grant has also presented on the topic of social media at Web Directions South 2008 and online business development at CPA Congress 2008. Grant has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting.
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