Future Insights Live – Day 3

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Day Three began with a dilema: Mark Otto talking about frameworks or Luke Wroblewski talking about UI. Oh, the humanity. Both of these guys are innovators in their respective fields so it’s a nice dilema to have.
In the end I went with Mark, since I have more concerns with development right now and got really excited about Bootstrap in his Day Two presentation. This session was about the future of these tools and how we might expect to see them develop. Mark talked about a lot of his “competitors” to Bootstrap and the ways in which people will continue to bundle tools – CSS resets, SASS and LESS, javascript libraries, grids, etc. His advice is to not be afraid to build that kind of thing for you, or your office, because it can be really useful.

After the morning break I went to another session with Estelle Weyl, this one about improving mobile web performance. I’m not desperately concerned with that, but what’s true in mobile is true in the web as a whole. She did make some good cases for the limitations mobile devices have, not just in processing and memory, but with their battery power – something your phone uses when it loads a website. Plus this way I got to see Estelle’s demo of her “clown car” technique for managing image size with .svg files. Another thing I’ve got to try when I get home.

Lunch was a casual affair but I did wind up sitting at a good table with a variety of folks from around the country (and Canada) and another person in higher ed. More good conversation and a damn tasty lunch (all the food was really good at MGM Grand).

After lunch I hit Michael Jovel’s session on “Iterating Awesomeness” which sounds good but I probably should have gone to the Coffeescript session… Michael’s talk was good, but not really applicable for me. His demo was of Nordstrom’s use of the “LEAN” UX process (seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO2GKC29CsY) but I don’t think Nick and I will ever be deployed to the Brickyard for a week of fluid web development based on student interactions.

Last up is David Shea’s “Why the Web Doesn’t Need Another CSS Zen Garden.” Full disclosure: I’m writing this BEFORE I watch that, but seeing as I’ll be booking it for the airport once this is over I’ll go ahead and post this and assume for the purposes of this post that it will be a “very insightful and enjoyable session.”

Overall I’ve ben really impressed with the conference. Good group, good networking, good sessions and very well run. I would perhaps have liked more sessions that weren’t so completely devoted to mobile but I keep hearing that’s the way the web is going so it’s probably appropriate. The truth is, that’s really the way the web already IS, we’re just a little slow to catch on to that in the university system. So that’s eye-opening.
Anyway, I always feel like it’s a successful conference when I have a few things that I’m super-excited to go home and try, and I’ve definitely got that. I’ve also met a LOT of really cool people who are doing really cool things for the web, so the networking aspects were very worthwhile. Two thumbs up! Would come again!

 

Future Insights Live Conference – Day 2

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Day 2 started with a keynote on team development which I skipped since I don’t do team development. Got some work done and emails answered and prepared for my first session, an hands-on demo of Twitter Bootstrap.

Mark Otto, one of the co-creators of Bootstrap was actually running the demo which was pretty freakin’ dreamy. Bootstrap is preparing to launch their third iteration with several major changes, including updates to the grid system – the whole thing is built to be mobile-first. The demo was perfect for showing off the incredible power and ease of the tool and I just want to go and play with it RIGHT NOW. I shared all this with Jason (Austin), who is already a big Twitter Bootstrap fan, and rightly told me, “I told you so” when I informed him that it rocked.

Next up for the AM was Jason Pamental’s session on “Rethinking Your Design for a Million-Device World.” Jason was one of the people I’d met and had an excellent conversation with at the networking event last night so I was anxious to see what he had to share. He rightly pointed out that the only major site to stay up during the Boston Marathon bombing, in the face of the critical demand for news, was the Boston Globe site – built very lightly and with low bandwidth demands.

Lunch was a special event: the conference coordinators had planned a networking lunch for those of us in higher ed. There wasn’t a huge turnout but we had some great conversations about the things we teach, how our campuses work, and talked about how online training is impacting colleges. One of the people there was an instructor who worries about the day when people start taking these free classes and getting real, good jobs. Or once these classes become accepted as college credit.

In the afternoon I went to David Shea’s “Mobile Web Design Anti-Patterns.” This was another session that contained a lot of good tips and reminders, though sadly many of them were repeats for me. He did provide some good insights into what the most important things to include on your mobile site. Think about your copy and make sure it makes sense for a mobile device (“click here” doesn’t apply for mobile) and be sure that when you skip a text menu for the sake of size you include sensible icons.

Estelle Weyl was up next with her “CSS Selectors” presentation and lemme tell you, this girl knows her CSS selectors. Some of her tips, once again, were repeats but she had much more that I hadn’t seen: sibling selectors, tabs built all in CSS (YAY), styling for drop caps and the first line of text, and using the ::before and ::after selectors to apply additional CSS to a div. All her stuff is in Github, which is delightful, and I really need to follow her blog, standardista.com.

