Session Detail

Keynote: Selling Design

Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder/Executive Creative Director, Happy Cog

Web design has been a profession for over a dozen years, yet nothing is known, statistically, about its practitioners. Who are we? How and with whom do we work? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? And just how well does this gig pay, anyway? To find out, A List Apart magazine created the first web design survey, and over 32,000 readers answered its 36 questions. Months of data crunching later, a true picture of web design as a profession has begun to emerge. A List Apart's publisher (and the father of modern Web design) Jeffrey Zeldman shares the secrets of the survey -- and ponders the questions it raises.

General Session: What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?

Jared Spool, Founding Partner, User Interface Engineering

Everyone wants an "intuitive" interface: users, designers, and content publishers. But building them is hard. To build an "intuitive" interface, a designer has to do two things: take complete advantage of what users already know, so what they see is completely familiar to them; and make the act of learning anything new completely imperceptible. If the interface requires users to realize they are learning something, the "intuitive" label disappears instantly. Learn the two types of knowledge -- tool knowledge and domain knowledge -- that users need to complete their tasks, and see case studies of what successful teams are doing to create user experiences that delight.

General Session: More "Wow," Please

Dan Cederholm, Founder, SimpleBits

We hear it all the time from clients and bosses: "More 'wow,' please." While working with clients, bosses, and teams, it quickly becomes clear that "our" Web can be very different from "their" Web -- and that our definitions of "wow" can be quite different from theirs. In this session, Dan Cederholm focuses on what "wow" means to him when designing for the web. What are the most important elements to focus on when creating interfaces that are compelling, readable, adaptable, and reusable? Take a journey into the worlds of typography, iconography, microformats, and more, and learn how to wow the citizens of the web by caring about the details that matter most.

Ajax Frameworks & Design Patterns Survey

Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company

Ajax and other Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies are fast becoming one of the most in-demand skill sets for Web developers, Web designers and other Web professionals. This session will be an in-depth, practical tour of the latest Ajax frameworks — their features, strengths and weaknesses to help today's Web professionals understand better how to begin to choose and then use one of the Ajax frameworks. The session also provides a tour of Ajax design patterns' emerging story, as well as the most popular design elements in Ajax applications today. Using the "design patterns" metaphor of Christopher Alexander — i.e., "common, recurring problems" — we will examine Display Manipulation, Web Remoting, Dynamic Behavior, Web Services and Performance Optimization, among other popular Ajax design patterns.

Strategies and Techniques for Web Mashups

Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company

Can you really build a business model based on mashups? What are some of the current best practices? What are some of the pitfalls encountered by those who have tried to build a business model based on a mashup product? This management-level session will provide a tour of current trends in mashups to find out who's doing what in the mashup space, as well as the leading mashup tools for the enterprise. The session also includes a discussion of monetization strategies behind mashups and provides real-world information about how a business model can be built. Presented by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Best Practices for Social Web Design

Joshua Porter, Principal, Bokardo Design

Time was when you could build a web site indented for use by an individual. No longer. Software is used by groups of people for work and for play. As a result, designing web sites and applications has become another degree harder, as our focus is now on the experience the many instead of the one.

Eric Meyer on CSS: From Azimuth to Z-Index, Parts I-III

Eric A. Meyer, Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting

Join one of the great minds in CSS for a three-hour tour of the basics, the back alleys, and the big ideas in today's state of the CSS art. Eric will describe the state of CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 -- learn where things are headed. Get the scoop on advanced selectors and other Internet Explorer 7 CSS goodies. See how to create rounded corners (painlessly) and implement other design elements. Find out how (and how not) to zero out browser defaults and start with a blank slate. And learn the best ways to go from design comp to final code. In addition to code (and lots of it), there will be plenty of time for Q&A during this workshop, so come prepared to ask about the biggest obstacles you've hit and to get more depth on topics that confuse you. No question is too simple or too complex!

Writing the User Interface

Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder/Executive Creative Director, Happy Cog

Drop-shadows don’t fill shopping carts. Aside from a few buttons and arrows, nearly all of the work of a user interface is performed by words. Yet most designers don’t question the text their clients dump on them, and most budgets don’t cover editing and writing. Learn how word choice can drastically improve design, branding, and usability—and how to edit web content effectively, even if you aren't a writer.

