On 7th – 8th July the Dev4Good hackathon kicks off, with a mission to get a group of very smart people together to do something cool, that has the possibility to change lives.

Organiser Craig Hogan set up the event as he felt there weren’t enough small hack events that are just for developers. “I decided to do Dev4Good to bring developers together – it gives people who mostly sit in a darkened room working on their own the chance to get together with others and build a real-world application.”

It’s a 24 hour event (sleep is optional) where you get the chance to work directly with some leading charities and some of the smartest developers in the UK. It’s a fast paced, ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ environment. No-one has any idea what the requirements/problems are until Friday evening, and two days later each solution is pitched to the judges. The winning team gets a load of swag from our sponsors and possibly some cash to continue the project with the charity.

There are no ties to any particular vendor or platform, everyone simply brings their skills, knowledge and passion for developing/designing good software. This is a ‘not for profit’ event and all code is available after the event for others to use.

If you a software/web/mobile developer (any platform), a graphic artist, designer, database admin, database developer or are just interested in helping build some cool applications and think you are interested in finding out more about this exciting event then register now.

Peter Gregson has a CV that any music or tech geek would be envious of. Having worked with companies including Microsoft, Google, MIT Media Labs, United Visual Artists, and musicians and composers including Peter Gabriel, Gabriel Prokofiev, and Scott Walker. He’s performed at Royal Festival Hall, SxSW, The Roundhouse and Latitude Festival, and next week will be delivering the keynote at Reasons to be Appy.

Why would a cellist be delivering a keynote at a design and development conference, I hear you ask? Well, Peter isn’t an everyday, commonplace cellist…

Take for example his two most recent works, goPlay and The Listening Machine. After spending years playing with his cello, sequencers and triggers, Peter wanted something that would play music in reaction to musical input, based on sets of musical rules and various input elements, instead of preprogrammed sequences. In essence, a free-thinking musical accompaniment app. The Listening Machine, on the other hand, is a dynamically shifting piece of music that reacts to the twitter data of 500 unknown tweeters, reflecting their mood, activity and subjects they’re discussing.

We caught up with Peter briefly when he got back from his most recent concert in Boston.

How did you first get into mixing tech with music?

It kept occurring to me that the cello had to come from somewhere – it didn’t seem possible that somehow innovation was over, so I set about using the things that were knocking around in my day to day life to create music that felt relevant: computers.

What will you be talking about at Reasons to be Appy?

I’m going to talk a little bit about technology and the arts, then rather than focus on The Future, I’m going to talk about The Present: what’s happening now, and why that’s exciting. Predicting the future is easy and pointless – I imagine it’s hard to be accountable if you’re a Futurist. I prefer to focus on work that is relevant today, so I’ll give a few examples of that and how/why they’re interesting to me

Can you tell us a little bit more about The Listening Machine

It’s a piece of music that runs for 6 months, directly controlled by the social dynamics of a group of UK tweeters. It plays continuously, so the issue of writing “potential music” for it was really exciting and a massive challenge – we map vowels, consonants, emotion, topic, place, theme and more to music – I’ll explain this properly in my talk!

We’re very excited about goPlay as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

It’s music controlling music – bringing chamber music into the 21st century. Baking the control of performable music into the music itself is very exciting – it’s brought back my curiosity and inquisitiveness in electronic performance/composition, and given we’re talking about music (not raw technology), that’s quite important!

The worlds of tech and arts seem to be colliding more and more recently, especially with things like CultureHack and Music Hacks cropping up all around the place. What are your thoughts on technology and the arts?

It’s only relatively recently that we’ve separated the two; I don’t really see it as a remarkable thing, I see it as more of a “back to basics” thing, but it does legitimise my love of new and shiny toys!

Peter will be delivering the keynote at next week’s Reasons to be Appy. Let us know what you though of his talk if you’re heading down!

A few months ago I met up with Peter Gregson, who we chatted to yesterday and is giving the keynote at Reasons to be Appy next week. Peter was very excited about a project he was knee-deep in at the time called ‘The Listening Machine’. ‘The Listening Machine’ is ostensibly a 6 month long piece of music that is dynamically generated (using pre-recorded live instruments) based on the conversations of 500 people on Twitter. That is, the music will shift and change based on elements including volume of tweets, sentiment and topic area. It launched last week with some nice coverage from the likes of Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and Scientific American, and makes for some rather lovely background music.

At first I thought this was another example of art for art’s sake, pushing technology and arts to the limits to see what can be achieved (which I applaud, as it’s usually these projects that inspire other people to more awesome stuff). It was only when I was chatting to someone about the project, and they referred to the project as ‘data auralisation’ that it really got me thinking (thanks Tassos for the inspiration!).

