Design Track | Web Directions South 2010

Design Track

Dan Rubin gets creative with CSS3 and HTML5; Juliette Melton runs effective remote research; Simon Pascal Klein knows how to typeset for the web; Matt Balara designs better online shops; Craig Sharkie intro­duces jQuery to designers and Darren Menachemson designs inter­action with enriched story­telling.

Remote research: Running effective remote studies

Tools and tips for getting the most out of your user research

Presenter: Juliette Melton

Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combi­nation of surveys, video, screen­sharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using tradi­tional lab-​​based usability tests, while using resources more effi­ciently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-​​style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, tech­nology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and partic­ipant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increas­ingly popular non-​​scripted research services.

Setting standards-​​friendly web type

The art of tech­no­logical typography

Presenter: Simon Pascal Klein

Web typog­raphy has in the past two years seen a resur­gence in interest and many would agree only rightly so, with most of the content on the web still textual. However the range of tech­nical options available for setting type on the web is quite broad—not to mention the range of styl­istic choices available—and often confusing. This session aims to demystify the current tech­niques available to set type on the web by comparing and contrasting the various options at hand while offering a set of good defaults and safe advice for not only making it acces­sible but also plea­surable to read.

The talk is suited to anyone who publishes on the web, with rele­vance to both designers and developers.

jQuery Loves Designers

Presenter: Craig Sharkie

They’ve already found the good bits of JavaScript and created a bunch of frame­works and libraries. And now that jQuery can be found on around 1 in 5 sites you visit — more if you’re lucky — its time for those devel­opers to let the folks that know have a go!

jQuery brings the behaviour layer out of the dev team and into the whole team. And it does it in a way that lets you focus on what you know best.

Find out why all those devel­opers are so keen to get to work these days and beat them at their own game. Plugins, actions, expres­sions, and selectors used to be the domain of the anoraks — but not any more! Even the biggies like Ajax and progressive enhancement can be taken in bite sized chunks with jQuery.

And if you think acces­si­bility is beyond your grasp, time to think again!

Creativity, Design and Interaction with HTML5 and CSS3

Using up to the minute tech­nologies for interface design

Presenter: Dan Rubin

HTML5 and CSS3 are the newest stars of the web: the corner­stones of progressive enhancement, the future of online video, the easiest way to build web appli­ca­tions for desktop and mobile devices, and a bril­liant foun­dation upon which we can add complex inter­action and animation layers with javascript and Canvas; happily — thanks to much-​​improved browser support — we can now use them. In this session, Dan Rubin will show you who’s already taking advantage of these latest addi­tions to our toolbox, what this means for interface designers, and how you can bring the same tech­niques to your projects.

Flogging Design – Best Practice in Online Shop Design

Shopfront show­manship, retail recom­men­da­tions and more

Presenter: Matt Balara

Consid­ering how many busi­nesses depend upon the web for their income, it’s shocking how poorly designed most shops are. Not only aesthet­i­cally, but also as far as ease of use, retail psychology and user expe­rience are concerned. How can we design better shops? If customers enjoy shopping more, won’t our clients earn more? Can forms be fun? What’s the psychology behind online purchases? How can online and offline buying expe­ri­ences be harmonised? Matt Balara will share some of his 15 years of expe­rience designing web sites, the vast majority of which have sold some­thing or other.

Designing interactions using enriched storytelling

Create compelling user expe­ri­ences that go one step further

Presenter: Darren Menachemson

Story­telling is a powerful way of designing and iter­ating user expe­ri­ences. Used well, it shapes the design by focusing the design team on the user’s context and needs, rather than on a “checklist” of require­ments, func­tions and UIs.

Enriched story­telling takes this one step further, linking up the func­tional and UI design of a website (or, really of any interface) to the desired user expe­rience and to the under­lying business architecture.

The talk will demon­strate three very prac­tical methods for creating and commu­ni­cating enriched stories to inform the devel­opment of complex web inter­ac­tions. It will walk through example arti­facts, and the design process for creating them.

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