Web Design Blog

This morning I was off to the Web Directions North conference held at the Hyatt here in downtown Vancouver. The Web Directions conference was started back in 2004 in Sydney, Australia. In the four years since the conference has begun much has changed. Some of the topics covered in the past were web standards,  valid HTML, CSS.

Jeffery Zeldman was the opening keynote today and his topic was titled: Return of the Web Standards King. Jeffery’s speech was one of the speech’s I most enjoyed. He is an very animated speaker and made it interesting and easy to listen. Jeffery Zeldman is the brains behind A List Apart. He also is an author.

Jeffery talked about web standards - what a surprise. He told us that originally when he began the Web Standards Project, the designers and developers were not creating better sites they were actually creating more versions of sites. Simply because no of the browsers were standards were complainant. So designers were creating sites using browser detection and once the browser was detected it would send the user to a website designed specifically for that browser. His speech was full of some of the history of the web. Which I found very interesting.

I also had the opportunity to here  Josh Williams give his speech on Bedroom to Boardroom. Josh is the founder and CEO of Firewheel Design, Blinksale, and Icon Buffet.

Josh spoke about the process he went thru going frm having a boss, to being a freelancer, to assembling a team and starting a company. Josh also chatted about how he ended up moving from a top notch design firm in Texas to product development.

Right before lunch there was one more session with, Tara Hunt titled, Government  2.0: Architecting  for Collaboration. This was another great speech in which I thoroughly enjoyed. Tara spoke from the perspective of the user, not the Government. She spoke abou the difficulties in budget and resources that many of the government agencies have.

One project she mentioned which sparked my interest was the CalTrain project. In short the Caltrain project is where developers took note of the horrible schedule that CalTrain website had. The developers then took the schedule and create an easy to navigate map. Which explains where the trains run, what services each stop has and when the next trains are coming. You can view the iamcaltrain.com website yourself.

She then went on to speak about how regular people are getting together and helping the government understand the technologies and what they can do with the data they so secretly guard now. I was surprised to find out something like this was in my back yard titled Transit Camp Vancouver - visit the website to learn all about the great collaboration that is happening to help the web.

After lunch, I was able to hear “Plays well with others” with Brian Oberkirch. Who is a marketing consultant focused on social media.

Brian spoke about all the different social media sites  and having different logins and how we should be using or working on new services in which we can combine all our profile data and friend lists’. To make life easier for ourselves. He states, “The social network fatigue users feel the  and inefficiencies of multiple social apps. He showed on some examples of projects which are currently developing way to begin to do it.

Warren at Techvibes.com put it perfectly when he blogged,”Brian  said the technology, in applications like OpenID, oAuth already widely available now, while the Creative Commonsmovement helps to propagate ideas of openness and sharing.”

From there it was on to Jared Spool, whom I must say was one of the most animated speakers. Which was great for me as I was starting to tire. He kept me engaged and listening. Jared spoke about what makes a design seem intuitive.

He started by explain that in technically a design can’t be intuitive. But that’s his short cut to explaining it. He talked about what not being intuitive meant and he stated, “Not intuitive is when users don’t know what to do” this usually leads them to become frustrated.

He also spoke about the “Knowledge Gap” which is the point between what users know before ( from their past experiences ) and what users need to know to either use the website or application. He explains that this is where we start designing and that the is where design helps the user by educating them - without them knowing  and they reach the point where the user knows how to use the application. An unititative application would not each this point. Where an initiative design would make this easy.

And last was Gina Trapani creator of A better Gmail and create or Lifehacker.com. She explained what a better Gmail was - as I was unfamiliar and some of the difficulties she encountered and how she overcame them.

All in first day was a good one!

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