Data visualisation has become the buzz word of the late 2000s, with infographics becoming almost de rigour for anything web 2.1 and Dave McCandless being heralded as the best thing since sliced bread. Whilst I still love the odd infographic and practically worship the ground Mr McCandless walks on, I’m waiting to be excited by the next big thing.

With data visualisation, you can package data in digestible formats for just about anyone to understand , appreciate and work with. However, while it makes it easy to data snack without having to dig your head in stats for days at a time, it’s still something you need to actively look at. However, with something like The Listening Machine, sentiment, volume of tweets and topics can be monitored as background noise. Replace the source and what you have is an aural dashboard that’s as unintrusive as possible… Something you can tune in and out of, and train your ear to listen out for warning signs.

This concept of interpreting data as sound, as opposed to visuals, like we feel fine, has got me rather excited of late. I’ve been working on a few dirty hacks myself that can hopefully see the light of day soon, but I’m having just as much fun playing with other people’s data auralisations, like MTA.me (aka Conductor), which takes the New York Subway trains and turns them into string instruments. What can you pull together with live data and sound?

Thanks to everyone who came along to our first Windows 8 camp in Manchester – it was a perfect summer’s evening where beer gardens and ice cold lager beckons… instead you all sat in a blazing hot room and sweated with the Ubelly team to learn about developing Windows 8 apps. Nice one!

So why come along? Mainly to find out more about Windows 8 (surprise!) because, in the words of one attendee, it’s “exciting dev stuff”. Front end web dev James Rand. from Blueleaf, uses a Mac and Komodo as his weapons of choice, but seeing a Windows 8 demo at FOWD piqued his interest: “I’m interested in the possibilities of Windows 8 and the fact I can use what I already know – I don’t have to learn something completely new. That’s what drew me to find out more – I’m utilising my existing skills and building on them.”

If you fancy finding out more then come along to the next camp in Brighton.

Register for the Brighton Windows 8 Camp – 14 June 2012

Resources

• Windows 8 Developer Centre- all the downloads, latest news, updates, forums and support
• Windows 8 Developer Tools
• Windows 8 Design Assets
• Building Windows 8– an inside look from the Windows engineering team
• Channel 9– video tutorials and product information from Microsoft
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview forum– need help? Try here.
• Windows 8 Developer Linked In Group – got an idea for an app? Join the Windows 8 developer group on Linked In to get your app into the Windows Store.

A few weeks back, I headed to the west country for Bath’s Digital Festival. It was there that I first met Intohand‘s Kieran Gutteridge. Kieran ran one of the afternoon workshops (which was fantastic) at the Big M, sharing his knowledge gained from specialising in developing for “anything with a small screen and a SDK”. I caught up with him a few weeks back to talk Windows Phone, the pros and cons of web vs. native apps, why the UK might not produce the next Instagram and a lot more…

Hi Kieran! For those of the readers unfamiliar with your background; who are you, what do you do and what’s your background? Kieran Gutteridge, co-founder and CTO at Intohand. I work with a great team who deliver applications primarily to the small screen; we are platform agnostic and have (just this year) delivered applications for iOS, Android, HTML5, Blackberry and Qt.
I started off in the comparatively dark days of making games for Java mobile, where I became fully aware of the ‘write once test everywhere’ paradigm. However, a lot of the lessons learned such as global distribution, localisation of content, dealing with device fragmentation and software updates are still very much applicable today.

How has the smartphone changed your life in the past few years? Even as someone who has written “apps” before the iPhone, I still find the recent app store explosion and some of the apps amazing – I probably download a new one each day to take a look at what’s being done. I would be regularly lost without Google maps, to the point where I wrote an offline map for personal use on holiday last year!

Given the rise in prominence of the smartphone (and mobile devices in general), what do you think the next 12 months will hold for how we use computers (mobile or otherwise)? I think mobile – and tablets in particular – are giving us a new way of manipulating and visualising data and even more importantly humanising technology for “non-techies”. People who can deliver real business value to an organisation, from my perspective are starting to see these devices as much more of an essential tool rather than an occasional means to play games and browse the internet on.

