Tag : design and user experience

Game design has dealt with a lot of the interaction issues that designer-developers are just beginning to face today. Ideas like flow, easter eggs, and feature discovery have been used and refined for years by game designers to achieve some of the same user experiences web designers are pursuing now.

This session looks to games and other related fields for both inspiration and practical strategies for improving web design.

Speakers :
-- Alice Taylor
-- Sampo Karjalainen

In current generation of makers and consumers, the attitudes and trends we see in Web 2.0 aren't limited to the online space.

Using projects by Schulze & Webb and others, I'll show how ideas such as community, connectedness and creativity can manifest in physical products - particularly in the area of consumer electronics - and how they form a design approach applicable off the Web and on it.

There is a commonly held belief that Agile Methods and User Centred Design do not play nicely together. On the contrary, Agile and UCD have much to offer each other. Each can learn and benefit from the other, and work together as a robust design and development methodology.

Including an introduction to the principles and practices of Agile Methodologies, this presentation explores the opportunities for UCD in an Agile environment, how designers can shape Agile to better support their work, and what designers can learn from Agile methods.

Once we progress from the user-centered design model to community-centered design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding community design.

This presentation collects the key features and interactions that a successful community should display in order to empower its users and facilitate conversation between its members.

The transition of user's role from consumer to producer requires that those who produce online and offline services not only to understand the process by which the conversation happens but also which interface mechanisms and flows should be present in their interfaces.

This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.

Tagging represents a new type of metadata used to organize information. As with all types of metadata, there are advantages and disadvantages to tagging. Also keep in mind that metadata is independent of its UI representation, and that there are many potential ways to leverage tags in an interface. Ultimately, to bring value to your business, people must be able to efficiently navigate your tagging system.

In spite of the dearth of design guidelines at the moment, you must nonetheless understand the broader context of tagging in order to create an effective system.

This presentation offers practical design recommendations around three key steps in the tagging process, with many examples to illustrate each point:
1. Creating tags: In general, encourage tagging and lower barriers to adding useful tags. Make recommendations to help people find the right words to use, allow for tag forms to resemble natural language, and avoid space-separated tagging.
2. Navigating your own tags: People tag so they can return to a resource later. The system must allow people to effectively manage their own tags, including editing, deleting, filtering, sorting, and searching them. The ability to combine tags can also help people find the resources they are looking for quicker.
3. Navigating tags from other users: Finally, a social system let's users share resources via tags. Here, adaptive navigation proves to be helpful, such as with enhanced tag clouds. Expose other types of metadata where appropriate as well, and add structure to tag menus. And because of the social aspect of tagging, consider how to provide rich linking to other members of the tagging community.

Given that the web is '95% Typography', why is most typography on the web so poor? For so long now, designers and developers have taken little time to learn the subtlety of good typographic design. But don’t worry, it’s not a black art; you just need to follow a few rules.

This presentation will take you through Five Simple Steps to improve your typography; type anatomy, types of typeface, choosing typefaces, size, space and weight, and basic typesetting.

Demands on the mobile phone to become the omni-potent mobile computer mean that successful design for mobility needs to first and foremost understand people. People are more than numbers. They are mobile beings by nature.

When designing for mobility we must immerse ourselves in routine, the movement of crowds and the beauty and simplicity of casual computing.

Navigation patterns are changing. Objects are increasingly reactive to context and the new UIs are becoming services in themselves. The web is more sociable — how can mobility be more sociable?

Successful cross-platform design must understand and leverage all of the above.

Kwame will talk about new processes that designers need to understand in order to innovate within mobility.

They're small, they're simple, and they're showing up everywhere. Find out just how easy it is for you to start publishing with microformats and add to the semantic richness of the Web right now.

It's been several years since web standards were championed by designers and developers alike. But even now, the majority of web sites and web services aren't standards-compliant or fully accessible.

If you want your content or services searched and consumed by millions of web and mobile users, designing and developing with standards isn't an option - it's a necessity.

Learn how to implement standards across browsers, platforms and devices, and hear from experts on how semantics help web sites, search engines, and ultimately, people.

Design patterns for brochureware and editorial sites are well-established. In fact, they’re so simple and formulaic that even waterfall development processes can churn them out.

A producer has an idea, a designer mocks it up in Photoshop and then client-side types and engineers go all agile on its ass. But what happens when you’re pushing into web apps or social media? What happens when an absence of hierarchy makes left-hand navigation redundant? What do you do when design practice blurs into URLs and data structures, and where your service breaks the frame of the browser and start appearing in hardware, in desktop applications or on other people’s sites?

In this session, Tom will talk about new literacies that designers need to build things that are native to a web of data, the blurring and interplay between designers and developers and what it means to rapidly iterate in small multi-disciplinary teams to find the heart and soul of a new concept.

Good design is much more than good looks: it translates what your users really need into the product they’ll want to use and love. For many startups however, “design" remains a mystery and an expensive art: they often think that they don’t have the time, money or expertise while they underestimate the impact that good design would have on their product. But going through the process doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated - and good design always starts simple.

This session will cover the essentials of interaction design methods and specific adaptations that have proven successful at several tight-ship startups: how to go from research through defining your users and iterative validation, all the way to launch and continuous improvement - while always keeping it simple, quick and cheap. Your users will love it and your release schedule, too.

The 2.0 web world is more than just embedded technology - it is a philosophy.

Companies who embrace this thinking are more flexible, agile, and innovative in their strategy and approach, but moving in this direction means rethinking structure, management style, workflow, and culture.

How teams are structured, educated, and implemented in your organization is key. Are you a design firm, individual freelancer, or corporation trying to migrate past 'old-school' thinking and move yourself, management, or team into a more progressive era?

Come hear how others have made innovation a priority - through carefully guided leadership and an environment that fosters creative thinking and collaboration.

Speakers :
-- Leisa Reichelt
-- Fred Oliveira
-- Matt Patterson