Tags: accessibility
Tue 23-Feb-2010
Day 1 of Webstock - Thursday 18 Feb. I saw the following presentations:
- Opening
- Web Design that Grabs People
- Brian does the Andrew Sisters
- Designing for Diversity
- Building The Open Web
- Security-Centered Design
- Fostering Personal Connection to Place
- Building Social Software for the Anti-Social
- Please, don't let it be interactive
- The Word Wild Web
Day 2 coming soon.
Opening and welcome
Mike Brown (@maupuia) opened Webstock 2010 by reminding us that we love working with the web, and that we fall in love with things made from love.
Web design that grabs people
Scott Thomas (@simplescott) was the design director for the Obama campaign. They wanted to use images people can be proud of, and to unify the design of the print and web media. A consistency and balance needed to be established in the messages, which had to be clear and concise. E.g. they focused on "We" rather than "He".
They made sure supporters could get everything they needed. The mission of the home page was to persuade people, but it also needed to make it easy to get localized information. As the campaign progressed the message of persuasion changed to fit the needs of the campaign.
Analytics are essential to understand how people are interacting with the site.
Brian does the Andrew Sisters
Brian Fling (@fling) gave a disappointing presentation. Communication 101 says that if the listener/reader doesn't understand then the speaker/writer has failed to communicate successfully. Brian's presentation covered the things he could have talked about; some of which looked very exciting. Sure, they were presentations he'd done before but they were new to most of us. Brian is clearly very articulate and knows what he talks about, but this presentation jumped everywhere and didn't allow any idea any depth. The bits I did get were:
- Focus on a single platform. The cost of supporting different devices is expensive.
- Build cross-platform mobile web applications. This lets you support a single framework.
- App stores like churn. To sell things you need to drive the viewers' attention.
Designing for Diversity - Inclusive Design & the User Experience
Lisa Herrod (@scenariogirl) reminded us design needs to cater for more that the obvious audience; shallow personas often miss accessibility characteristics. (I wish I got to use personas more, they're an important overlap with business analysis and design.)
Lisa also pointed out designers needs to work ethically. Without doing so, user experience is missing opportunities to be an inclusive experience.
One way to make the WCAG2 easier to apply, is to break the components down into the roles needed to perform them. A back-end developer doesn't need to know some of the elements a designer needs, and a front-end developer has a different set too.
Note to self: find out ways a business analyst can convince stakeholders that accessibility is an important quality-of-service requirement.
I got to talk more with Lisa over dinner that evening; Lisa, Lachlan, I, and a few others all went to La Casa Pasta for dinner before going on to Mighty Mighty.
Building The Open Web
Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy) started by reminding us what "open" means in relation to the web; that it is royalty and patent free; that it is supported by more than one vendor or provider; and that there is public involvement in the specification. Lachlan warned us to be aware of "open washing", the presentation of something as open when it isn't Open.
Lachlan then pointed out things become simpler for user when there is greater implementation of open technologies. An example is the linking of webfinger to OpenID to make is simpler for users to benefit from OpenID technology. I'll be adding webfinger to this domain.
People are able to implement these open technologies as if they are pieces in the puzzle. We don't know which pieces are missing, bus as these talk to each other gaps will be noticed. This is a good thing.
A big question raised with open technology is the issue of money. Lachlan reminded us that using open lets companies focus on the things they want to do, and not have to write security code to implement good security. The other advantage of open is not needing to pay the creators for their expertise.
Open can be profitable too, look how successful SilverStripe, a Webstock sponsor, is.
Security-Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behavior
Chris Shiflett (@shiflett) spoke about change blindness and ambient signifiers. Our brains are wired up to receive a lot of information, and to filter it down to the essential items. Change blindness is our inability to notice a change; our brain doesn't register it as important enough to focus on it. Ambient signifiers exist to bypass this blindness and let us know something has changed.
An example of an ambient signifier is a particular tune playing as the train pulls into each station. Travellers become familiar with the different tunes as their train passes each station, and are more aware of their stop.
This can be used online to improve web security by accommodating users' expectations and tendencies without trying to modify them.
He demonstrated the Colour-changing Card Trick. It's awesome.
Fostering Personal Connection to Place
Shelley Bernstein (@shell7) talked about making the Brooklyn Museum more accessible and understandable. They did this by
- Posting interesting content on the blog, with multiple bloggers providing content.
- Interacting with people via twitter and social media.
- Providing a kiosk enabling recording and uploading of comments to youtube.
- And learning from the feedback provided by visitors.
Stack Overflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social
Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) had a few points to make:
- Know your audience (programmers)
- Know your Topic (software code)
- Understand people's motivations (reduce bad code)
Rather than saying whether you can complete a task, ask yourself if you are motivated to do it in the first place. This is "Work" (paid for) vs. work" (inspiring to do).
Please, don't let it be interactive
Regine deBatty (@wmmna) took a very different direction to the other speakers, but considering her website looks at art using technology it was not surprising. Her main point was that interactivity in some art adds no value.