With the current limitations of web apps, do you see native apps continuing their dominance for their foreseeable future? What’s going to shift the balance? I am a big believer in open technologies. As a collective we can use open things to accelerate the ball going forward rather than a large mass attempting to solve the same niche problem; which may only really affect techies.
Back in the Java Mobile days, it seemed everyone (including myself) had a go at writing a framework to assist with porting/ fragmentation – we probably spent as much time on the frameworks as we did pushing the state of the art. Therefore I have a fondness for the web – however, I think we get too hung up on the ‘native vs. web‘ arguments that only interest the 3% of people involved in producing this stuff! So I have started to take a simpler line, pick the correct tool for the job and always be evaluating: it’s certainly not black and white and I think we will see more hybrid apps in the future, especially as Javascript, rendering engines, GPUs and CPUs continue to improve on mobile devices.

As Apple and Google have avoided signing up to the W3C Community Group, do you think we’ll see more OS’ like Mozilla’s B2G being developed until Apple/ Google relinquish their grip on appstores (which is ultimately causing them to drag their feet at the moment)? Years ago, as web developers, we all wanted to develop for the shiny new features in IE 6… Which has now become a dirty word.
Mobile Appstores are rapidly becoming like warehouses so I think they will be surpassed by the evolving market and customer needs before long. Standardisation is great but it shouldn’t be used as a defence against innovation. Let’s make use of tools and techniques like Modernizr and fallback gracefully and deliver for the here and now!

What’s going to be the most exciting advance in the mobile space in the next year or so? It’s a hard question as the market is so fluid. Every time I have been asked this question I always say the same, so at the risk of sounding like a stuck record I’ll say the same again: NFC. I am almost certain we will see more interesting advances with augmenting other consumer electronics such as TVs and Cars with data and processing from mobile devices and tablets.

What’s your thoughts on technologies like QR codes and NFC? What potential do you see either/ both having on how we interact with technology in the real world? The current use of URLs for QRs and providing payment solutions for NFC is not where I see these technologies becoming interesting. We can do so much more with them that solve people’s problems (e.g. bump’s image uploading demo [whilst using neither technology, shows a great demo of a "NFC type" solution] – or QRPedia providing people a means to access localised wikipedia entries).

How do you think the UK startup ecosystem is doing these days; can London produce the next Instagram? What (if anything) does the UK have that the Valley doesn’t? I hate to say it but I think we probably can’t produce consumer hits like the next Instagram, as you would need some very risk-friendly capital in the early stages before they [UK startups] gained traction. However, the ecosystem in the UK is very vibrant – and not just contained in London – particularly around mobile; where when accessing global markets is important.
It’s perhaps easier to be in a mix of different speaking nationalities within London and the UK. Whilst being more risk averse, I’d like to think the UK is better at creating sustainable long term business. I sometimes wonder whether perhaps the grass just looks greener, certainly even for myself the lure of Silicon Valley appeals, but Europe has produced some great services in recent years such as Skype, Spotify, Last.fm [to name just a few! - ed] etc.

How much time have you spent developing with the new Windows Phone OS? What are your thoughts? Unfortunately not that much time, the iOS platform (which is where we see the most demand) has meant a migration to OSX. I do think Microsoft are very good at providing tooling and the necessary ecosystem for developers, which some of the other more mature platforms really struggle with. With Xbox, they have the experience in delivering a consumer experience and hopefully are in it for the long haul and will help stir up the market some more, from which we consumers and developers will benefit from greatly.

Where you see WP fitting in with iOS, Blackberry OS and Android in the future? For smartphones I think iOS has taken the top end of the market for the foreseeable future, everything else feels as though it’s playing catch up. On single points, the others can all claim to do something better – Android’s intents and content provider system is something I still feel is under used. WP will probably continue to innovate around the UI and home convergence space and produce great hardware with partners such as Nokia.

You can find Kieran on Twitter or catch up on more of his work on his personal blog. Let us know what you thought of his interview in the comments below or get in touch on Twitter. If you want to have a chat about the interview or anything else you can also Shortmail me!

I’m lucky enough to have been to Disney Land in Florida. I was reluctant at first, but the whole experience was amazing. It was mainly down to the extraordinary care and attention that had been given to the customer experience, from the second you walk into the park until you leave (and it stays with you).

Richard Shepherd, front end lead for vouchercodes.co.uk talked about how he stumbled across Marty Sklar and his book ‘Mickey’s Ten Commandments’. Marty was The Walt Disney Company’s International Ambassador for Walt Disney Imagineering, the part of Disney which designs and constructs the Disney theme parks and resorts across the world.

Mickey’s Ten  Commandments are the bible of great customer service  – and Richard noticed for this bible you could translate this as ‘great user experience’ on the web. Here’s how:

1. Know your audience

Simple!

