Umamiblog

Chit Chats won with all 3 votes. (Suspected rigging)

Wasn’t playing the national anthems of both countries a little overboard?

Steven talked to us about simplicity, web standards, and spam. Admitted it wasn’t that closely related to the conference but important regardless. Good passionate speaker, NEEDS help with his slide design! Why must we see 20 bullet points on every page? What’s the point of us reading them and ignoring you?

Email is broken (badly!) but deserves to be saved. While the content isn’t the problem, it’s the consent that is. We don’t really know how broken it actually is.

Spam is like cancer, many different kinds, many different forms of treatment. No cure…

We need to accept that tolerance and mutual respect on the internet is dead, it’s gone.

We can look to the war that was won on the web with standards, from a vendor incompatibility and accessibility nightmare to today. Obviously lots of progress to go but that “only” took 5 years. Can we do something similar with email?

Kelly talked to us about designing for lifestyle. Great speaker, very engaging and interesting. I felt the content of the speech, while good, lacked structure or focus. Not sure where she was leading us or if she was just taking us for a ride. Still very good.

We can’t just ask users what they want, a few centuries ago people would’ve asked for stronger faster horses, they didn’t know to ask for the car.

Organisations profiled:
*Apple
*Google
*JetBlue
*TiVo

Very personable experiences. They’re personality driven.

Ok, so lets look into/at lifestyle oriented research. What can we learn? Focus groups just tell us what we *might* do. Key difference from the real world.

Know your audience, get out there. Get out there and understand what your customers actually think.

There are Apple’s EVERYWHERE!

Apparently geeks like these a lot, too!

Web standards, and why you should care.

Not a very good presenter, didn’t really offer any real reasons as to why we should care. The guy introducing her did a better job in 30 seconds… The only real reason offered was that your site will rank higher in search engines.

Maybe its just symptomatic of how far we’ve advanced that argument in Wellington. We’ve already dealt with these questions and issues with GWAGs – it’s old news. We’re looking for how we can take it that step further whereas Dori was still telling us to close all our <p> tags.

This session saw 8 speakers with 5 mins each, the highlights:

Philip from Shift: Rapidly prototype with Flash. Its easier, and more agile than in HTML.

Rachel from Heliocell: .NET *can* be used successfully for standards based apps. Communication is key.

Michael from Ruby on Rails core team: Full stack, convention over configuration. Happier developers

Robin from Acease: all of the info for all of the people all of the time.

Mark from Searchbots.net: Cool idea, check it out.

Steve from Abstract Engineerng: Centruflow – visualisation of team structure.

Theresa from Focus (Melbourne): Excellent speaker. Good design is elegant problem solving.

Sideshow Bob from Provoke: The times on the web are a changin;

Darren is a blind user from Australia, gave an excellent presentation showing the audience what is it like to navigate and use websites with a screenreader. An example website, one that he needed to use for his work had 70 down arrow keys just to get to the content of the website.

“No such thing as skim listening…”

“So what I normally do is leave”

“The day that the Sydney Morning Herald went online it enabled me to read the newspaper independently for the first time ever.”

One of the interesting points that was brought up was that we shouldn’t really need text-only versions of websites if the main site has been designed/developed well. It is just a duplicate.

There are also unseen benefits of making things accessible. Sydney Buses, we’re forced to be made accessible. Side benefit is that now all people are able to get on and off the buses even quicker – and that benefits everyone. I guess it’s emergence.

Joel Spolsky from Fogcreek Software, an excellent presenter who engaged the entire audience with humour . Talked about blue chip vs the off brand, iPod vs Creative, Angelina Jolie vs Sandra Bollock.

The key is to make people happy. Often the computer is deciding what you do, not the other way around. How does that impact on our emotions and feelings if we are not in control of the experience? Compare the checkout process on Abercrombie vs Amazon. Abercrombie where you must go through their process in a specific order and way. Amazon, where you can change things when you want, where you want in the checkout process.

Think about emotions!
Why do people feel safer in a SUV rather than a Camry even though they are twice as likely to die in a SUV?

Obsess over aesthetics! Style over comfort.
Why can Apple charge about 70% more for a product with less features. You can’t even change the battery.

Lipstick vs guts.
“The world is monumentally superficial”

Focus on happy comfortable people, not Java vs .NET.

JD doing a stellar job.

There are Threadless tshirts EVERYWHERE.

Apparently geeks like them, alot.

Doug Bowman of Stop Design talked to us on Common Structure. There is very little reuse on the web, we are constantly reinventing the wheel. Over and over again. Yet there are some common patterns. That might be with websites (blog, wiki, etc) or what they are used for (support, document list) of page patterns (contact, archive) or module patterns (header, footer, blogroll) etc.

We need to ask, seek, and document. There has been research into these patterns and whether they actually exist. 90% of sites use the id ‘footer’. Everything else is repeated, but no where near the same level.

You can approach patterns from the top down (page patterns and modules), or the bottom up (XHTML, microformats, etc) but there is still a gap where the two meet. Two types of grouping is proposed, to identify and to classify. We need to start simple, identify those common patterns, and reuse popular taconomy (footer, etc) and enable participation on a global level.

There is a hidden deep web that is HUGE. But missing out of the benefits that could be attained here.

Allowing users more (yes more!) control. Scary… but the “web is the web”. Nice.

Mike Brown from Web Standards NZ opened the conference stating that the web is at a crossroads now and we have the opportunity to exact real and positive change. That the key of this conference is to come away inspired.

Tim Berners-Lee has been asked to attend but couldn’t make it. Instead he sent a video message. Nice.