I was recently lucky enough to attend the 2010 UX Web Summit at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor. From Facebook, to Yahoo, to the person who literally wrote the book on card sorting, the list of speakers was a veritable who’s who of UX professionals.
The day started with a joint presentation on “the first 15 minutes” by Daniel Burka, Director of Design for Tiny Speck, and Rob Goodlatte, from the Facebook UX team. Next up was M. Jackson Wilkinson of LinkedIn, with a presentation on the seven core principles of product strategy for UX designers.
This discussion moved into a presentation on remote user testing by Juliette Melton of Deluxify. The morning session ended with a presentation on sustainable UX by Nick Finck of Blue Flavor.
After a break for lunch, the afternoon session started off with a presentation on card sorting by Donna Spencer, who wrote the book on the subject.
Next was a joint presentation on mobile web design by Jenifer Hanen, mobile web designer and developer, and Cindy Li of Yahoo. Last, but certainly not the least, was a presentation on practical prototyping by Sidebar Creative’s Dan Rubin.
For the sake of time and space (I took nine pages of notes, single-spaced), I won’t go into detail for all of the presentations. Instead, I’ll give you three things that I found incredibly helpful:
- Rob Goodlatte told a short story about a user test that essentially changed the design of Facebook’s sign-up process. Watching a participant struggle in a user test brought the Facebook UX team to their “AHa!” moment. Facebook is about connecting users to people in their lives. Period. This realization lead to a significant change in the design of Facebook’s sign-up process.
- M. Jackson Wilkinson’s seventh core principle regarding product strategy is to “sweat the important details”. If nothing else, take one part of your product and make it seem like magic (make it so easy and useful that users won’t know how you did it). A well-designed and usable product nurtures and develops trust.
- Dan Rubin’s explanation of his prototyping process on a recent project brought up an important point about users and their tasks. When designing or redesigning a website, clarity must be paramount. It is more important than anything else that users are able to find a clear path to accomplish their task.
Something that goes hand-in-hand with this is the implementation of Inherent Value tests. Find out what users love so that you can protect it. Don’t destroy something that works because it seems old. “Familiar” is not synonymous with “old”. Keep the things that users like. They’ll be happier and it will make less work for you in the long run.
So here they are, three of my favorite concepts. Of course, there were many many more. Every single speaker had amazing insight (and some very quotable phrases).
I look forward to another UX Web Summit in hopeful anticipation. Here’s to another fantastic Web Summit with great conversation and, hopefully, pants!
Of course, this year’s summit would not have been possible without the generosity of our sponsors. A big thank you to all of you for making this happen! Thank you,of course, to all of the speakers! Also, a big thank you to Deborah Edwards-Onoro and Environments For Humans for making this available to those of us in Ann Arbor!
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Want to attend the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in San Francisco June 28-29, 2010? Through our user group partnership with Peachpit, Refresh Detroit members can get a $200$150 discount off (oops! Their user group coordinator just sent me an update on the price) the price of the Core Conference or Core Conference and Seminar package when they register with Priority Code WDUSERG.
Combine the user group discount with Early Bird pricing (register by May 14May 21, 2010) and you can save more money!
The Voices That Matter Web Design Conference will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center. The conference brings together respected industry authors and thought-leaders of the Web design revolution including:
- Robert Hoekman, Jr.
- Dan Cederholm
- Steve Krug
- Emily Lewis
- and many others
The conference highlights web design and development advancements in:
- HTML5 & CSS3
- Content Strategy
- Microformats & Progressive Enhancement
- Social Media
- Typography & Font
- Grids
- Smart Phones
UX Web Summit
April 15, 2010
Join us April 21 2010 at UX Web Summit, an online conference, where nine of the Web’s most experienced UX professionals share their experiences working on sites big and small. Learn practical techniques to create the best user experience for your users.
Due to the generosity of Environments for Humans, Refresh Detroit has a meeting room pass which allows us to meet in one location to attend the conference. All Refresh Detroit members are welcome to attend, there is no cost!
Location
Washtenaw Community College (map)
Student Center Building, 3rd Floor, Room SC 318
4800 East Huron River Drive
Ann Arbor MI 48105-4800
Conference runs from 10am to 6pm EDT
Schedule (as of April 15)
- 10AM: Daniel Burka and Rob Goodlatte — Designing the First 15 Minutes
- 11AM: Jackson Wilkinson — Product Strategy for UX Designers
- Noon Juliette Melton — Remote User Testing
- 1PM: Nick Finck — Sustainable UX
- 2pm to 3pm: Lunch break (lunch is not provided, plenty of restaurant options in the building)
- 3pm: Donna Spencer — Card Sorting
- 4pm: Cindy Li and Jenifer Hanen — Mobile UX
- 5pm: Dan Rubin — Practical Prototyping
Registration is first come, first served! Only 15 seats are available.
Order your ticket today through GuestList, our ticket registration site.
XML Visual Quickstart Guide, 2nd Edition (Book Review)
March 21, 2010
Every once in awhile I enjoy just picking up a book on a topic I’m not so familiar with and discovering something new. The XML Visual QuickStart Guide series (second edition) is one I recently chose to work through. If you’re familiar with the Visual Quickstart Series then you probably know that the layout of the book is very straightforward, easy to read, and has great examples on nearly every page of the book. This title is no exception.
I was the most hands on with the first few chapters, creating XML and XSLT files and also working through the XQUERY examples. This gave me a great overview of XML, but it also left me with the awareness that there is so much more to explore.
The book continues to touch upon XSL-FO, DTDs, Schemas and Namespaces. I wasn’t quite ready to dive into these topics yet, but I noted that the overviews of these chapters were a nice quick reference if I needed it in the future.
The last few chapters go into more depth with XSLT 2.0, XPATH 2.0 and XQUERY 1.0. These are the newest W3C recommendations for these languages, but it’s noted at the beginning of the book that XSLT 1.0 and XPATH 1.0 are still in use, so the beginning examples are in the older versions.
The last chapter gives a flavor of XML in practice with very brief examples of Ajax, RSS, SOAP, and others. It’s just an overview of how powerful XML is and just how much it is used in conjunction with these other technologies. Of course several more volumes can be filled with these topics, so in my case, when I get the desire to learn something new again, at least I have a good list and jumping off point in the last chapter.
This book is recommended if you’re new to XML, or if you just want a basic reference to guide you along.
- Title: XML: Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition)
- Author: Kevin Howard Goldberg
- Publisher: Peachpit Press
- ISBN: 0321559673
- Date: 2008
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 288
- Cover: Price USD: $34.99
Looking to reboot Refresh Detroit
February 14, 2010
We’re hoping to reboot Refresh Detroit in March 2010. Want to help plan the future? We need people to help with:
- marketing and social media
- choosing meeting topics
- finding venues
- finding speakers
Interested? Send an email to refresh [at] lireo {dot} com.
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