An Event Apart Boston 2012

Monday, June 18

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

   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.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   On Web Typography

   

   Jason Santa Maria, Founding Principal, Mighty

   Achieving a thorough grasp of typography can take a lifetime, but moving beyond the basics is within your reach right now. In this talk, we’ll learn how to look at typefaces with a discerning eye, different approaches to typographic planning, how typography impacts the act of reading, and how to choose and combine appropriate typefaces from an aesthetic and technical point of view. Through an understanding of our design tools and how they relate to the web as a medium, we can empower ourselves to use type in meaningful and powerful ways.

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

   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. Details will be announced as the conference draws near, so stay tuned!

Tuesday, June 19

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   The Future of CSS

   

   Eric Meyer, Author, CSS: The Definitive Guide

   There is a lot of activity happening in CSS right now. Not only are several popular aspects of CSS evolving, but major new ideas are being proposed and, in some cases, already implemented. From selectors to regions, from flexible boxes to filters, from conditionals to compositing, there is a lot coming. In this session we’ll take a look at the most popular and pressing modules, how they’ll affect what you do, and, most importantly, how you can help shape their evolution.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Interacting Responsibly (and responsively!)

   

   Scott Jehl, Author, Designing With Progressive Enhancement

   Your website is being used in ways you may not expect. Between screens small and large, bandwidth constraints, varying capabilities, assistive technologies, and diverse input mechanisms – mouse, keyboard, touch, sensors, device buttons, trackpads, etc – multi-device development requires an awful lot of consideration to do well! Thankfully, there’s plenty you can do to be prepared. Learn how to think and build defensively to create experiences that not only work most anywhere, but take advantage of the latest browser capabilities and are ready for your users’ next move.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Buttons Are a Hack

   

   Josh Clark, Author, Tapworthy

   Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. Find out why our beloved buttons are weak replacements for manipulating content directly. Learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. But hang on: if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by making it effortless to discover invisible gestures. This talk explains the power of animation, reveals the influence of game design, and offesr techniques to build native and web apps according to the new rules of touchscreen design.

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

   Handcrafted Patterns

   

   Dan Cederholm, Co-founder, Dribbble.com

   When learning a new creative skill, we often follow a progression: Imitation, repetition, and innovation. We learn by dissecting the work of others, building our own tools, and later adding our own uniqueness. We’ll apply that thinking to designing flexible interfaces in an HTML5 and CSS3 world, exploring the process of crafting your own markup and style pattern library. What lessons can we learn from breaking websites into micro frameworks? What happens to these patterns under varying browsing conditions? Dan will share how patterns have helped him build bulletproof websites.

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, June 20

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 Boston and runs 9:00am - 4:00pm on Wednesday, June 20. You can register online and save over $100 when you sign up for both An Event Apart and Designing Mobile Web Experiences.

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.