Webstock – New Zealand’s Web Conference – Day 1

I had heard lots of great stuff about Webstock in previous years so decided to go along this year to experience it for myself. This is a very professional conference and has (mostly) excellent speakers covering a variety of Web related technologies.

Here’s my synopsis of Day 1.

Opening

Mike Brown (@maupuia)

• You will fall in love with things that are made with love

Web Design that grabs people

Scott Thomas (@simplescott) – Design Director for Obama's campaign

• Web and Print overlap in campaign

• Deliver clear and concise messaging, focussed on the “We” rather than the “He”

• Keep the message of hope while dismantling the notion of being aloof

• Establish a consistency and balance to exemplify stability and experience

• Persuading people was the mission of the home page therefore needed to be prominent, with localised information

• Spend more time researching than design

• Information architecture (inc. wireframes) is a key part of the design process but is often overlooked

• The fold is dead

• Recording speeches and putting up on Obama website with transcripts gave the power back to the politician not to major media.

• The web is changing the way we interact, it is making the world smaller

• Analytics are king. Track when people drop out of a process, how they are using a site etc.

• No matter how complex or disorganised you think you are, understand that you can achieve great things when you have great people

Brian does the Andrew Sisters

Brian Fling (@fling)

• “New Zealand is Yours Go there now” cheesy video clip

• “Mobile Design and Development” O'Reilly book author

• Context is important

• Cost of supporting different mobile devices is high

Designing for Diversity – Inclusive Design & the User Experience

Liz Herrod (@scenariogirl)

• Why are we segregating people?

• Shallow personas are often used that don't take into account accessibility (poor sight, language barriers, poor hearing)

• Why is disability intimidating?

• Consider WCAG2 checklist

• Work ethically; don't be lazy

Building the Open Web

Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy)

• Open Web 101: Check out OpenId, Microformats, Oauth.

• WebFinger can connect your email address to an OpenId.

• ActivityStreams extends Atom

• Portable Contacts looks like a good way to access "who-you-know" information in a secure way; built around Oauth and vCard

• URLs are important for usability. Apparently also good for SEO e.g. http://blah.co.nz/supports/xyz

• APIs should be based on REST

• Offer APIs (pref REST based) and relevant web feeds (ideally personalised) for your site that utilise Microformats

Security-Centred Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behaviour

Chris Shiflett (@shiflett)

• Ambience is an interesting concept to consider in design (e.g. ambient music when approaching a train stop, login seals)

• Login seals (e.g. Yahoo) make phishing harder

• Excellent example of Change Blindness given with switching between photos are trying to identify difference (hard!)

• Password anti-pattern:

• Accommodate users' expectation and tendencies; don't try to modify them

• Be Humble. Arrogance attracts negative attention.

• The Colour-changing Card Trick is awesome http://quirkology.com/UK/Video_ColourChangingTrick.shtml

Fostering Personal Connection to Place

Shelley Bernstein (@shell7) - Brooklyn Museum

• Brooklyn Museum make things easy to find and make it easy to enjoy

• Learn and adapt to feedback

• Push comments up the page to foster discussion

• With twitter be transparent about who is talking, good news and bad news.

• Brooklyn Museum have kiosks that enable YouTube content to be uploaded from within the museum to capture public comments

• Brooklyn Museum pulls back info from Foursquare and displays it on their website for the general public. Open APIs ftw.

• They also worked with Foursquare to get a specific badge.

• Use communities for moderation

• Use crowd-sourcing to engage communities. Brooklyn Museum made a game to tag photos.

• I like the concept of crowd-sourcing tagging of photos via a game. Crowd-sourcing has a number of opportunities

StackOverflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror)

• Coding Horror blog

• Know your audience

• Social software for the anti-social: i.e. supports developers to ask questions and get answers

• Voting works well with good info going to the top and allowing the person who asked the question select what they think is the best answer.

• Have support to flag inappropriate content

• User generated tagging enables related questions to be grouped

• Reputation system unlocks abilities and people's answers are voted on

• There aren't bad programmers, just programmers that haven't been taught how to write good code.

• Work vs work ('Work' is what you're paid to do vs 'work' is what you do when you're interested and inspired)

• Voting for new features

• Badges are good to a) reward people and b) provide more context to others to evaluate context of answers

• The faster your site the less friction it will have which which enable more participation.

• No registration required: reduce barriers

• Anybody can edit anybody's post.

Please, Don't Let it be Interactive

Regine Debatty

• http://we-make-money-not-art.com

• Interactivity sometimes adds no value

The Word Wild Web

Rives

• We fall in love with things made with love & some people refuse to fall in love with things that aren't made with love.

• ASCII Storytelling/Poetry is quite cool and Rives is great at it

• Check out http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_tells_a_story_of_mixed_emoticons.html for his TED talk on ASCII Poetry

• Rives is great at Storytelling and Poetry 2.0