An Event Apart Seattle 2012

Monday, April 2

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Content First!

   

   Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Ed.

   The rules of design engagement are changing. You may no longer be in control of the user’s visual experience. Learn the number one job of every web designer, how to persuade clients and bosses not to subject users to dark patterns, why the days of “Best Viewed With…” are finally behind us, and how a mobile (or small screen) strategy can help you improve your content, rethink your web experience, and put the user first.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Big Type, Little Type

   

   Jon Tan, Co-Founder, FontDeck

   Web typography is growing up. Learn how to set type for advertising, headlines, or at large sizes using display or decorative typefaces, and how to set type for extended reading, information design, or at small sizes. Discover OpenType ligatures, swashes, and alternates for the web. More importantly, learn the why as well as the how of advanced web typography, with examples to leave you inspired, and techniques to help you create exquisite web typography, today.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Silo-Busting with Scenarios

   

   Kim Goodwin, Author, Designing for the Digital Age

   Perhaps the biggest cause of bad user experiences is the organizational silo; customers have to talk with three different groups to fix one problem, or use a mobile app that’s nothing like the desktop site, or deal with a retail store associate who has no idea what’s offered online. In this session, Kim will show you how effective scenarios can shift everyone’s perspective away from internal structures. You’ll learn what makes an effective scenario and what scenarios can do that use cases and user stories seldom can.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   The Five Most Dangerous Ideas

   

   Scott Berkun, Author, Confessions of a Public Speaker

   There are truths about how the world works that creatives don’t like to talk about. We get angry and frustrated when we’re not granted the power we think we deserve, but there are often good reasons the world works ‘against us.’ This session takes these ideas head on, from how power truly works, to our unavoidable dependence on salesmanship skills, so we can convert them from frustrations into practical behaviors for empowerment and achieving our dreams at work.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content

   

   Karen McGrane, Founder, Bond Art & Science

   For years, we’ve been telling designers: the web is not print. You can’t have pixel-perfect layouts. You can’t determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will “live” on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works “just like Microsoft Word”? Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won’t work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. Learn how to adapt to creating more flexible content.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   Rolling Up Our Responsive Sleeves

   

   Ethan Marcotte, Author, Responsive Web Design

   We’ve discussed at length the fundamentals of responsive design, combining fluid grids and media queries to create more flexible, device-agnostic sites. So does that mean responsive design is a magic formula that solves all our problems? Well, no. But thankfully, we didn’t get into web design because we wanted to be bored. In this session we’ll review strategies for handling trickier elements that’d make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.

8. 7:00pm–??pm

   Opening Night Party

   

   Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple

   Belltown Pub
   2322 1st Ave (between Bell St. and SR99)
   Seattle, WA 98121
   (206) 448-6210
   

   Media Temple’s opening night parties for An Event Apart are legendary. Join the speakers and hundreds of fellow attendees for great conversation, lively debate, loud music, hot snacks, and a seemingly endless stream of grown-up beverages. Kindly RSVP if you’re planning to attend so we’re sure to have enough for everyone!

Tuesday, April 3

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   The Future Is Now

   

   Eric Meyer, Author, CSS: The Definitive Guide

   There is a lot of activity happening in CSS right now, and sometimes it seems like browsers are ging seventy directions at once. Fortunately, they’re converging in some key areas; as a result, several very powerful features are already widely supported. In this fast-paced session, Eric will take a close look at new style capabilities and demonstrate how to use them to create interesting visual effects with a realtively small amount of CSS.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   A Philosophy of Restraint

   

   Simon Collison, Co-Author, CSS Mastery

   With a wealth of ideas and tools at our disposal, we often muddle our messages and complicate our code. We appreciate that less is usually more, yet stuff our sites to the bursting point, failing to be economical with what we have. We must know when to stop, and when to throw things out. We should embrace simplicity and subtlety, and exploit the invisible. Through timeless lessons and practical examples, learn how reduction and restraint can improve communication, emotion, and experience in our designs, with a philosophy applicable to every aspect of the systems we produce.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Touch Events

   

   Peter-Paul Koch, Author, PPK on JavaScript

   With the advent of touchscreen devices web developers now have to deal with three input modes instead of two: mouse, keyboard, and touch. Learn how touch events differ from mouse events; how to handle the disappearance of hover state; how to make sure that your scripts will work for all three input modes; and how to avoid a few mobile browser bugs. Basic familiarity with JavaScript event handling and at least a little (raw or library) JavaScript experience is assumed.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Mobile to the Future

   

   Luke Wroblewski, Author, Mobile First!

   When something new comes along, it’s common for us to react with what we already know. Radio programming on TV, print design on web pages, and now web page design on mobile devices. But every medium ultimately needs unique thinking and design to reach its true potential. Through an in-depth look at several common web interactions, Luke will outline how to adapt existing desktop design solutions for mobile devices and how to use mobile to expand what’s possible across all devices. You’ll go from thinking about how to reformat your websites to fit mobile screens, to using mobile as way to rethink the future of the web.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects

   

   Whitney Hess, User Experience Designer

   “What do you do?” has become the standard opening line for getting to know someone. But if you were asked, “Why do you do what you do?” how would you answer? We are too narrowly focused on developing solutions for problems that we don’t understand, don’t care about, or worst of all, don’t actually exist. Life is too short to waste our time expertly creating something that matters to no one. Learn to find your “why.” Discover interviewing techniques to build greater empathy with your users, synthesizing techniques to uncover their underlying inefficiencies and frustrations, and tips to continually draw inspiration and long-term product vision from their lives.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Curious Properties of Intuitive Web Pages

   

   Jared Spool, Founder, User Interface Engineering

   When the page works, your user knows exactly what to do. Everything makes sense and they accomplish their goal, pleased with your site. Yet, often pages don’t work and users get flustered and confused. Turns out that intuitive web pages abide by a set of curiously unintuitive properties. Learn how to merge interaction design, visual design, information architecture, and other skills together to assemble pages that delight your users.

Wednesday, April 4

Designing Mobile Web Experiences

Each day, device manufacturers ship more than a million touch-screen phones enabling new ways for people to interact with the web. But when they get to your website or application, what kind of experience will people with these devices have? Will they be delighted by your mobile Web experience or frustrated?

In this full-day session on web design best practices for mobile devices, Luke will detail how to think about and design for web organization, actions, inputs, and layout on mobile. Through lots of examples, you’ll learn how to:

• Use “content first/navigate second” organizational structures optimized for small screens and mobile use cases
• Design for increasingly prevalent touch interactions with appropriate targets and gestures
• Construct forms and input fields to make input on mobile easier and more pervasive
• Manage layouts across multiple devices with ruthless editing, device experiences, and responsive/flexible designs
• And more!

Armed with these design best practices and principles, you can make sure people have a great mobile web experience whenever they visit your site.

This full-day session follows An Event Apart Seattle and runs 9:00am - 4:00pm on Wednesday, April 4. You can register online now, but don’t wait: there are limited seats available.

NOTE: The full-day session on Designing Mobile Web Experiences is not a hands-on learning session or small-group workshop; upwards of 200 people typically attend.