Deconstructing... You!

Panel: Jim Heid, WDW Conference Chair, Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular, and Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Happy Cog

Top Web designers join Conference Chair Jim Heid in critically evaluating several of our attendees' sites. Bring your pencil! Your site may be among the ones we examine in this always popular wrap-up session.

Your Home Page is Obsolete: Finding Your Way in Web 2.0

DL Byron, Principal, Textura Design

The Web has changed the way we socialize and do business. And Web 2.0 has changed the way we design and browse. Truth is, no one cares about your home page -- they're coming into your site directly from a search and want to get right to the content. In this session, Byron will show you how to design for findability, address a searching user's needs, and give your users the content they want.

A Blog-Oriented Architecture

DL Byron, Principal, Textura Design

Everyone knows blogging is mainstream. But did you know it's also gaining traction inside the firewall? Join us for a case study discussion of Textura Design's work with Boeing, Intel, and other Fortune 100 companies. See how organizations of all sizes are using internal blogging as a conversation tool, and learn how standards and technologies have made intranet user experiences richer. Byron will demonstrate a blog-oriented approach to intranets, blortals (blog + portal), and distributing blog content across the enterprise.

XML in 2007: A Survey of Tools, Technologies, and Strategies

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

XML has entered the mainstream of Web design and development, and has brought along with it a host of associated tools, technologies, and design problems. In this session, all new for 2007, we'll take a survey of the XML landscape with a look at each of these categories. You'll learn about the important XML technologies you need to know, the tools that will help you work with them, and some guidelines on designing and developing with XML data.

Dynamic User Interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and the DOM

Joe Marini, Group Product Manager, VSIP, Microsoft

Joe Marini is back for 2007 with a set of updated and all-new examples of how you can build responsive, dynamic, interactive user interfaces and web page features using a pinch of CSS, a dash of JavaScript, and a smattering of DOM. In this session, you'll see how to give your web pages automatic features like adaptive layout, data filtering, and content navigation.
You'll also see how to make forms more usable and how to write your script so that these features gracefully degrade when JavaScript is disabled.

Second Life: Business Boom, Bust, or Both?

Steve Mulder, Molecular, Inc.

It's 3D, it's buzz-worthy, and it could be the next-generation Internet. But is Second Life good for business? A growing number of companies think so. How are organizations using virtual worlds like Second Life for marketing, product development, ecommerce, customer service, and more? Hop aboard this entertaining tour of Second Life as we demystify what's actually happening in the metaverse. We'll uncover what's working and not working for businesses that are experimenting in the Internet's latest Wild West.

Designing for ROI

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Few organizations have a bottomless web design budget. That means few designers have the luxury of leisurely experimenting with web page design variations – they're tasked with producing a winning solution ASAP. If this sounds like you or your organization, this session is for you.

Learn how to prioritize your design efforts by identifying the elements with the greatest impact on Web page effectiveness. In a practical, how-to approach to design, we'll discuss the most important concepts and elements to address for effective landing pages, home pages, category pages, product pages, forms, shopping carts, and the checkout process. We'll share guidelines, show case studies, and look at current examples to illustrate what works -- and why. When it's your job to make your site beautiful and profitable, you'll want to start here.

Designing for Discoverability

Steve Mulder, Principal Consultant, User Experience, Molecular
Joanne McLernon, Consultant, Molecular

When it comes to creating successful sites, half the battle is making things discoverable. If users don't notice what we want them to notice, they'll never be satisfied (and neither will we). How do people scan web pages? What makes some things on a page more visible than others? How do we make sure critical content and functionality are actually seen? Come discover practical tips and tricks for taking advantage of what we know about the human eye to make your site more effective.

Pleasing Users and Search Engines Alike: Balancing Design, Usability, and SEO

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Traditionally, Web designers were taught to focus on aesthetics. More recently, their scope has expanded to include usability and search engine optimization (SEO). Conventional wisdom says focusing on one detracts from the others. So designers often feel like they compromise – and end up with a mediocre design. But do you really have to choose? What if you could do it all?