Workshops | Web Directions South 2011

Workshops

Four great full day workshops to choose from

October 11 Workshops

• Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis — CSS3: practical, beautiful, usable
• Stephen P. Anderson — Seductive interaction design

October 12 Workshops

• Relly Annett-Baker — A practical guide to creating web content
• Damon Oehlman — Building web and native mobile apps

CSS3: Practical, Beautiful, Usable

Presenter: Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

Venue: Masonic Centre, Sydney

Date: Tuesday October 11th 2011, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Artists and designers, there’s a new way to paint! CSS3 is the latest and greatest and the cool kids are already using it. But there’s new syntax to memorize and not all browsers are equally capable of rendering the effects you create. How will your workflow change? What are the benefits of this evolved web standard for development time, SEO, accessibility and site performance? What can you use on the web and in mobile development right now? Where should you wait?

In this session you’ll learn about progressive design principles, the new capabilities of CSS, time-saving tools to aid as you visually write the code, as well as a variety of methods to tame incapable browsers when it’s absolutely necessary. Learn CSS3 tricks and techniques—all based on the experience of a real-world front-end developer. Welcome to the next generation of web design!

What you’ll learn:

• Which parts of CSS3 can we use now?
• Finding the balance: progressive enhancement versus regressive enhancement
• Take advantage of powerful new selectors
• Enjoy color and transparency flexibility
• Use real fonts on the web
• Create new text effects
• Replace shadows, images, and gradients with CSS
• Experiment with new background and border effects
• Explore CSS for movement—animations and transitions
• Master adaptive layouts and media queries
• Examine tools for creating CSS3 effects

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for anyone with an interest in seeing what you can do with CSS3, and how you can incorporate it to speed your workflow and add zest to your web pages that your clients will love. No knowledge of CSS3 is required, although you should be familiar with basic CSS syntax and its application. Web designers and front end engineers looking to become CSS3 pros, this is the workshop for you!

About Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DW CS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-monthly column for Web Designer Magazine, train corporate web departments, and speak at numerous conferences. Stephanie is the WaSP liaison to Adobe Systems, working with product managers to ensure the output of its web products continues to move toward today’s web standards. An admitted workaholic who rarely leaves the office, she frequently escapes to talk to the people inside her computer via Twitter. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Seductive Interaction Design

Presenter: Stephen P Anderson

Venue: Masonic Centre, Sydney

Date: Tuesday October 11 2011, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Pricing: $449 (conference attendees) $549 (standard)

How can we design interactions that encourage specific behaviors?

As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from psychology.

In this hands on workshop, Stephen P. Anderson (Poet Painter) will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

What will be covered?

We’ll look at ways to:

• ease users into your application’s features
• integrate behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric into your design process
• leverage your users’ natural curiosity and playfulness to bring your design to the next level

Throughout the day you will learn dozens of insights from psychology and how they can be applied to Web design. Through and mix of practical examples and group activities, you will learn:

• why a clear product story is critical to your product’s success
• how visual imagery affects perception, attention and responses
• how language shapes our understanding and decision making
• ways to apply feedback loops and personal informatics to create a performance-based game
• how even serious business apps can benefit from being more playful and gamelike
• why it’s dangerous to mix intrinsic motivation with external rewards (and the latest findings on motivation)

…and other things to consider if you wish to create more seductive interactions.

Best of all, attendees will be given a free copy of the Mental Notes card deck, which pulls together 52 of the best heuristics, biases, principles and patterns from a variety of human centered disciplines. Groups will use this brainstorming tool to respond to various design challenges created specifically for this workshop.

Regardless of your current project, the principles taught here can be applied universally. You will walk away inspired, and armed with creative ways to apply different insights into human behavior to the design of your web sites and applications.

About Stephen P Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playful and effective online experiences. He’s currently writing a book about “seductive interactions” that will be published by New Riders in 2011.

A practical guide to creating web content

Presenter: Relly Annett-Baker

Venue: Masonic Centre, Sydney

Date: Wednesday October 12th 2011, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Based on the forthcoming book of the same name, this workshop is a day long bootcamp in getting you from a blank page to a confident content wrangler.

We will be working on a real website, your website in fact, as we look at how we can find out what content you already have, how to improve it and what we can do next. A personal site or small business site, such as a blog or portfolio, is perfect for this and I honestly don’t mind if you’ve never written a word or if you have an archive of 500 articles.

Along the way we will discuss working with clients and how you can help them create good content on time and on budget, what makes good content work, and when to use audio, visuals or text to convey information and narrative.

We will cover auditing content, creating tools such as styleguides, page tables and content plans, measuring and adjusting content and simple copywriting techniques, that apply to projects big and small. You will be able to take what you have learnt and executed on this small scale and apply it to much bigger things with confidence.

Who is this workshop for?

This intensive hands-on day is perfect for designers, developers and anyone who wants to know how to create web content for clients and for themselves.

About Relly Annett-Baker

Relly Annett-​​Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Supernice Studio, she is employed as live-​​in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again.

Building web and native mobile apps for iOS, Android and more with HTML5

Presenter: Damon Oehlman

Venue: Masonic Centre, Sydney

Date: Wednesday October 12th 2011, 9.00am to 5.00pm

As mobile, tablet and other platforms proliferate, the demand for native apps, as well as mobile and tablet optimised web sites and apps has grown dramatically.

With web technologies, developers can have their cake and eat it too, developing sophisticated native mobile and tablet apps, as well as mobile and tablet optimized web sites and apps using the technologies they already know well — HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Because there is no “one size fits all” approach to mobile development, we will walk through a few of the cross-platform mobile approaches that developers and designers can take to build mobile apps and sites.

If you are a web designer or developer comfortable with HTML and CSS, and you know your way around JavaScript, then you’ll be more than equipped to participate. In advance of the workshop, you might find it useful to brush up on your jQuery skills as they will definitely come in handy.

What will we cover

• Mobile Web Design Fundamentals
• UI Frameworks Overview
• • Sencha Touch
  • jQuery Mobile
  • jQTouch
  • Jo
• jQuery Mobile Deep Dive
• Going Native with Phonegap
• Going Native with Appcelerator
• Offline Mobile Apps and Synchronization
• Handling Touch Events
• Accessing Native Device Capabilities

About Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehlman is an experienced web and mobile applications developer. He has worked with small and large companies to develop software solutions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first technical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon currently runs his own software development and consulting firm Sidelab, which specializes in cross-platform mobile solutions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Distractable offers a mix of articles, tutorials and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, husband and one day dreams of owning his own underground lair.

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