Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Events

As a designer and presenter at this year’s DC Design Talks, I couldn’t have been happier with the way it went. It was full of great speakers, great people to meet, and it was on my home turf not just at our office but in the DC area itself.

Based on the overwhelming popularity of the one-day conference (90 seats sold in a few weeks), it is obvious that talks like this one are important to the community.

The day started with Viget’s own Samantha Warren speaking about web typography.The topic came easily to her; as a self-proclaimed “font-geek,” she at one point actually confessed “I could talk about fonts all day.” She urged us all to think about which fonts to use and why to use them beyond stereotypical, “because they look cool” reasoning.

Later in the day Robert Goodlatte gave an inspiring talk called “Justifying Design.” He emphasized the notion of using the grid for making layouts more effective and distinguishing designers from decorators; decorators are the ones who make the site look “pretty” while the designers make the site as a whole more usable.

As a first-time speaker at one of these things, I was happy with the reception I received. My thanks to organizers Jackson Wilkinson and Jason Garber for successfully creating an open and receptive vibe for everyone involved.

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Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF Events

This past Friday, Viget Labs hosted DC Design Talks, the first of a conference series called DC Talks that promote collaboration and creativity in the web community. Jason Garber and Viget’s own M. Jackson Wilkinson did a fabulous job of organizing the event, which was smaller than Future of Web Design, more organized than Barcamp DC, and as inspirational as many of the panels at SXSW.

With an entire day of first-rate speakers, the amount of information I absorbed was overwhelming. “Coming to Terms with Sociality,” the talk given by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, was fascinating.  He referred to “online interactivity” as being the engagement amongst participants in an online community, rather than the interaction a user has with the site. “Finding Design Inspiration” by Alex Giron of n’clud reaffirmed my belief that investment in creativity and inspiration will pay off in the quality of design work produced.

In “Speaking in Styles: The Importance of CSS for Web Designers,” Jason Cranford Teague (of AOL) articulated the importance of CSS through a humorous demonstration that both dispelled its myths and illustrated its advantages. He compared a web designer who knows CSS to a print designer who knows press specifications and explained that a designer needs to:

• understand the limitations of her medium.


• take ownership of her design.


• create accurate specifications.


• be able to talk to developers.


• triage problems.

Viget’s own Erik Olson spoke on “Sane User Experience in Flash,” during which he said, “just because you can make it move, doesn’t mean you should make it move.” Many people don’t realize that anything that movement in peripheral vision dominates awareness. Too much animation on a page can distract the user from making the decisions necessary for her to find a site useful.

Overall, DC Design Talks was a marvelous community event that brought together very talented designers. It’s fantastic to play host, and I look forward to attending (or maybe just peeking into) all of the DC Talks in the future.

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Clinton R. Nixon, ON THE TOPIC OF Events

As a web professional, it is very exciting for me to see the continued growth and vibrancy of Refresh the Triangle. The February meeting happened last Thursday (February 28th) and we had more than 40 people show up, packing first-time sponsor iContact‘s meeting room.

After the traditional meet-and-greet, Rob Goodlatte gave an excellent talk entitled ”Justifying Design,” which was challenging to the designers in the audience while being accessible to the developers and others in the audience. The principles he shared were good guideposts for designing within the rapidly-changing aesthetics and building blocks of the web.

iContact was gracious to let us have a longer social hour after the meeting in their office. The Refresh after-talk is quickly becoming one of my favorite conversational and networking opportunities in the Triangle. If you haven’t been yet, I definitely encourage you to join the mailing list and come to the next meeting.

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M. Jackson Wilkinson, ON THE TOPIC OF Events and Opinions/Reviews

There’s a lot going on here at the four labs, and so the four of us attending Carsonified’s Future of Web Design conference this year had to make a long day trip up to New York. Fortunately, when it comes to Ryan Carson’s conferences, even the sub-par conferences are well worth every resultant hour of sleep deprivation.

I say sub-par mainly because this conference didn’t have the polish that we tend to take for granted when it comes to Carson conferences. The venue was large, echoey, and didn’t allow for much audience feedback—if a speaker told a decent joke, audience laughter was swallowed up by the space, and it sounded like awkward silence. The venue was also essentially a glass cube, and the sunlight coming through shone directly on the presentation screen, making speakers’ slides nearly impossible to see for much of the day. Ryan Carson did the right thing and is offering attendees video of the conference free of charge.

On the other hand, the content of the conference was definitely the high-quality fare you expect. It was action-packed, with no fewer than eighteen speaking spots in just over nine hours. While many of the speakers were familiar faces from the web design / web standards speaking circuit, there were a few who were new (to me, at least), and a couple who really stood out:

• Elliot Jay Stocks, Carsonified’s new Senior Designer, was given ten minutes to make his case for abandoning some of the trendy design motifs we’ve seen in the Web 2.0 space. He made the most of each of those minutes, and left the entire audience wishing he’d been given a full slot, with an engaging, witty, and eloquent monologue. I’m sure we’ll see more of him in the future.


• Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Chief Creative Officer at SkinnyCorp, did a really great job on his talk, answering questions submitted by users. It was a creative and engaging way for him to deliver a talk on community.