Last session of the day was Bruce Lawson, my favorite presenter of Day One, talking about “How to Destroy the Web“. Yes, he’s being iconic, people. He talked about all kinds of things that we do as designers, that countries do, that companies do, that are all bad for the web and for users trying to use the web. It was fun and insightful: 40% of the web users are coming from China and India and they’re getting online with phones. And I don’t mean iPhones. So some more good reminders and a very nice way to end the day.

Future Insights Live Conference – Day 1

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I’m in Vegas this week for the Future Insights Live conference. It’s front-end web, back-end, web, and all things mobile. This isn’t a conference I’m presenting at, it’s all about learning, and in an effort to share my experiences I’ll be recapping each day of the conference and the sessions I’m attending.

The opening keynote was “Visual Semantics: Color and Shape in Universal Design“, by Molly Holzschlag. She went through various colors and shapes and talked about their meaning for user. Past uses of the shapes and how that impacts their recognition (the star used by Nazi’s to tag Jewish and other groups of people) was also discussed. I didn’t really get anything new here but it’s a nice reminder that these are things that are important to consider in design, both for the user impression of the sites, but also for usability and accessibility.

The next session I attended was Brad Frost’s “Beyond Media Queries: Anatomy of an Adaptive Web Design.” This wasn’t a super-technical session and it talked about a lot of known issues, but also raised a lot of concerns about future use cases for the web – we think phones are challenging, wait until you see your site on Google Glass or the dashboard of a car. He did talk about some good enhancement strategies and though there was a bit of a dearth of technical examples he was a GREAT speaker and his slides were kick-ass. Can I say “kick-ass” on a work blog? Meh. No one’s going to read this anyway.

Next up was a hands-on lab session, “From Desktop to Mobile: One Small Step for You, One Giant Leap for Your Website.” It was nice to get some hands-on stuff and the examples are in Git, which is excellent (https://github.com/moovweb-demos/hackernews-demo/tree/demo) but the tool being demoed is proprietary and knowing that we very likely can’t afford something like this put a bit of a damper on my excitement. We’ll have to keep working on responsive (sorry, Brad) adaptive design the “old-fashioned” way.

After lunch I attended the panel on “The Future of Online Learning.” You’d have to have your head under a rock to have missed the tidal wave of attempts to provide online courses/training/education that have popped up recently. I’ve been staying on top of that, but have somehow missed the emergence of several web-specific training companies, including Treehouse and CodeSchool, both of which were represented here (no Lynda rep, which is an IT training source that more people are familiar with).
The conversation didn’t meander too far towards Higher Ed, which was my primary interest, however they did mention that they feel like they are a more supplemental resource versus a replacement for colleges. That being said I do wonder about the effectiveness of these courses without any personal connection or in-person meetings. I’ll be curious to see how these types of trainings/companies continue to grow (or not) and evolve.

Next up was “The Future of Smart Business” which turned out to be a tactical error since it didn’t contain too much of interest for me (I had high hopes, long story).

In the late afternoon I went to “Responsive Web Design: What’s Next?” by Bruce Lawson, which was great. He covered some upcoming and proposed changes to W3C and his perspective as an employee of Opera (web browser) was very interesting. He gave a demo of the usefulness of the “viewport” tag and showed off the upcoming modified flexbox CSS, which is a grown up and super sexy version of the box model. Lots of good stuff I can’t wait to get home and play with.

Last but not least I attended the evening keynote, “Designing a Business that Won’t Kill You” by Carl Smith. Carl told his story, from his first job through starting his own business and the ups and down that go with it. I felt like the presentation was kind of uneven, and there were a lot of “lessons” along the way but it did end up on a high note.

Immediately following the last session was a networking event complete with an open bar – huzzah! I managed to get past some of my nerves and make some small talk with strangers and eventually worked my way into some very interesting discussions with several of the presenters, as well as some interesting colleagues from all over the US. Great evening activity.

Infographics Presentation for Campus

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I recently presented on Infographics to some of the campus communicators in a joint session with Fred Eaker of DASA. The session was a primer on how infographics are made, their purpose, and recognizing the good and bad elements that go into design. A copy of my presentation (in Prezi) is included below. Please let me know if you have questions about the topic!

Conference review, 2012-2013

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I have been woefully bad at reviewing the conferences I have attended on this site; Nick is completely showing me up. As it happens I will be heading to Las Vegas, NV next week for the Future Insights Live conference so I will do my best to pop back here and report on my experiences in a timely manner.

In the meantime I haven’t been sitting around the office for the last year. I’ve actually attended and presented at several conferences in the past year; a list is below.

I’ve also presented on campus on a number of topic, including infographics. You can see my presentation on that topic here.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know – I’m always happy to re-present or share what I’ve learned. Check back soon for my thoughts on FI!