2. Wear your guest’s shoes

Don’t forget the importance of emotional, human factor in designing your app. We have an innate need to connect with other humans but, paradoxically, often shy away from human contact. However Facebook allows us to share emotional experiences and connect online in a way we feel is safe. Why create emotional connections through web apps? We have an emotional memory for events that are either very good – or very bad. If we can create emotional experiences for users they’ll remember them and even form a connection with them. We can do this by humanising our apps (‘I made this!’). Make people smile! Put you app in context – like the Pocket app (‘When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket’). Rdio does the same thing, putting the app in the centre of their customer’s world, visually and by using direct language. If you look at the simplehoney travel site it takes the user on a journey, putting users in holiday mode as soon as they start interacting. The UX creates an emotional connection and primes the user to buy. Tactics like sequencing (chunking down the steps a user needs to make) remove the barriers to purchase.

3. Organise the flow of people and ideas

What’s your story? What does your app represent? If you don’t give your app a personality then your users will give you one – and you probably won’t like it. How do you get personality into your app? Take a leaf out of Wufoo’s book – the language used and overall experience makes users aspire to be someone who uses it regularly. It proves you can maintain professionalism and still have a personality. So does mint.com. Check out Aaron Walter’s templates for design personas – they’re a great way to start.

4. Create a weenie

Richard made sure he clarified what a weenie is – apparently it’s a visual landmark to let customers know where they are. So now you know.

5. Communicate with visual literacy

Apps should be beautiful. Of course they should … but why? Don Norman, co-founder and principle of the User Experience/Usability consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group, said ‘Attractive things work better…’ We can understand this in the context of depth versus breadth processing. Depth first is when you’re anxious, laser focussed – when we’re stressed we focus deeply on one problem, to the detriment of everything else. In contrast, breadth first is a hit of dopamine – your app is making people laugh, it’s helping them make connections, to remember your app and ultimately find it easy to use.

6. Avoid overload and create turn-ons

Let customers choose what they want, when they want it. Delighters (turn-ons) are the fun parts. They put people in a positive state and create or reinforce personality. At vouchercodes.co.uk they decided to personalise their email subscription page – with a fun element. The email features a member of staff’s picture. If a customer de-selects subscriptions she starts to put her coat on. It a surprisingly simple tactic that really works – people don’t want to see her put her coat on so stop unsubscribing. On the Kickstarter site you’ll find a pair of scissors at the bottom of the page. They serve no real purpose, but if you click on them they cut the bottom of the page off. It’s just fun! And the one we’ve all done, MailChimp – type ‘boredom’ into the search bar and a game of Asteroids takes over the page. But only if you’re signed in

7. Tell one story at a time

If you overload your users it can backfire and you may become a victim of what Barry Schwartz termed ‘The paradox of choice’. We want choice – but only so much, otherwise we get paralysed by too many decisions, even worrying about choosing the wrong option. The Flickr menu presents users with no less than 57 choices. Compare that with Skyscanner that gives users only 10 options to choose from. The trick is to set smart defaults and reduce the number of options your user has.

8. Avoid contradictions and maintain your identity

Go beyond the browser and think about the whole experience from the minute the user enters your site or accesses your app to when they get the product/service they ordered. Order something from Mr Porter and you’ll get your clothes delivered in a beautiful white box encased in tissue paper. Wufoo send hand-written notes to subscribers thanking then for their business. Both of these companies take their online personality into the real world to provide a deeply personal customer service.

9. For every ounce of treatment, provide a ton of fun

Give your customers something – reward them for using your app or website. Take Codecademy as an example – they reward users with a badge for doing something right. And you can share it.

10. Keep it up!

Ask your users for feedback and measure the impact of what you’re doing. UX serves the business – it’s not part of the process, it is the process.

So why is great UX important? It allows us to have an emotional experience online. It makes users like and recommend your app. One final thought from Richard: aim for excellence! Take ‘like’ and turn it into love.

Resources

• Windows 8 Developer Centre – all the downloads, latest news, updates, forums and support
• Windows 8 Developer Tools
• Windows 8 Design Assets
• Building Windows 8 – an inside look from the Windows engineering team
• Channel 9 – video tutorials and product information from Microsoft
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview forum – need help? Try here.
• Windows 8 Developer Linked In Group – got an idea for an app? Join the Windows 8 developer group on Linked In to get your app into the Windows Store.

Future Of Web Design London is a fantastic yearly conference which I’ve attended for the last four years, and this year I was incredibly lucky to also speak on the Track 2 stage.

