Web Design Blog

First I would like to say thank you to the Web Directions Team for mentioning my post here on xemion.com yesterday about the speakers at the conference, it was a very nice gesture. Hopefully no one was able to read it and see all the spelling and grammar errors.

Secondly, I would like to tell you about the speakers today.

First speaker this morning was Indi Young of Adaptive Path speaking about Innovation and how it is overrated.  Young made three points at first. One is that currently we have hit a wall with innovation. Saying that currently we now are innovating current products when it fact we should be working on completely new products that can be innovative.

She then went on to say some of the most important things you need to remember when you come up with an idea, is that you have to think about the fact you still need to be able to manufacture, deliver and convince people to buy you innovative idea. Which of course can make innovation very expensive.

The one thing that stuck out in her talk was that if you focus on people rather than the product you will succeed with time. This I thought was excellent advice and wished she hadn’t just told everyone!

Next me and all my bags (purse, laptop and the prize I had received for having my blog post mentioned - you visualize this not being easy  right?) over to “The Future of Web Interfaces” with Cameron Adams. First I must say Cameron was a very well spoken individual, very easy to understand and he made sense!

Cameron chatted about the fact that currently users have a multitude of platforms, screen resolutions and ways of viewing our content. And that is what makes our job difficult. He stated, “each different person has a different view and they all want to do something different”.

He then went on to talk about dynamic interfaces. Stated that there are really two types. Developer driven interfaces and user driven interfaces. We discussed the pros and cons of each. The developer driven interface needs a deep understanding of what your users want. The user driven interface is something that is coming soon and is already in beta at BBC. View the site here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/.

Cameron stated users are like information omnivores and they are getting more demanding. Someone in the audience brought up an excellent question, with user driven interfaces, how do we approach the customer service  aspect which these new interfaces.

Now off to, Information Visualization as a Medium with Erin Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. Stamen talked mainly about maps in which you think would be boring. But surprise, surprise it wasn’t.

He showed different examples of where his company has used live data and compiled it and displayed it as a usable easy to read map. One of his projects were cabspotting.org which traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. And Oakland Crime Spotting which is a map of crime in the Oakland Area.

On to Anil Dash with Putting Social Media to Work. Anil Dash is the Vice President of Six Apart. His talk was of particular interest as he talked about business cases and how to show the CEOs and CFOs of your company why they should be using social media.

Social Media is changing the way people communicate and larger business’ are having a hard time adapting to this change. He stated the main real why an IT manager would automatically say no to a new project is budget, real estate, time and resources. He also mentioned that when presenting the business case the technology we propose we need to make sure it is safe, reliable, scalable, measurable and manageable.

An easy way to over come this is point to current success with the technology and tie it to where others are failing.

The How and Why: UI Case Studies  with Daniel Burka was my next stop. Daniel Burka is a partner at silverorange and is one of the Digg team. And Daniel is from Prince Edward Island - a fellow Maritimer….

Daniel talked about three different UI Cases. The digg story, digg comments and pownce -original design. He walked us thru each of the steps and talked about why and what the reactions were. In the end we were given some useful insight on how to deal with these types of projects. Overall it was a very interesting, speech.