K-Voltage blog

Where to begin. Well, if I think in terms of one picture is one thousand words and by one picture I allow myself to swap it to one word describing a thousand other, I would simply say AMAZING!. But I’ll try to go a bit further than a word because you might want to hear some of the details and that’s probably a bit more than a thousand words.

Following, I made sort of an overview of the conferences I assisted and some impressions I had on them and what key points they covered.

Sunday 4th

Reception and registration

Ok, there’s nothing exiting about the registration as anyone can image, but the reception right after was pretty cool. People little by little start to pop in the salon where it was hosted and breaking the initial iciness, groups start to mingle and exchange backgrounds, professions, origins, and share the love (the love for what they do, as far as I was able to tell). Even though not many people showed up (just a minor portion of people), it was interesting to meet some of the people that came and find out who they were and lay the ground for future encounters across the week.

Monday 5th – Seminar

Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with visual design by Luke Wroblewski | Yahoo!

I didn’t know much about Luke until this day. What caught my interest on him was particularly the fact that he is the Principal Designer at Yahoo! which is one of my favourite sites at present, design-wise and on the huge development work and improvements yahoo has had in the last few years.

Luke’s speech and exercises pointed key points on design and on how to deal with the people determining what things should be considered for the pages you work on, from marketing people, CEO’s or whoever you might have to deal with that makes most of the decisions of what goes in the site. For us as designers many times we get very frustrated with the ‘design design process’ where we want to do something, then we are told what should we be aiming at and then not understanding perhaps the considerations each field has. Luke with a series of examples from sites he’s worked on and others illustrated interesting points on the how, what, and why things were done to ease the pase and shorten the call to action for customers, and of course, speak the same language of stakeholders.

During some of the breaks of Luke’s seminar, I came across Andy Budd, which as many web designers know (or might know) he wrote the book CSS Mastery, which in turn also has as a co-author Cameron Moll whom he spoke at the conference. In Andy’s case he was assisting as an attendant and unfortunatelly not giving any conference. However I was able to exchange a few words with him and as a corny fan I couldn’t avoid saying how cool and influencial his book was on my day to day work. So, it was good to talk to him, even though the talk rounded more about our backgrounds than anything else.

Website: http://www.lukew.com/

Tuesday 6th

This day was divided in several conferences of one hour and a half each. Since there where many running simultaneously I assisted to the ones it was physically possible to assist. But ‘believe-you-me’ if there would have been a way to assist to them all, I would definitely have. Anyway, these are the ones I went to:

The Secrets of Killer Web Content by Gerry McGovern

This presentation in essence was mainly about the content of your web site, disregarding much of the design aspect of the web site. That being said, the focus went on how to use the words and language that identify your audience. On how to talk to people, knowing that they don’t have time to try to understand what you are intending to say or figure out your site. They come to your site, knowing what they want and they want to get out of it with a fulfilling result, being that a sale, information or whatever it is they are in your site for. The main point is to address your audience needs, fill it, and shorten the path to an action. So for that reason, cut the bullshit, go to the point, and give them the best acurate options.

Another point that he remarked was the under use or misuse of ‘links’, saying that they represent the quintessence of the web. Through a series of funny examples he exemplified how changing even a word on a link, could create a much clearer understanding of what you’ll get out of it, not to mention the improvement on the clicking rate. He went through some slides with examples of websites doing horrendously bad and how a simple change improved drastically the performance.

And even another point he remarked was how to study peoples search habits using Google Trends where you can see what people is searching for. He went through search patterns for the same thing with different words and how they could have more impact if you know how people will be searching when they search for information.

In a few words it was a killer presentation by Mr. McGovern.

Website: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/

Best Practices for Form Design: Bridging the Gap with Your Customers by Luke Wroblewski

I assist this presentation simply because I deal a lot with forms at my present job. One of the constant things we bitch about is that they are boring, hard to make them look fun and usable and usually makes your site looks ugly. Luke on it’s previous seminar went a little bit through forms design and it looked promising. As far as he went, it was interesting enough. However, on this specific presentation about forms he gave I didn’t see much difference on the previous on regards of “expanding” on the topic and I really felt that I should have assisted other conference instead.

So, since I didn’t mention the forms thingy on the the Site Seeing seminar section I wrote (read seminar on monday 5th), I’ll say here that overall he covered a good deal of studies made regarding effectivelly positioning elements of form (labels, input fields, buttons, etc) on pages to achieve more confortability for the user at the time of filling forms and not creating confusion by the time the call the action of submitting information. For instance one person asked: “Ok, it seems that you can position the label in several ways and still being legible to people. So, what’s the best approach then? What’s the difference?” The answer was (as in many other questions): “It depends”. For instance he mentioned the difference between top align labels with left align labels and right align labels. Just to point some ot the benefits of one over the other I’ll simply point one on each:

The top align labels, minimize the time of completion and the scanning process has a vertical eye path. The left align labels, enables a more specific label scanning and requires less vertical space. The right align labels, have a clear association with label and input field and of course, requires less vertical space. There are more that can be pointed but you can find out more on the references i’ll put at the end of the article.

Another key point he mention is the process of validation, with the emphasis made on inline validation so you don’t have to jump from page to page or reload the page if something got spooky. For these practices, Jared went also on his presentation on Creating Rich User Experiences and the use of Ajax about how the technology could help to improve the experience.