As I do with most conferences, I live-tweeted all the sessions that I saw, and I’ve compiled these into a Storify stream for those who want a blow-by-blow account of my conference experience. This post is more of a digest, what I found to be the themes and threads running through the two conference days.

Unfortunately I could only cover the sessions I attended. As there were two tracks I missed some brilliant talks. Those I did make it to were:

• Notes On Design – Brendan Dawes
• Client-centric Web Design – Paul Boag
• Art Direction vs The Web – James Fenton
• Inform To Inspire: Perfecting Your Creative Workflow – Stephanie Troeth
• Web Typography: The Good Bits – Jon Tan
• Creating Wonderful Web App UX – Richard Shepherd
• Dr Weblove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Web – Remy Sharp
• You Are A Channel – The Standardistas
• A Responsive Process – Steve Fisher
• The Future of CMS: A Million F#%ing Dollar Web Project?! – Paul Bellows
• Organising Your Stylesheets – Chris Eppstein
• Failing and Doing It Well – Mark Boulton

In which I get a bit meta

On Day Two of the conference, the Standardistas gave a lovely and inspiring talk, ‘You Are A Channel’, in which they spoke about how we mold our knowledge and ourselves as individuals, where we want to be in life (and in our careers), and how we can use our values and output to get ourselves to where we want to be in a way that is true to our individuality.

When speaking about how we ‘are what we eat’ in terms of the input and output of ideas, inspiration and information, the Standardistas gave the example of being a cow vs being a squirrel. A squirrel will continually collect nuts throughout the year, creating many stores for winter, but when winter comes they will only be able to remember a few locations of the stores and most of those nuts will go to waste. This is like those of us who continually add bookmarks and images to ‘favourites’, collections and ‘Read it later’ services. We may bring all of this information together, but very rarely do we actually go back to these silos and actually get the value from them that we originally intended.

The cow, however, is continually grazing on the small amounts of grass that it needs. As a by-product of this nutrition, the cow is frequently producing milk that makes cheese which is not the same as grass, but is very nutritious to others in a different way. This was a lesson in how we should masticate our information. We shouldn’t take on more than our minds can manage, and we should synthesise the information to increase our understanding and make ourselves into better designers.

And how is this meta?

Well this synthesis is just what I try to achieve through my digest posts. Live tweets are really a way of sharing with others, and a form of quick note-taking. I directly share what I hear and throw these nuts out on Twitter. When I first wrote a digest mindmap after dConstruct in 2010, I was trying to get my head around the ideas that were shared with me.

It reminds me of those reading comprehension tasks you have in English lessons when you’re in primary and early secondary school. You’ll have to read a short story, and then are asked to write about a particular theme or element in that story to prove that you understood it. Now I’m not trying to prove anything, but I do find that the process of trying to connect the dots, link the themes and ideas, helps *me* better understand the ideas of the speakers, and helps me understand how I can use this information to make myself a better designer.

The fact that I blog this stuff? That’s the kick I need to actually get on and digest it. Well, that and I love being able to share what I’m lucky enough to experience with other people.

Craft and Care

One of the overarching themes of Future Of Web Design this year was definitely craft and care. In yourself, with clients or bosses, in your design and development work; as Mark Boulton expressed, having a passion and love for what you do and putting it into your work should be more important than time scales and money. Time limits and worrying about getting paid makes a project much harder to love.

Craft and Care: Yourself

As I mentioned in my meta opening, the Standardistas really focused around the craft and care you put into understanding yourself and your learning. The more you take time to be selective about what information you put into yourself, and the more time you take to assess which of your values are important to project to others, the easier you will achieve your goals and become a better designer.

Brendan Dawes really started off the theme of the value of the individual with an amazing quote he’d heard from Aimee Mullins:

Own what it is that makes you different

The thing we must remember when we’re starting work is you’re bringing *you* to the project. This was a great way to start the conference, empowering the designers, reminding us all that we’re not just an extension of Photoshop or Fireworks, we have value in ourselves.

Brendan also extended the consideration of craft to the world around us, reminding us not to get complacent about everyday things. Not only should we seek inspiration from our surroundings, we should give everyday objects the respect and acknowledgement they deserve, they only became so widely used because they’re such good design.

Craft and Care: in design

Richard Shepherd provided what I think was my absolute favourite thought of the conference:

Great user experience is taking our human desire to please other people and putting it into our apps and sites

Through the theme of craft and care, I see the care in design as being the consideration of user experience. User experience really is something greater than web design; web design is a small part of the experience of a product, but is also the single most important factor in the design of a website.

