Design Track | Web Directions USA

Design Track

Dan Rubin gets creative with CSS3 and HTML5; Juliette Melton runs effective remote research; Aaron Walter gets all emotional about design; Esther Derby introduces agile to UI; Ryan Freitas balances data-driven and genius design; Zoe Mickley Gillenwater streamlines sites with CSS3; Jason Cranford Teague celebrates the year of web typography and Relly Annett-Baker is telling tales.

Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design

Bow down to the machine no longer!

Presenter: Aarron Walter

Humans, though cute and cuddly, are not without their flaws, which makes designing for them a challenge. By understanding how the wet, mushy processor works in these hairy little devils, you can design interfaces and web experiences that will have them hopelessly devoted to your brand.

In this talk, Aarron Walter will introduce you to the emotional usability principle – a design axiom that identifies a strong connection between human emotion and perceived usability. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn practical interface design techniques that will make your websites and applications more engaging to the humans they serve.

I’m Telling Tales

Creating helpful content for profit and pleasure

Presenter: Relly Annett-Baker

Humans are drawn to narrative we can engage with and we may have just found the perfect medium for this sort of narrative interaction in the internet. Every site, app or connection is full of the possibility of story – yes, even yours. Especially yours. But is your site making your user the principle character? Or are they just the forgotten redshirt? And who’s writing the script?

In this talk, Relly will show you how narrative runs as deep through websites as it does through your favourite TV dramas, video games, comic books or musicals, and explain how you can write decent help for your users, define personality for your site and create documents to support everyone involved in creating that experience. These methods will allow your team to work together to create a site rich in personality and tell the story of your brand, right from the navigational opening set-piece on the homepage to the microcopy that is the closing curtain on a successful transaction.

Effective and Efficient Design with CSS3

Go beyond the skin deep with CSS3

Presenter: Zoe Mickley Gillenwater

Since many pieces of CSS3 are now supported in the majority of browsers, web sites are popping up all over the place that feature rounded corners (ooh), drop shadows (ahh), and unique embedded fonts (hooray!). But CSS3 can do more than add visual richness to your sites (though it’s quite good at that). Using robust, forward-thinking CSS3 techniques in place of the old standbys can have tangible benefits for your business and users. Powerful new selectors and image-free visual effects can streamline your sites and improve their speed. Media queries can make your sites more adaptable and usable on the wide variety of browser configurations and user agents in use today, including mobile devices like iPhone, Android, and iPad. CSS3 is changing how we design and develop web sites, allowing us to quickly and easily create and maintain highly efficient and adaptable sites that are a pleasure to use. You’ll learn practical yet progressive examples of the most beneficial CSS3 techniques to put to use in your pages today.

Balancing Data-Driven & ‘Genius’ Design

When and how to use data in design

Presenter: Ryan Freitas

Building compelling consumer experiences is often described as being more art than science. Increasingly, those who build them are under pressure to validate their design decisions with data. What is the appropriate role of quantitative and quantitative data when designing for interaction? What are the most effective ways to gather and interpret data that effectively improves the quality of the consumer experience? Ryan Freitas will tackle these and other issues while discussing the importance of integrating data-based iteration into your heuristics-driven design process.

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.

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.

Agile Meets UI

How to incorporate UI & UX into an Agile process

Presenter: Esther Derby

Agile teams work in short iterations and deliver working software—that means coded, tested, documented, and if the customer decides the time is right, ready to go out the door. Teams work on features in tiny slices based on prioritized user stories, avoiding big up front design. But without a design phase, where does UX and UI fit?

Esther will share strategies for evolving UI design as the software grows, keeping UI designers in the loop and helping everyone on the team be a better designer (cause they think already are).

2010: The Year of Web Typography

Beautiful type on the web has come of age

Presenter: Jason Cranford Teague

For almost 15 years, Web designers have had a list of 10 “Core Web fonts” to choose from. Many ask, “Why can’t I just download a font file from my Web server the same way I can an image?” Well, actually, you can. The verbiage for font linking is a little different than images, but the syntax for Webfont linking has been around for over 10 years as a part of the CSS standard. Web typography expert Jason Cranford Teague shows you how to apply the principles of fluid typography, to choose, find and use Webfonts and create your unique typographic voice. Come and find out why 2010 is going to be the year of Web typography.

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