The Word Wild Web
Rives entertained us with his performance poetry and stories. From Kite, to the end, by way of explaining the selling of stolen wind chimes for Rubiks cubes; filming dancers; climbing cranes over New York; and other stories.
You should check him out at TED. The emoticon story is one he retold for us.
Day 2 coming soon. What was your experience of the Thursday speakers? Is there someone else I should have seen?
Sun 22-Feb-2009
What a week it's been at Webstock. I learnt a lot and I'll try to distil it here.
Webstock Workshops
Presentation Aikido, with Damian Conway, taught me to be competent, passionate, entertaining, prepared, stylish, interactive, and to be myself when presenting. Practice helps with all of these.
Data-mining and machine learning for social data, with Toby Segaran, opened my eyes to possibilities of learning more about our current customers.
Managing Humans and Projects, with Michael Lopp, taught me that there are 3 types of meetings: Alignment, where info is conveyed; Creation, where we brainstorm; and Therapy, where nothing useful will occur.He also taught me to state the obvious; it may not be obvious fro someone else; and that it's all about people.
Webstock Conference
Mike Brown's opening of the Conference was a great start.
Gaming Reality, with Jane McGonigal, taught me that predicting the future is less useful than designing possible futures, and working toward making the best happen. She also taught that games make us happy, and that good games amplify our potential.
Better, Stronger, Faster Failures, with Nat Torkington taught me that feedback loops lead to improvement, and failure is awesome because you learn and improve from it. To fail before the outcome of failure gets big.
The Wisdom of Communities, with Derek Powazek taught me that groups get stupid when they stop thinking, that we benefit more from large diverse groups than small groups, and that we should design to appeal to people's selfish nature.
Content, Communities & Collaboration, with Meg Pickard, taught me that people consume, react to, curate, and/or create content; that context has deposed content as being king; and that latent communities exist; that we go from being an audience to being participants to being a community.
Open, Social Web, with David Recordon taught me that social networks are currently isolated; that social application each do one good thing, and that good, interoperable, building blocks are being formed to allow us to easily build good, social sites.
A mashup case study: EveryBlock.com, with Adrian Holovaty, made we think of potential data that could freely add value to current products. (I'd still like to get up-to-date crime information to show in a map.)
Shepherding Passionate Communities, with Heather Champ, gave us rules:
- Respect your members
- Put more tools into the hands of your members
- Don't wait to make changes
- Feedback has a life-cycle
- Own your failures
- Make lemonade
- Embrace the chaos
Being Geek, with Michael Lopp, resonated as it covered how a geek relates to their surrounds, and how we can work with these traits.
The explicit, with Ze Frank, entertained with highlights of his projects. He showed how engaging with users, and showing the results of that, helps build communities and fans.
Content: Who's Doin' It Right?, with Russell Brown, taught us how big media is struggling to keep the reins of control on their information, and that the new generation is sidelining them.
Madame Butterfly On Accessibility, with Derek Featherstone, showed the problems that just meeting the accessibility guidelines is not enough, that we can do thing to make our sites even more accessible.
Your Business Plan Is Science Fiction – And That's a Good Thing, with Annalee Newitz, taught us that science fiction prepares us for the next generation of computers and technology; that it gives us the vocabulary to refer to the future products; and that we need to address the fears expressed.
Why Semantics?, with Toby Segaran, taught us what semantic data is, and how semantic models can give us fast access to data in sparse datasets. This provided additional insight into his data mining workshop earlier this week.
A retrospective of ballet classics Why Chrome?, with Ben Goodger taught us how and why Google created its Chrome browser, and it wanted to achieve.
The Demon-Haunted World, with Matt Jones, taught us how people are starting to build things form the bottom up, and to always design a thing by considering it's next largest context – chair to room to house to city….
Instrumenting your life, with Tom Coates, taught us that dealing with privacy should be used as a competitive advantage, that data, not technology is driving new products, the customers are the ones to decide whether something is personal or private (there is a difference).
The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0, And What Comes Afterward, by Bruce Sterling, taught me that attitudes about technology are vague; that sermons, rather than presentations, lose the interest of the audience; that you need to talk with the audience, not at them; that the message (and I believe it was important) can get lost with the delivery. Hopefully when I read it later I will get more out of it.
Web 2.0.1, with Damian Conway, was hilarious as expected. It had some important truths, including the need for a Hippocratic oath for web design.
I swear to:
- To learn and share good design practices
- And then do my best using those practices
- While avoiding the things I know to be fatal
- I will not pretend to be a specialist in technologies I know little about
- I won’t screw my clients (metaphorically)
- I will preserve my clients confidentiality
by 5 steps
- Help them to find you
- Help them to find it
- Help them to read it
- Help them to understand
- Help them to buy (or acquire) it
The standing ovation for Natasha Hall at the end of Webstock was well-deserved. I took a lot away from Webstock'09 and hope to be able to use it.
Other bits
I had a great time meeting people, putting faces to names, drinking lots of good coffee, meeting people, eating tasty ice cream, meeting people, playing the card game, and meeting people.
This was my experience with Webstock'09. What's yours?