Both Richard Shepherd and Chris Jones (who won the FOWD Factor five minute talk competition) spoke about using humanity in experience design. Chris’s talk focused around the question “is it human?” and how important it is to consider this when designing or copywriting. Chris talked about something which Brendan Dawes had also mentioned; sometimes we get so immersed in tech, we forget that everything we’re doing is actually for real users.

Craft and Care: in development

Chris Eppstein discussed true craft in CSS development, talking about his experience working on caring.com. Chris pointed out that CSS frameworks aren’t the solution to unmanageable CSS, because CSS isn’t the problem, the developer is the problem.

It was clear that Chris is a true craftsman of CSS as his whole talk was focused around staying true to meaningful, semantic, well-structured HTML, and layering the CSS on top. Being realistic, Chris showed that some HTML needs to acknowledge the structure required by CSS and how he then opts for consistency over flexibility of markup.

As an advocate of SASS and Compass, Chris spoke about how these tools can make CSS stylesheets cleaner, and built upon reusable components, but he really ensured that the audience knew that these were only ways to enhance upon a solid CSS foundation which is well-named, structured, documented and regularly refactored.

The right tool for the job

Much of the talk at FOWD mentioned the tools of our trade. The emphasis however was always on remembering that tools are merely tools, and that our processes are really defined by us, not the apps that we use. In my talk on flexible web design I tried to share my thoughts on how we don’t have the right tools for responsive design, but we don’t necessarily need a killer app, it’s more about us understanding the processes and tools that make us most creative as individuals.

Steve Fisher summed it up better than me in a tweet during the IT/Web Education think tank discussion when he said:

Tools don’t produce great design, people do.

Jon Tan gave an overview of typography on the web, describing how we can learn to best use typography design to give structure and meaning to text. As designers we often think we’re being intuitive in our work, but usually there’s a reasoning behind it based on experience or fact.

Paul Bellows’s talk was a fantastic walkthrough of the problems that CMSs have trying to keep up with the future of web content, and more importantly, the CMS user. Paul pointed out that there are things that CMSs have done for years, but they don’t necessarily correlate with how ordinary people work. If you’ve done it right, a CMS must be sustainable, you get as much (or more) out of it as you put into it and it allows ordinary people with ordinary intelligence solve complex problems. A CMS is *just* a tool.

Both the Standardistas and Steve Fisher spoke about how vital it is to better understand what we do in order to grow as designers and design more effectively. Everyone knows *what* we do, most know *how* we do it, but very few people know *why*.

The definition of web design

It’s an exciting time to be a web designer, and there was a lot of buzz going round the conference about what actually constitutes web design. Steve Fisher said that he believes in as little as a year’s time, responsive web design will just be referred to as ‘web design’ because it will become the norm.

James Fenton also emphasised that graphic design on the web isn’t about adding pretty images. It’s about what we use to make our content easier to use and understand.

In my talk I tried to emphasise the importance of content in web design. Without real content, we are just decorating random text (such as Lorem Ipsum!) not creating anything of any use.

Content is king

Steve Fisher spoke about how a website is a black hole without content in it, and we seemed to forget that for a few years. Well-structured content makes a good website. And the structure is more important when you’re manipulating it responsively, which is why we’re starting to understand how central content is to our work all over again.

Process

The problem with a lot of design conferences past was that they could lose focus on design themes, and fall into predictable talks on web development trends. Luckily FOWD continued a run of recent conferences I’ve attended which ignored these kinds of talks and there was a lot more on interesting design theory, particularly around process.

Especially with the advent of responsive design, we not only need to revise our processes, but also examine what we’ve done in the past in order to formulate new better ways of working.

Ideas and problem-solving

Stephanie Troeth really lead the way on the process discussion talking about how to understand our creative workflow and find the most effective ways to trigger ideas. Stephanie explained how we can get too attached to ideas, and we can feel ownership of our ideas and price them at more than they’re worth. What we really need to do is let our ideas out, ensure they’re not being restricted by our surroundings.

Stephanie spoke a lot about the formulation of ideas as part of the problem-solving process and how framing a problem is the key to understanding it; working out who, what, why, how? Stephanie ended on the ultimate point that the creative process is not an assembly line, we can’t just push out great ideas but we must be heartened that the inspiration is in our hands.

Steve Fisher’s talk covered a huge amount on process. Steve spoke about the importance of research and exploration, explaining how understanding the story is an important part of the discovery stage of a project, it informs our decisions later on. In the strategic direction phase, all the information from the discovery phase is brought together, this helps define the project. The design phase is from sketching to working in-browser and everything in-between, particularly in the case of responsive design where working in-browser is even more significant than before.

