Design Track

Mark Boulton Designs Grid Systems; Aral Balkan Gets Emotional About Design; Rachel Andrews gets to the Core of CSS3; Christian Crumlish Designs for Play; Sandi Wassmer says Inclusive Design is for Everyone; Relly Annett-Baker looks at All the Small Things; Simon Willison is Building Crowdsourcing Applications and Hannah Donovan Tells Stories Through Design.

Inclusive Design is for Everyone

Presenter:

Sandi Wassmer

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Inclusive Design is currently the domain of people who design physical things, like product designers and architects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online environment just makes sense.

The principles of Inclusive Design encompass so many of the practices, principles and guidelines that web designers are already using – Accessibility, Usability, User Centric Design, Progressive Enhancement and User Experience – but unlike each of these discrete practices, Inclusive Design gives designers the ability to offer choice, as a single design solution will never accommodate all users.

Sandi will talk about how the principles of Inclusive Design can be easily adopted by web designers right now. By the end of the session you’ll have the framework for becoming an inclusion activist!

Telling Stories through Design

Presenter:

Hannah Donovan

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Hannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a storyteller—especially in terms of the importance of this role within a team. Improve your output as a designer by taking a closer look at influencing the input. As a visual narrator we help to visualise, inspire and curate for the people we work with as well as connecting scenarios around the larger product saga that supports the interfaces we design. By examining your input, make your output more effective with your team and users alike, paving paths for people to tell their own stories as your product evolves over time.

Designing for Play

Presenter:

Christian Crumlish

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Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how we can design to foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences.

Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That’s a stretch but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer some form of gather, arranging, and displaying objects. Just so, even an HR portal may offer some opportunity to incorporate a collecting “game” into the workflow.

Christian will share techniques for introducing a sense of play into the experiences we’re designing and will exhort the assembled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.

The Art of Emotional Design

Presenter:

Aral Balkan

Most apps suck. Making an app that doesn’t suck is hard work and requires uncompromising focus. We call apps that don’t suck “usable”. However, in the Age of User Experience, making apps that are merely usable is no longer good enough.

So how can you go beyond making usable apps to creating exceptional experiences that evoke powerful emotions in users?

In this inspirational session, Aral will offer you an impassioned glimpse into his approach of authoring apps that people find joyful and fun; apps that people fall in love with.

Delight, story, empathy, character, voice, beauty, fun, and play are just some of the topics that will be covered and illustrated with examples from Aral’s decade-long experience in authoring web, Flash, desktop, and mobile apps, including his latest top-selling iPhone app, Feathers.

All The Small Things: razor sharp copy for sites and applications

Presenter:

Relly Annett-Baker

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Microcopy is the ninja of online content. Fast, furious and deadly, it has the power to make or break your online business, to kill or stay your foes. It’s a sentence, a confirmation, a few words. One word, even. It isn’t big or flashy. It doesn’t leave a calling card. If it does its job your customer may never notice it was there.

In this session, Relly will show you how you can bolster sales and reflect your company and client’s values through just a few well-chosen words. Designers? Do you get lumped with the interaction copy? Developers? Do you get left trying to make meaningful error messages? Ecommerce managers? Do you want an easy increase in sales? This session will help. It will be a lot of fun. You should definitely come.

Designing Grid Systems

Presenter:

Mark Boulton

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Grid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that?

Core CSS3

Presenter:

Rachel Andrew

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This session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.

Rachel Andrew will take you through some of the core features of CSS3 including advanced selectors, media queries and other features that are being developed and starting to be implemented in browsers.

In addition to discovering how CSS3 will change the way that we develop in the future we will explore current and upcoming browser support. We will also see how it is possible to start using some of CSS3 in your projects now, with the help of a little JavaScript to plug the holes in current browsers.

Building crowdsourcing applications

Presenter:

Simon Willison

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Crowdsourcing applications take indigestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter periods of time.

Designing and building crowdsourcing applications incorporates a fascinating range of challenges, from usability, psychology and interaction design to scaling applications for surges of traffic – all the while ensuring that contributors are rewarded, good behaviour is encouraged and the resulting data comes out in a useful format.

This talk will discuss lessons learned building serious crowdsourcing applications on newsroom schedules at the Guardian, and playful crowdsourcing features for WildlifeNearYou.com.