2 posts tagged “conference”

On Friday I attended:

• Building Better HTML Emails - Mark Wyner;
• About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle - Kelly Goto;
• Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7 - Christopher Schmitt;
• Keynote: The Naked Interface - Luke Williams;
• Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution - Gene Smith;
  
• Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of Experience - Jared Spool

Building Better HTML Emails

Easily the most info-packed session I attended, the focus here wasn't what I thought it would be ("Everyone hates them, don't do it"). Instead Mark covered the topic from marketing and usability angles, ultimately making me feel good about HTML emails. He also outlined the CAN-SPAM Act, whose details I never knew.

Mark spent a solid half of his presentation going over the nuts and bolts for major mail clients, though. For instance, I learned that Yahoo! Mail actually changes your HTML tags - body becomes xbody - and in general, ensuring a consistent message is difficult. It's more difficult to test things. Also, Eudora on the Mac (hello, 7 people who use it) is apparently the worst.

He also stressed the idea of "styling" plain text emails - don't treat those folks like second class citizens.

Mark noted that designers should target the "CSS on, images off" state of mail clients. Make your stuff look good without images, in other words - good advice for emails and the web.

About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle

Definitely not what I expected. This was on the mobile track, though, so the focus was on mobile devices. The big takeway here was to consider the emotional experience in the interface. An interface must be usable, yes, but it should be emotional, useful, meet your needs, and integrate into your life. This was also the 284th speech that referenced how good iPod/iTunes are.

Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7

The only disappointing session, I left this after 20 minutes. Christopher didn't have his A-game when it came to speaking and had some technical issues (mostly with Virtual PC on the Mac.) I expected a really nice, humor-filled (given the title) look at migrating from supporting IE5/6 to IE7. Instead I got the info I wanted and a lengthy howto on making transparent PNGs work in IE5/6. Sorry, I don't care.

Here's the good info from the speech, though:

• IE7 is a security update, not really a standards one;
• CSS3 selectors, pseudo-classes, and text are nowhere to be found;
• text-shadow is not supported;
• multiple backgrounds on the same element are not supported;
• text columns are not supported (this sucks);
• auto-content generation (:before, :after) are not supported;
• PNG24 w/alpha transparency is supported (huzzah);
• :hover on block elements is supported;
• CSS2 selectors are largely implemented (about damn time).

That's really all you need to know.

The Naked Interface

Fascinating keynote from Luke Williams of frog design. Came in about 15 minutes or so late, but picked up some great conceptual notions here. Work with what your users/visitors/peeps know from growing up. For instance, if there's a wine bottle and somehow the entire bottle slices at a 45 degree angle with no liquid spilling, a clean break, etc. - that strikes the brain as weird and nonsensical and can't be trusted.

Social Metadata

Mildly interesting session. Takeaway: use the wisdom of crowds to solve IA problems. Work with tools such as moderation to suss out who is "good" and who is "bad" in your community.

Dawning of the Age of Experience

Great, great, great, great. Great. Jared Spool rocked with this keynote, mostly focusing on (duh) experience and what it encompasses. As "experience designers" one has to have a ton of talents from many disciplines, and that's hard.

Technical issues can affect one's experience. One example was his using an airline site to book a flight, and the site referenced totally incorrect airports. This made him stumble. In this case, it was a database issue that was fouling things up - so pay attention to the low-level stuff.

It would be great to mimic the buzz/evangelism around iPod (surprise!) and Netflix. Netflix basically bested Blockbuster and Wal-Mart at a new game, and the latter two never recovered. Netflix did it with a small team and no phone/in-person customer service and obviously no stores. Harnessing that kind of speed/agility and coupling it with great service worked well for them.

Ultimately we need to go beyond just designing interfaces and think about the entire experience, top to bottom. That touches so many departments... but if it's executed well, we'll have customers who are evangelists, too.

Epilogue

These have been brief synopses from my notes and lack of notes, from the conference. Expect some deeper posts on these topics starting next week or so.

I attended:

• Becoming a Professional Blogger - Matt Haughey;
• Practical Business Blogging Panel - Byron, Haughey, Baio, Powazek;
• Push, Click, Touch: The History of the Button - Bill DeRouchey;
• The New Community: How Decentralized Conversation Empowers Individuals While Creating Community Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Pocket Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois - Derek Powazek.
  

Becoming a Professional Blogger

Somehow it escaped me that Matt had quit his day job and become a full-timer, but there it was. I just didn't know. His talk was pretty good and gave me a few ideas for inspiration, including the concept of "mining" forums for blog posts. His example was an owners' forum for the Honda Ridgeline, which he recently purchased.

He did incorporate as an LLC, which is something I discussed with Ryan on Saturday in brief. He also claimed that he got lawsuit threats "once a year" which sounded scary.

Matt also went over schwag, promotional items, and discussed a lot about ads. I was encouraged to look at AdWords again because, let's face it, money is nice. Not everything though.

Practical Business Blogging Panel

Nice superstar lineup there! This was quite insightful. Ryan and I realized that DL Byron was the guy behind Clip-n-Seal, our favorite food saving device. He also did a blog for Boeing (!) and talked about the idea of getting something out there but not to just have something out there.

Lessons learned:

• Don't have your PR department write your blog.
• You can't calculate passion. This was a big one, and Dell's crappy handling of "dell hell" was the focus here.
• TypePad and Movable Type are being used to prototype sites and designs.
• Make sites more blog-friendly (working on this).
• Find people who are already blogging and tap them. Communities might not appear where you'd like them to appear, so follow them.
• Treat bloggers like journalists. Give them respect.
• TiVo totally dropped the ball on their own blog; first they allowed comments. Then they moderated them. Then they had people email comments in (!)
• A private, internal blog is the first step to a public one.

The button is the only intersection between the web and the physical world.

Buttons progressed as such:

• Novelty: doorbells and the like. "Hello". "Come here".
• Convenience: radio presets (sidebar: I was utterly fascinated by Bill's noting that if one sees 6 square buttons in a row, one assumes it's radio presets. Why 6? That's how it was in 1939) and customization of presets - really owning one's technology. Also, the phrase "push-button" becomes synonymous with "easy".
  
• The Promise of Leisure: buttons will solve domestic problems. Push-button again.
  
• Destruction: Nuclear weapons. Noted that THE BUTTON was probably the most unusable design ever.
• Provide Leisure: Buttons integrated into furniture (Tomorrowland at Disney). "Even a woman" can use complex systems controlled by buttons. And, the remote control.
• Everywhere: More buttons = better, like on UNIVAC. Also we start seeing dexterity emerge as being important here, such as in pinball games. And on games like Simon, the button is the interface.
• Metaphor
• Anything: the web, the link, the 1-Click payment button.
• Culture
• Concept
• History

There was also talk of a new electronic wallpaper in early development that would allow one's entire wall to become a button.

Good stuff. And, good website, too.

Derek Powazek's Speech With a Long Title

It was great to see him reference George Pullman, a figure integral to Chicago history. Pullman's company town is analogous to the way some sites work, but technology is kind of spreading our atoms across many sites. And ultimately, those company town sites must open themselves up and work with the decentralized fabric of the web in order to survive.

flickr was mentioned (of course!) and given props as being a company town site that still got it, and opened itself up with APIs, portable things (post your photos on your blog, RSS feeds), etc. Boing Boing was namechecked for using Technorati for its comments section. And Derek told us that people wouldn't graffiti their own "houses" (blogs), so encouraging comments that spread over the web is a good thing.

He's a great speaker, and pretty much as I figured he would be based on his online persona.