Web Directions South 2012

Sydney, October 16–19

October 18+19 — Web Directions South:

  1. Design Track
  2. Development Track
  3. Startup Track
  4. Big Picture Track
  5. Keynotes

Design

Samantha Thebridge

Developers will design: let’s make them amazing at it

Photo of Samantha Thebridge

Samantha has been designing complex web apps since 1998. She’s been an interaction and visual interface designer for online booking systems and shopping sites for Qantas, Panasonic, Telstra, YHA and BigPond for companies like Red Square, Boomworks, Wax and now Atlassian. Over time, Samantha’s roles have become increasingly more software-development-centric, and her exploration of the minds of software engineers is a life-long hobby. Now she’s designing software for software engineers and splashing about in a whirlpool of meta.

He who is closest to trunk will inevitably take matters into his own hands.

Any designer working with software engineers has run into the situation where a developer suddenly puts on a design hat. There are numerous valid reasons why this happens. It can go horribly wrong, but you can make it go brilliantly.

At Atlassian, the developers outnumber the design team 25–1. We have a strong Developer on Testing initiative and a famous Developer on Support rotation. Both programs make us stronger in the areas of QA and support.

To truly become a design led organization, we asked ourselves: why not Developer on Design?

There were two possible outcomes of introducing this as a developer rotation: a) the devs would realise that interaction design is often incredibly gnarly and leave us to it, or b) we’d discover some formidable and natural design talent from within our development team. We considered both outcomes a victory, and that is exactly what we got.

In this talk I will show you:

  • The two-week program that we wrote for the Developer on Design secondment, and walk you through how to write your own program.
  • How we selected our candidates, and more importantly: why we turned others down.
  • A blow-by-blow of the rotation itself: How we condensed a tertiary design education into a fortnight. What did we leave in? What did we leave out?
  • How it scaled: From short workshops to intensive month-long secondments on the design team where they actually had to do design work on their own product.
  • The tools: Which wireframing and high-fidelity design software we taught them and which ones they found easiest to learn.
  • What WE learned from our developers.

Jay Rogers

Avoid opinionitis

Photo of Jay Rogers

Jay has a great gig as an interaction designer at Atlassian Software in Sydney, building software in unusually fun ways. He’s been designing and building interactive products since 1996, moving from web design to UI design, and finally to designing processes and team experiences.

His current focus is web application software development and building great software design teams.
With humble antecedents as nightshift manager at a tex-mex restaurant in Austin, Jay retains a strong service philosophy in his design practice. Great software should anticipate needs, exceed expectations, and mix a really nice margarita. Exactly that.

Opinionitis

Pronunciation: \ə-ˈpin-yən-ˈī-təs\
Function: noun
Date: 2007

1: A dangerous syndrome where personal preference, unverified statements, and misconceptions direct the approach and deliverables of a product team, often resulting in products with no connection to reality. Opinionitis can exist for years in a near-dormant state, but then flare up into epidemic proportions, triggering symptomatic outbreaks in nearly everyone who comes into contact. Opinionitis can destroy teams, products, and professional relationships. Avoid at all costs.

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This talk is a public service announcement about how Opinionitis can kill in-house and agency product teams. It looks at the root causes of opinionitis and addresses the sort of hygienic practices which can help a team remain uninfected.

For those teams already suffering Opinionitis, the talk offers consolation, but also identifies mutations of the syndrome that may be less easy to identify.

Finally, for teams on the deathbed (or the living dead), there are a set of radical triage methods to attempt to breathe life into the corpse.

Attendees will be given a 4-part course in outbreak identification, treatment & triage, quarantine, and proper disposal methods for bodies. There will be 2 exams where participants will be asked to assess an opinionitis situation and propose a successful response. Opinionitis Management certificates will be awarded on the spot.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Getting unstuck: content strategy for the future

Photo of Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an independent content strategist, writer, and rabble-rouser based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She got this way after stints as a journalist, copywriter, and web writer, during which she became increasingly dissatisfied with the chaos typically found in web content projects. In 2008, she launched a content strategy practice at her past agency, and started working closely with IA and UX teams to build a better way forward.

Today Sara focuses on designing systems for flexible, adaptable, future-friendly content, with a heavy interest in making content mobile-ready. When she’s not consulting with clients or partnering with agencies, she’s putting the finishing touches on her first book, Content Everywhere, with Rosenfeld Media; serving as Editor in Chief of A List Apart; contributing to publications like Contents Magazine; and speaking about content strategy, user experience, and related topics at conferences worldwide. You can read her blog at sarawb.com.

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a web that’s more flexible, future-friendly, and ready for unknowns. There’s only one little flaw: our content is stuck in the past. Locked into inflexible pages and documents, our content is far from ready for today’s world of apps, APIs, read-later services, and responsive sites—much less for the coming one, where the web is embedded in everything from autos to appliances.

We can’t keep creating more content for each of these new devices and channels. We’d go nuts trying to manage and maintain all of it. Instead, we need content that does more for us: Content that can travel and shift while keeping its meaning and message intact. Content that’s trim, focused, and clear—for mobile users and for everyone else, too. Content that matters, wherever it’s being consumed.

Mark Boulton

Adapting to responsive design

Photo of Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton is a graphic designer living in South Wales, UK with his wife and two daughters. He runs a small design studio, Mark Boulton Design, working with clients such as ESPN, CERN, Al Jazeera and Drupal. In the past, he worked for the BBC and Agency.com, designing experiences for all manner of clients and people across the world. He also runs a small publishing imprint, Five Simple Steps, and a tool for making grids for web; Gridset.

Responsive design involves more than just fluid grids and media queries. The move to adaptive web sites touches every part of an organisation: from content needs and content management, to editorial workflows and project management. The way we design and build web sites is changing, but the way we write, manage, and evolve our websites needs to change, too. Mark will share his thoughts and experience of how adopting responsive web design practices needs to begin in the the boardroom, rather than the developer’s office.

Josh Clark

Buttons are a Hack

Photo of Josh Clark

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s author of “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” (O’Reilly, 2010) and “Best iPhone Apps” (O’Reilly, 2009). Josh’s outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services, training, and product invention workshops to help creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a management consultant at Monitor Group in Cambridge, Mass, and before that, a producer of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the uberpopular “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)

Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those familiar desktop widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn to craft touchscreen interfaces that effortlessly teach users new gesture vocabularies. The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark (author of “Tapworthy”) mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.

Craig Sharkie

Responding to Responsive Design

Photo of Craig Sharkie

Craig has been a regular at Web Directions South since before it was Web Directions South. He’s moved from the audience, through moderation, and on to being a presenter.

Along the way he’s released the second edition of his book with Earle Castledine, jQuery: Novice to Ninja, and has toured the East Coast capitals delivering HTML5 workshops. That’s all of course when he wasn’t founding SydJS and organising monthly events for 100 or so of Sydney’s keenest JavaScript programmers. All the while he’s been working at some great companies, with even greater people.

No matter what you do, your design is going to be responsive. Even if your response is to ignore Responsive Design, that’s still a response.

We’ll look at a range of techniques and attitudes – and even an application or two – that will make simply ignoring Responsive Design harder than embracing it.

From the server to Media Queries and beyond we’ll look at taking the big R from Responsive and making at a big ahhhh!

It’s not about Mobile. It’s not about the Desktop. It’s about time we moved beyond 2.0.