Steve had an interesting point in that ‘visual design’ is really just a term used for clients. We know that this stage of the design process is so much more than that, and a culmination of so many stages that went before. Steve pointed out that really the significance of identifying a ‘visual design’ stage is the knowledge it comes later on. Following on from Stephanie Troeth’s talk, it’s understanding that the solution to the problem can only come after we’ve identified the problem itself.

Pattern Libraries and Style Guides

Steve Fisher, James Fenton and I all mentioned using pattern libraries and style guides as part of a solution when trying to express design ideas in a way that can be translated easily into responsive design. Steve explained how style tiles and guides help avoid designing for specific widths. They can help us get an idea for how elements work together.

Feedback and communication

Designer-developer relationships

Remy Sharp’s talk was incredibly popular, broaching many of the issues that developers have when dealing with designers. Remy explained that there’s an huge issue where designers and developers don’t talk to each other and just throw problems over the wall. This often ends in frustration on both sides and a suffering project, and Remy explained how the key to solving it really mostly good communication.

Of course, Remy suggested that learning to write code is the best way to try to understand where a developer is likely to come across problems, but he also gave list of solutions to common developer pain-points that designers should bear in mind when trying to make a developer’s life easier:

• Show hover states in your mockups
• Show where the error message would go if there’s an error
• Show what the logged-in state looks like if there’s a log in box
• Where complicated graphics are concerned consider if they can be made into sprites to accommodate dynamic text
• Use grids! That gives the development some structure and hopefully some reusable components
• Be wary of the fonts you use FLICK isn’t good tightly kerned!
• When using custom fonts, choose a custom font with an open license, so it can be embedded

With clients

Paul Boag gave a brilliant talk advocating client work, and ways to improve relationships with clients through client-centric web design. I was cheering from the front as I *love* working with clients. It’s not right that the ‘cool’ designers do products and the poor designers do client work.

Paul believes that getting our attitudes sorted out when working with clients is a big part of client communication, and it will give us more job satisfaction. At some stage on all client projects, we tend to have times where we feel like clients are ruining our designs but the client must be involved. We provide a service, we don’t just build websites, we provide a whole customer service experience and that should involve good communication with the client!

Controversially, Paul stated that client work was not about the user needs, but the client needs. I could see where he was coming from in terms of paying the bills, but not really in creating a better web! However Paul pointed out that there is generally an overlap between business needs and user needs, and only occasionally will there be a conflict between the two, at which point you must make a sensible decision (where he errs on the side of the client!)

Richard Shepherd gave somewhat conflicting advice when he stated that a good user experience *serves* business goals. It’s vital to success that the users feel a connection with our sites and apps which encourages use.

Paul Boag also discussed how sensitive our egos can be when designing for clients, and if a client has a good idea, don’t reject it because of your ego! James Fenton also briefly touched on democratising design and involving other team members and clients, using their ideas rather than being ruled by aesthetic decisions.

Critique

Mark Boulton spoke about feedback when working on a project. Mark had the idea that you’ll get more truthful feedback if someone doesn’t think you have spent much time on your mockup. And that this is where sketches are beneficial over more polished prototypes.

Leading on from online discussion over the last week or so, Mark also talked about critiques. Mark explained that design critique is not personal and not a dig; it’s a comment on the work, in public, and a conversation. This seemed like a good way to end the conference, a reflection on how we can use all that we’ve learnt to help each other grow as designers too. The benefit of working on the web is that we’re all part of a greater community all striving to make the web as universal and as good an experience as possible.

Bill ‘Frickin’ Buxton (as coined by Josh Clark) spoke at Future of Web Design this year on the social network of devices. In essence his talk focussed on the state of play when it comes to device interaction, and some thoughts, problems and procedures associated with interaction design in the future. In Bill’s eyes, it’s all about making technology transparent and interaction seamless in everyday life. That is, you shouldn’t have to worry about technology in different concepts, and if you can see the machine/computer/motors in what you’re doing, then the design is broken.

However, it wasn’t the talk that inspired this post, but something that Bill said in response to a question after the talk. An audience member asked about the problems that we face with technological hurdles (like processing power, memory and battery) when it comes to creating experiences across devices and contexts.

