Hardboiled Web Design with Andy Clarke

Looking at modern design tools, browsers and techniques

Take an uncompromising look at how to make the most from modern design tools and browsers, up-to-date techniques and processes. In this practical, design-focused talk, Andy will discuss the “how” as well as the “why,” and challenge your preconceptions to help you make better work for the web. Learn the most modern, forward-moving, and sometimes experimental CSS techniques, and why a forward looking approach to CSS will pay real dividends.

Blending Usability Testing with Interface Design, Prototyping and Rapid Iteration with Dan Rubin

Presented as a case study review, Dan explores examples from a real life project, explaining the method of testing and prototyping used, and showing the value of making adjustments to a design during testing, exposing changes in behavior that could not have been otherwise observed.

Photo: © John Morrison / Subism Studios LLC

The Designer Startup with Adii Pienaar

How great design contributes to better customer service

More and more online startups these days focus on the tech that fuels their products or services, and as a result they often neglect to give proper attention to the design aspects that relate to those. In this regard though, design is not only something that is superficial and pretty, but I’d like to argue that great design is a great influencing factor in providing excellent customer service to your customers.

Design to Communicate with Simon Collison

As designers, we manipulate all that is available to us, aiming to present ideas in a visually engaging form. But what are our motives, and why do we go in a particular direction? Why do great designers have the courage to do things a certain way, and succeed?

Simon will explore how web designers can improve their thought processes by stepping away from the browser, and in turn bring clearer, well-reasoned thinking back into their work. He’ll introduce established and new ways of thinking, and key points of influence that can assist with any web design process.

2020: A Design Odyssey

I’ll be taking designers through the design odyssey and explaining how to prepare themselves for the next 10 years.

You’re going to need a bigger toolbox with Gareth Rushgrove

For years it was possible to get by as a web developer with only a small number of tools.

Knowing PHP, some SQL and how to restart Apache seemed enough. It was only a web site after all? But the last few years have seen a change in the type of applications we’re building on the web. And with that has come problems that can’t be solved effectively by our limited toolset: Huge data sets, real time applications, increasingly complex application logic, spiky traffic
profiles, lots of hardware and more.

This talk will cover a number of tools that all web developers should have in their respective toolboxes. Whether you’re a .NET fanboy, Java purist, Ruby or Python convert, or a PHP stalwart their should be something for everyone.

The Touch Action with PPK

Discussing the consequences of a touch action on mobile phones.

This action is a frightfully complicated one, since it can mean several things. Users may touch their phone because they want to click a link, because they want to scroll, or because they want to zoom. Handling these various use cases correctly is what distinguishes a good touchscreen phone from a bad one.

The touch action also fires several JavaScript events which web developers need in order to create an appealing website that works well on touchscreen phones. We’ll discuss these events, too.

Finally we’ll take a brief look to see what the future holds in terms of touch actions.