An Event Apart 2006
- 18 September 2006
- Bell Harbour Conference Center
- Talk Notes: http://aneventapart.com/slides/seattle06/
- Frank Fujimoto
An Event Apart is for people who design, write, and code web sites.
Talks
Hardcore CSS
Most of this talk revolved around different CSS techniques one can use which go beyond the basics. One interesting point to me was that the <html> and <head> blocks aren’t special as far as browsers are concerned, other than the fact they happen to be hidden with display: none. If you want, you can expose them in CSS.
Another interesting topic he covered was styling tables. Styling them is very difficult, especially with the different levels of support the browsers have. Styling columns is particularly difficult, unless you class each cell in the column. Since a table is just a nested set of objects, it’s possible to completely override how it looks and completely change its appearance (make a table into a bar graph, for instance).
“One True Layout”
The One True Layout is a concept which showed up late last year and created quite a buzz in the CSS world. Its basic premise is that you can reorder columns any way you please with just CSS markup. You can also create equal-height columns, although the support for that is less universal.
These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For
This talk covered relationships with clients, and how it’s benefical that the relationship be a good one. Part of what you can do is make sure that your clients are good ones (not in a rush). No matter what kind of client you have, however, you need to make sure you have a process, and go through it calmly and methodically. Zeldman says to make sure you have a good relationship with a client even before you begin to show them designs.
Zeldman also says that it’s important how you respond to criticism. You can ask for more specifics (“That color is ugly.” “What don’t you like about it?”), try to explain your motive (“That button is too big.” “We were responding to research that showed users don’t know what to do when they get to this page.”) He then cited Dan M. Brown (author of Communicating Design) who says when all else fails, either gently push back, say “We’ll look into it” (and then do so), or just agree with the client.
Textism (Writing the User Interface)
The main point of this talk is all copy (text) on a page is important. Even things as small as the text used for links. The reasoning is the content drives traffic.
I found his most interesting point in this talk was that the web is a completely different medium than print, in that web pages have to guide the eye and grab a reader’s attention. Even people who like to read end up just scanning web pages, so it’s important to break text up into chunks, and have frequent, descriptive subheads.
Solving (Re)Design Problems
Jason was in charge of redesigning the A List Apart web magazine. When doing a redesign, it’s important to look back and see what wasn’t working, rather than just redesigning for a new look. In other words, designing is problem solving.
At one point Jason tried making the page be fully fluid (adjusting to width) but found that when the browser window was extremely wide, things broke down too quickly. I’ve found the trend towards fluid width is waning a bit, and fixed-width pages are gaining popularity again (although I also see many pages which are fluid to a certain width, then get no wider; I think that’s a good compromise.)
The content management system used for A List Apart was home-brewed, both because of their special needs (needed to group articles into Issues) and the need for special support to migrate content from their previous CMS.
Design for Lifestyle
Kelly’s talk centered around design for mobile devices, since that will probably be the next market with large growth. While mobile devices have already made it big in Asian countries (near-100% market saturation, many people have multiple devices), the US market is still mostly centered around cell phones (rather than web-enabled devices).
One interesting concept centered around different ways to gather user information. While many people use focus groups, they center around asking people in a group what they think they would do. Usability testing is one-on-one, but is still in a controlled environment. Ethnography, however, studies people in their natural environment, and has the potential to be the most useful for gathering information.
Most unique statement: “Just because something is usable doesn’t mean it meets needs”, which makes sense when you think about it. Second place: “Emotional attachment makes people willing to work harder to get things to work.” Her example was with an espresso machine she bought for her group. It had no real instructions and nothing on the machine was labeled, but since they really wanted an espresso machine (and it looked so good), the group was willing to spend the extra time it took to understand how to use the machine.
Her final point is that researchers and designers should work more closely together, rather than working in separate worlds and then combining efforts at the end.
Critiques
Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Kelly Goto, Erin Kissane
These were self-submitted sites which the panel examined ahead of time. Many of their comments echoed the presentations (text should be more to the point, a home page should describe what the company does and what you can do on the site, etc.)
Eric Meyer mostly commented on the code, and his comments were quite sensible (things should make semantic sense, there’s no need to overly-tag or class things, no need to create a whole block meant to generate a horizontal rule when there’s the<hr> tag).
Karl Nelson submitted the learningcommons.org site and got some good feedback about it. The big one was there was no text describing what the Digital Learning Commons was, even though there was a good description on their About page. The panel thought that copy should be tightened up and put on the main page.