Podcasts Final
And here are all of the podcasts for WDN08. Thanks once again for your patience, and for coming along to Vancouver this year!
That's a Wrap!
Thank you all for attending and being a part of WDN 2008, another fantastic year! Podcasts and presentation slides will be coming soon, but you can view what we have available so far. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to stay updated as new material is posted to the site.
Web Directions News
RSS FeedPodcasts
Our apologies for making you wait this long, but at last you can grab the first few podcasts from WDN08.
This will almost definitely not be their permanent home, but you can immediately start listening to the ones we’ve published thus far by subscribing to this RSS feed. Here’s what you’ll find:
- The Future of Web Interfaces - Cameron Adams
- Information Visualisation as a Medium - Eric Rodenbeck
- Ajax Security - Douglas Crockford
- Government 2.0: Architecting for Collaboration - Tara Hunt
- The Why and How: UI Case Studies - Daniel Burka
- Mobile Web Design and Development - Brian Fling
And more are on the way very soon, rest assured. We’ll update here as soon as we’ve worked out the last few kinks.
A Conversation with Walter Smith
Jackson Fishmarket’s Walter Smith came up from Seattle for Web Directions North to give us some real world insights into using Silverlight, which they did for their Taffiti Search Engine project.
While there, Qixing Zheng from Microsoft Canada had a chat, and the podcast is now online.
Jackson Fishmarket also picked up some coverage recently in the New York Times, along with a picture in that esteemed newspaper. Well done folks!
WDN Slides
What a great week! Hopefully everyone who came along to WDN this year went away feeling as inspired and refreshed as I did. John has already blogged a big thank you on behalf of all of us, but I think it’s worth repeating: thanks to everyone — speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees alike — for being a part of our 2008 event.
I know many of you would like to get your hands on presentation slides and podcasts, and in the coming weeks we’ll be gathering those and uploading them to the site. You can bookmark this post, which we’ll update as more come in, or just stay tuned for when we refresh the site with all our post-conference material. Bear with us, it’ll take a few weeks to wrap everything up.
For now, here’s the list of presentation slides we have thus far, with many more to come:
- Bedroom to Boardroom by Josh Williams
- Citizen Superheroes and other Tales from Government 2.0 by Tara Hunt
- Plays Well with Others by Brian Oberkirch
- Working with Ajax Frameworks by Jonathan Snook
- Adobe AIR Overview by Andre Charland
- Crowdsourcing a Better GMail by Gina Trapani
- Innovation is Overrated by Indi Young
- The 3 Stages of CMS by Boris Mann
- Ajax Security by Douglas Crockford
- Where’s Your Web At? by John Allsopp & Dave Shea
- The Why & How: UI Case Studies by Daniel Burka
- Movement (Closing Keynote) by Matt Webb
Your conference bag
Just in case you missed our signs about re-using your re-usable conference bag, we whipped together this handy set of folding instructions in English, French, and Cantonese:
(Of course, no one’s stopping you from just cramming the bag inside the pouch it came with and hope for the best.)
Thank you
Web Directions North 2008 has just wrapped up - 6 intense days of workshops, conference, skiing, and (for your boss) “networking opportunities” (aka parties).
Thank you to all who came.
Thank you to our wonderful speakers.
Thanks to our sponsors.
The event was wonderful, and we trust that all of you involved felt so too.
Plenty of podcasts and much more to come, but for now, thanks again from Dave, Maxine, Derek and John
Brian Fling on Canada’s mobile web landscape
Brian Fling, author of the dotmobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, delivered a talk at Web Directions North today about the mobile web landscape in Canada and elsewhere. Across the world, mobile access is revolutionizing the way people access and interact with information in the next two years. Except in Canada, where Fling said the transition will take five years.
The 3 C’s of the mobile web are Cost, Content and Context, and balancing those goals is where you find the mobile web’s “sweet spot,” Fling said. Cost means if you don’t design a site with a mobile user in mind, that user could unwittingly get a big phone bill. Navigation, image sizes and page weight all become more important as content concerns on a mobile device. And context on a phone is much different than when a user is sitting in front of a computer.
some of the benefits of mobile phones is that it is the first truly personal mass media, as well as being always-on and always-carried. It’s also the only mass media with its own payment channel. Payment by cell phone hasn’t taken hold in North America, but in Japan cell phones can be used as mobile wallets.
In fact, Fling said he thought the web is on the cusp of major transformation, driven by mobile devices, and pushed forward by Google, Apple and Opera software. Apple especially has captured the imagination of people as to the possibilities of the mobile web.
But what of Canada, or as Fling said, “what is the the deal with Canada!?!” Canada’s slow wireless growth is due to relatively cheap landlines, which slowed demand for wireless. 67 percent of Canadian homes have a mobile phone, which is actually low compared to the rest of the world.
Growth in Canada is only nine percent per year, and based on past and present growth rates, it could take Canada five more years to reach the market penetration of other countries.
