OSCON 07 Day 3
My ongoing adventures at OSCON 07, read day 2 here.
Day 3
Day three is the actual start of the conference, day 1 & 2 were in depth tutorials, so there is quite a bit of stuff happening today.
Here are the sessions that I attended:
Practical Design for Web Developers
This presentation was given by David Verba, Director of Technology, Adaptive Path, which surveys principals of visual design, interation design, information architecture, and user research.
Things to remember when designing site
- understand your users
- context
- motivations
- challenges
Interaction design is just as important as visual design
Five elements of design
- surface – What will the finished product look like?
- skeleton
- structure – How will the pieces fit together?
- scope – What features must the site include?
- strategy – What do we want to get out of the site?
Must meet your goals and your user’s needs
- know your stakeholders
- Site objectives
- Operation improvements
- Identity all of your users
** Talk to your users
Don’t try to be everything to everybody
Implementation Plan – make a promise to your users and deliver on it.
- select – core features
- fulfill – enrich feature set
- expand – move into new areas
Ecosystem of Applications
- Think modularly.
- Consistent granduarlity
- Make language on site for users, not corporate language.
- Consistency
4 principles of interaction design
- discoverability
- recoverability – reduce the cost of errors – help users not make errors)
- context – provide a sense of time meaning (bread crumb), keep users from bouncing around the site.
- feedback – provide clear error messages, not error numbers, provide feedback for ajax actions to users that something is happening or happened (yellow fade effect), make sure feedback from ajax actions are close to the users current place on the page, so they can see it.
The way the site looks matters! Visual design is important.
- Personality – formal business or fun web 2.0 design
- Non-designers design book
- CRAP
- contrast
- repetition
- alignment
- proximity
Links
http://www.adaptivepath.com/slides/oscon2007.pdf
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527341/
HREF Considered Harmful: Seaside and Rails
This presentation was given by Giles Bowkett, Enterprise Rails Developer / Project Manager, Bitscribe.
Seaside and Rails, two cutting-edge web frameworks, share a common design assumption. HREF is the modern GOTO. Just as GOTO was considered harmful for the straitjacket it placed on flow control, HREF limits web applications to trivial structures. Both Seaside and Rails are incredible frameworks, yet each has strengths the other can never duplicate. Looking at these strengths, and the design assumptions at the base of each framework.
Links
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/
http://www.bitscribe.net/
http://www.dabbledb.com
http://damien.cassou.free.fr/squeak-web/
Hacking with (and on) Gears
This presentation was given by Aaron Boodman, Google, Inc.
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that allows developers to build web applications that can run offline.
Demo on how to implement a Gears-enabled applications. Covered the fundamentals of the three major APIs, before delving into more interesting design questions such as synchronization and autoupdating.
Links
Google Gears code
YouTube presentation
http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/
http://gears.google.com/
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