In response, Bill told a story about a watch he owns. It’s a small Casio watch with a capacitive touch screen that allows direct input onto the face of the watch to access information. For example, if he wanted to know what 1+2 was, he would draw ‘1’, ‘+’, ‘2’, ‘= and the watch would show ’3’. If he wanted to look up a phone number, he’d start to draw the name of the person he was searching for. This is an intuitive and well designed piece of technology that Bill bought in 1984. Earlier in his talk, Bill made the comment that technology takes 20 years to go from invention to commercial visibility. That is, the technology that is heralded as new and cool now is actually 20 years old, and the things that are built today won’t be seen in the mainstream till 2032. In Bill’s words, “the only processing problem we face today is up here in our brain, with our creative process.”

It’s an interesting concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot. We’re currently in an age where almost anything is possible with technology. However, the real challenge is in the ideas and the creativity attached to coming up to what can be done with the technology.

It’s an incredibly inspiring thing to think on, and is something that makes me incredibly excited, especially with all the crazy, cool, wonderful things that come out of hacks and hack days. However, I believe that as developers and designers, we need to start looking outside our own fields. This is where I see hack days focussed around non-tech areas (like Music Hack Day, Culture Hack and Culture Code) as incredibly exciting opportunities where non-tech people and tech people come together, come up with ideas together, and build things together…

Now that technology isn’t standing in the way of the possibilities, it’s time to make something awesome. Get out there and do it.

We’re down at Future of Web Design today blogging, sketchnoting and showing people Windows 8 on the Ubelly stand. Carsonified have yet again done a brilliant job at bringing in some of the best speakers in the industry to talk about app and web design, including Brendan Dawes, Bill Buxton, Remy Sharp and Jon Tan.

To celebrate FOWD, we’ve had a cool little Kinect hack built by nUbelly-er Syd Lawrence especially for the design crowd. Syd’s created an HTML Helvetica or Arial quiz, using Kinect as the pointer and running in IE10. It’s a cool little experiment in what you can do connecting Kinect and web technologies, and shows some of the possibilities of Windows 8 and IE10.

More importantly, it’s a cheeky way of testing designers on something that a lot of people are a little bit passionate about. So far we’ve had only a handful get above 8/10, and so far I’ve only seen the formidable Jon Tan get a perfect score (well, he did cofound FontDeck…).

If you’re down at FOWD, why not come down and give it a go. While you’re there, quiz Syd on how he built it, and have a chat to Martin or Andrew about the other cool stuff you can do with HTML & JS, and Windows 8 & IE10. If you aren’t down here, Syd will be doing a writeup of how he built the app, and we’ll have a slightly updated version for Reasons to be Appy later in the month!

James Fenton, Digital Art Director with Tribal Group focused on the concept of art direction in print versus the web. Constraints are put on the user on the web – constraints like usability, compliance, bandwidth… essentially it’s a more complex medium than print. Images tend to be supplementary rather than integral. The only thing you can control as far as art direction on the web is semantics. A bigger constraint on the web is bandwidth. James referenced Irish academic, journalist and writer, John Naughton, who wrote an article called ‘Graphic Designers have ruined the web’, arguing that the fact images on many websites make countless calls to the server slows the sites responsiveness and therefore ruins the whole experience. He cites Peter Norvik’s homepage as preferable to more ‘beautiful’ websites. James conceded Naughton makes some good points but his assumption is that people know the content and also that graphic design is only about pretty pictures. There are small things you can do with CSS, for example, that make a huge difference to how users interact with the content.

James reinforced the idea that art direction on the web is a curation exercise. It’s about signposting to information and creating a space to view content. It’s important to make that space as neutral and non-distracting as possible. That’s not to say you can’t direct the audience through the space by signposting and way finding. Pinterest demonstrates this way finding, providing a space to show the content. The design is minimal, but there’s clear navigation and it typifies the whole curation exercise. Personal art direction is achievable in the small scale but across large corporations it’s more difficult. Hence the use of brand guidelines. However brand guidelines have traditionally been used for print – brands that have been born on the web are much more flexible.

So how do you evolve your brand guidelines for the web? At Tribal they have created a brand toolkit to accompany the guidelines, including:

• An icon library to provide visual signage with consistent metaphors throughout the site
• To manage the icons and prevent duplication they use the principle of image sprites that make just one call to the server and can be shared across a number of products. Logos and other brand elements are also included to make changes easier across a number of websites
• In sharing source assets you need design etiquette, so Tribal has created a library of UI patterns, forms, tables etc to prevent duplication
• Code snippets – they have chunked out code snippets of the HTML and accompanying CSS shared in a central place – this creates consistency across the brand

James ended the session by defining 5 core principles for the web:

1. Define the vision through a clear brief and guidelines

2. Be flexible and ready to embrace change

3. Aim for consistency in the quality of experience

4. Share assets and ideas

5. Democratise the design