With new spectrum being auctioned off, there is some hope that Canada’s wireless landscape will see some progress, but restrictive regulations that don’t allow foreign competition may again cripple the Canadian market. Fling said unless there’s change, Canada will continue to lag. Right now the three main wireless carriers are dominating different segments of the market, and as a result the total market is stagnating.
The Why and How: UI Case Studies by Daniel Burka
Burka used three case studies from his experience at Digg and Pownce to examine challenges that many designers face when designing interfaces. He specifically focussed on the iterative design process and many of it’s benefits and pitfalls.
He began with the overall iterative design of digg.com, beginning with the initial redesign which started as a client project during his time at silverorange. Burka then delved into the recent controversy surround the redesign of the comments at digg.com which lead to him discussing user testing, feedback, and acceptance.
He also stepped through the design process of the recently launched Pownce.com.
Anil Dash on putting social media to work
Anil Dash, the chief evangelist at Six Apart, gave a presentation to Web Directions North attendees today about how to put social media to work. He pointed to the web publishing cycle of publication, syndication and reaction and how it is necessary to show businesses how this cycle applies to them. At present, business tools don’t even mention relationships, Dash said, and the technology industry is partly to blame, as it assumes that people are different at home and at work. Things are well designed at home, yet at work people are forced into different restrictive behaviours. For example, one of the key selling points of a Blackberry is to allow corporations to restrict their employees from using certain features.
OpenID, by contrast, is a good example of how the “web” model can work in the corporate world. It’s partly as simple as having a normal, accessible name. While openness and accessibility is a foregone conclusion in the web world, it’s only now becoming a principle of the business world, Dash said.
Reliability, scalability, measurability and manageability are all vital to a corporate environment, but web technologies are sometimes not robust enough for their needs.
In purely pragmatic terms, Dash said email is your “best enemy” to convincing business to adapt a web-like model. Identify where email is failing (spam, irrelevant emails) and offering web services as an alternative. Explain how using wikis, blogs, and other tools allow for serendipity, whether its creating new business connections or finding new ways to interact with clients.
Dash also stressed the importance of permanence, such as ensuring that messages are not lost when moving to new technologies. But impermanence is also important. No-one gets a gold watch after 50 years with a firm anymore, and a far more likely dynamic is a small team coming together in an ad-hoc manner and then dissolving when a job is done. In practical terms, that means permissions to access data may change over time.
Iteration is also important. Technology deployment shouldn’t be flipping a switch and using the new version of Microsoft Office….and then finding that half of the people in a firm can’t send email. But time and again this scenario plays itself out in the workplace, and Dash said the only way to solve the problem is to iterate instead of accepting rapid change.
Playing nicely with others and patience are also important. On a macro scale, blogging went from obscurity to ubiquity in the business world in five years. But on a personal scale, such changes can appear to be glacial. But it’s important to remember that some people in an organization will need to assimilate change slowly. By the same token, Dash said to find the advocates within an organization, because there are always individuals who think in the same way as a webcentric worker…they just don’t know it yet.
Changing business means the blog world has to change itself. Stop rewarding people who shout, Dash said, which has been a route to success (or at least to notoriety) in both the blogging world and business.
New tools, such as Facebook news feeds, Jabber, Twitter and OpenSocial will all be able to bring in new users from the business world that the older generation of enterprise software just can’t do, Dash said. But those who work in the web world have the ability and obligation to bring those tools to the enterprise, and not just exist in their own milieu, Dash said.
Where’s Your Web At? by Dave Shea & John Allsopp
- We often assume a certain setting and specific device for our users.
- We also often assume OS platform, browser selection, user input device, and screen real estate.
- Mobile devices:
- Mostly ubiquitous connections, speed varies.
- Different user input types: virtual keyboards, etc.
- On the TV:
- Still under-represented.
- Wii & PS3 do offer good to excellent browsing.
- Other devices:
- LG fridges, watches, remote controls, etc.
- Web is starting to be used in other places than traditional offices, living rooms, etc.
- Designing for the physical location of the user:
- Amount of attention.
- Viewing conditions.
- Privacy.
- Motor skills possibly comprimised.
- Design:
- Vast range of screen sizes.
- Media profiles in CSS to help cope with this.
- Should we be designing specific layouts for all the different devices?
- Reference to the ALA article on adaptive layouts (not necessarily the best solution): http://www.alistapart.com/articles/switchymclayout/.
- Interaction:
- Text input on virtual input devices:
- Typing is slower.
- Undo is costly.
- Cut and paste not available (for the most part).
- Switch between numeric and alpha keyboards.
- Text input strategies:
- Use short URL’s.
- ECML – schema for naming form fields/elements (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2706.html).
- OpenID.
- QR codes.
- Try to make interactions passive and easy.
- Beware of design patterns that require fine motor skills.
- Assumed events:
- WIMP:
- Windows
- Icons
- Mouse
- Pull down menus
- No hover event
- No mouseover event
- WIMP:
- Text input on virtual input devices:
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