Web Visions 2007

Last year was my first foray into the world of speaking and presenting, and while it was incredibly enjoyable, I found it to be a bit overwhelming. It consumed a large portion of my free time with preparation and travel and then more preparation. So this year, while I knew I wanted to continue presenting, I wanted to slow it down a bit. Based on the wonderful experience at Web Visions last year, I put all of my eggs in one basket and begged the wonderful folks at Web Visions to have me back in Portland for this smaller and more intimate conference. It worked.

The Workshop

This year, I’ll be doing a two and a half hour workshop about improving interface design. However, I’m planning on the workshop being more than just a series of tips, tricks, and patterns. We’re also going to delve into the cultural and institutional aspects the prevent good interface design. We’ll discuss common problems, why they are problems, and see how we can address them.

For the first half, we’ll focus on the intangible aspects that influence or impede good interface design. This includes cultural, institutional, and other environmental factors that suffocate good design. We usually overlook these aspectsu but, even the world’s best interface designer can’t create a successful user interface in the wrong environment. So being aware of the problems and being able to articulate a clear solution is the first major step towards enabling good interface design.

The second half will go into specific ideas and details inspired by some of today’s most successful web sites and applications. We’ll cover the use (and over-use) of AJAX and Flash. We’ll look at extremely simple solutions to complex problems. We’ll see how a different perspective or context of a problem can completely change the solution. We’ll review countless examples, and most importantly, with every example, we’ll step back and discuss the underlying principles that guided the decision-making process—principles that we can put into play as we design our own interfaces.

Also, as I’m pulling together examples, I’m really interested in any unique interface examples that you may have come across. The more, the merrier. I couldn’t be more excited, and I hope to see you there!