Website: http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html

Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Design by Jared Spool

On this presentation, Jared went through the creation of illussions for our web pages. Not only we all find out that he is really a good magician, but that it actually made sense with the magic counterpart we have to do for our websites to create a good user experience. There a couple of things I would like to remark about this presentation in terms of web ‘illusion’. For one thing is the level of simplicity we need to bring to our audiences in order for people to get what they want from our sites and then, how cleverly we can hide the level of complexity from them. In other words, let the complexity fall into the background and simplicity come into the foreground. This simple pattern is not easily achievable in many cases, and that’s what we need to work extensibly in order to create richfull user experiences or that illusion.

The other I would like to mention is the example he use with the work of Hans Rosling and his work on animating data on statistics. One of the interesting things Hans Rosling have done is outputting data, more precisely outputting boring data like statistics on markets, child rates, life expectancy between developing countries and rich countries, etc. into animated charts. His idea primarily goes in the sense that there’s a lot of data buried on databases that nobody has a fucking clue it exist, and if it ‘exist’, nobody know what it is, what it means or more importantly why should it matter. What he did is through a series of animated charts, show the movement of that data through years and how easily you can see the differences and understand that data. whereas done on data tables, it’s impossible to get a sense or value of that information. You can check this presentation he did on the topic. Very interesting.

Website: http://www.uie.com/

Creative Thinking Hacks by Scott Berkun

This one as well as the seminar were without a doubt my favourites ones. Not only because of the intensity and energy Scott transmitt when presenting but, because the topics he cover are applicable in any field you might work on. Really, it’s not only about technology, web, usability, etc. but also about how to get to know better you creativity process, where your ideas come from, when you ideas come, how you accept that for one good idea you have there are many other that are complete shite and what you should do to filter the good ones and things like that. Also is good mentioning right up front that both of his books (The Art of Project Management and The Myths of Innovation) are very good sources of information, entertaining and educative. So, without getting much in the way of the ideas covered on this conference I’ll outline the main concepts that reververated on my mind and you think about them:

Combination: Ideas are made from other ideas.

Inhibition: As you remove unnecesary assumptions (fears included), your solutions become more creative

Environment: Each person has different triggers for being more or less creative. Discover the place where you are more creative, the time you are more creative. Where those moments of enlightment happen.

Persistence: If you do something creative, you’ll have a moment of uncertainty. If you fail, fail again, fail better till you get it right.

Hacks: This are pretty much some ideas he outlined to optimize the performance in the ones listed above:

• #1 Journal: Write down your thoughts. Even if it is the craziest inimaginable shit. Write it down, who knows it might help you later on if not, who cares.
• #2 Escape: Switch environments, dissasociation helps the inconscious to pop in and take over. One of the examples mentioned was that ideas sometimes come while you are in the shower.
• #3 Invert: Solve the opposite problem you were trying to solve. Or for instance, if you are working in project A and you get stuck, start working in Project B, if you get stuck on project B, keep going with Project A and so forth.
• #4 Partner: Find a partner or work together with someone. Ideas flow better between two than if you are alone. If you can’t find a partner, find a rival.
• #5 Fail: Take risks. Taking risk mean that subsecuently you’ll fail. If you are not failing you are not doing something creative or difficult. Again, fail, fail better.
• #6 Plan for roadblocks: Why did you ideas fail? Politics, loss of motivation, ran out of money, couldn’t convince key person, etc. Committ effort to overcome this ideas.
• #7 Switch modes: Ideas could be discovered visually, verbally, audibly, physically. If you are stuck, find a new way to represent the problem, using a different mode of communication.
• #8 Do something new: any field of study you know nothing about guarantees a new field of ideas. Find out about things you know nothing about.

Website: http://www.scottberkun.com/

Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll

Cameron’s presentation I would say it was ok. Not very intense, slow pace but quite informative. He pretty much cover key points of what he has written on his book, Mobil Web Design. He gave a bit of a historical overview between some of the major inventions till today to point how, from everything else, Mobile phones beat the records (2.7 billion of phones in 30 years!) Some of the key points on his presentation were:

• India has become the fastest cellular market in the world
• China recently added its 301-millineth subscriber, a number which exceeds the entire US population

How many people is accessing the web through phones?

• In the UK, 5 million people accessed the web with a mobile device compared to 30 million with a PC in January 2007
• In the US, 30 million compared to 176 million, same period
• In Japan, an estimated 53.6 million accessed the web with a mobile device in June 2007, nearly equaling the 53.7 million who accessed the web from a PC

So, what do we understand by mobile web?

• Fundamentally, ‘mobile’ refers to the user, and not the device itself or the application.
• Great design yields meaningful communication
• Mobile design is the discipline of communicating within an environment of mobility where context is king.
• Precisely target mobile users needs, making the best possible use of technology.

Then, what’s the best thing to do?

• Do nothing with you code. Keep alway present that the underlying standards for the web, regardless of device, person or place, are the same: semantic markup, separation of structure and presentation, accessibility, etc.
• Reduce images and styling
• Optimize the your content for the phone. Remember, context is king.

Website: http://www.cameronmoll.com

So, I’ll cut it here. I think is enough for a blog entry so far. Perhaps a bit more that conventionally done. So, stick around. I’ll write about the following to days of the conference soon.