Of course, there were other speakers more familiar to us who made the conference worthwhile. Brian Fling delivered a reworked twist on his mobile talk that always gives a good primer on the basics of mobile development. Our friend Cindy Li gave a good (albeit brief) talk on how illustration can bring a two-way communication with your users to the web in a way few other media can. Jon Snook gave a good overview of some design considerations related to AJAX. And Matthew Patterson from Campaign Monitor talked about the challenges in HTML email, and why we should care—and we should care.

The highlight of my conference, as far as the presentations were concerned, was Keith Robinson and Ryan Sims presenting “Inside the Designers’ Studio: IMDb,” in which they reworked the popular movie site. The crux of the talk involved the process the two talented designers undertook in the redesign, and I always find it very interesting to see how people actually attack a project. Keith had some technical issues with the remote he was given to advance slides, but the presentation was solid and informative, and was a great anchor leg for the conference.

Afterward, Brian and I headed out to engage in the best part of any conference: socializing. We talked with a ton of people in the few hours before our 10pm train back to DC, including one of my long-lost friends from elementary school. These conversations are always great, but the MediaTemple closing party had other ideas for what to do at the end of the day: something involving deafeningly-loud music and crazy lights. I think the MT parties are best either quite late the night of a one-day conference or, better yet, on the last day as a larger conference.

We had a great time, met a lot of great folks, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone again at SXSW, if not before!

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Brian Wynne Williams, ON THE TOPIC OF Events

A group of us from Viget are jumping on an early train on Wednesday to hit the Future of Web Design conference in New York, which looks like it will be better than ever.  The speakers list is impressive and I’m sure the audience will be more than mingle-worthy.

I had a chance to spend some time with Ryan and Gill Carson this past week, who I’d invited to speak at the New New Internet conference here in DC.  They were both excited about FOWD (they mentioned that it will likely sell out) as well as the Media Temple after-party, which they strongly recommended.  We’ll be there.

If you’ll be in NYC, join us and say hello!

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Thanny Young, ON THE TOPIC OF Events and Opinions/Reviews

Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to spend the day engaged in thought-provoking discussions with our industry leaders at Adaptive Path’s annual UX Week 2007. Although I was only able to attend for a single day, there was more informative and thought provoking discussions to keep my brain churning for the rest of the week.

While the topics varied from usability and prototyping techniques to agile process and accessibility, the theme was clear: we can join in finding solutions to the challenges we confront in the evolving web industry. Last weekend at BarCampDC, I spoke about some of the obstacles visual designers face. At UX Week, that sentiment was reinforced as we talked about the rise of technologies like JavaScript, AJAX, and RIA —and their impacts on usability, interfaces and documentation. I quickly realized that these challenges are felt across all disciplines (information architects, experience designers, visual designers, and developers) of our field. Throughout the day, we discussed how to adapt to these trends so we can be better user experience designers and, in the end, simply create better products.

Jared Spool’s “Making Smart Clients Usable” was among the most engaging and entertaining presentations. He talked about how the “cool features” of client-side technology can be abused and reminded us that audience research is essential to avoid this cluttered user experience. Always ask, “Is this useful for the user?” Good usability isn’t only about taking away frustrations and structuring the way your internal team thinks best; it’s about adding “delight” and intuitively leveraging what the end-user needs. He used Netflix as a prime example of a company that has successfully integrated user research and feedback in their processes.

Stephen P. Anderson’s presentation on Creating the Adaptive Interface was personally thought provoking. Stephen believes that established products can flourish if they evolve intuitively to provide a personalized experience to their users. Currently, most user interfaces are designed to fit a script that is “in a zone of safe mediocrity.” As designers, we are forced to make design decisions knowing that one approach is more desirable for one user group then another. Stephen argues that using an adaptive approach will allow designers to leverage various data and determine which approach the individual user needs. So, for example, under the adaptive solution, a beginning user might see more descriptive information about a product than a power user, who has already visited the site 100 times. Check out Stephen’s IA Summit presentation on Adaptive Interfaces for this and more examples.

Another fantastic discussion, “Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions” came from David Verba of Adaptive Path. He mentioned that traditional wireframes can no longer adequately communicate issues and solutions in an age of rich AJAX features because any particular page can have some 27+ states. Instead, he prefers making prototypes (be it low-fidelity or high fidelity), which can deliver more impact and allow designers to explore divergent ideas with more detail than paper wireframes. He suggests that prototypes would be more cost effective when developed with an agile approach, especially in the case of a high fidelity prototype where the end product is production-ready, front-end code.

Leisa’s Reichelt’s session on the Agile Process & User-Centered Design was particularly interesting. (Pat and I just pitched a proposal for a SXSW talk on a similar topic. Fingers crossed!) Leisa argued that the traditional waterfall method is obsolete,—especially with large and technically challenging projects – because it makes unrealistic assumptions too early and doesn’t consider how designers naturally solve problems. Her solution is called the washing machine method, which is a combination of agile and user-centered design that incorporates user testing and feedback throughout the process. That testing and feedback harkened back to Jared’s Netflix example and further emphasized its importance in today’s evolving web industry.

Two other noteworthy highlights of the day included an exciting keynote demonstration of the Design and UI Behind the One Laptop per Child project and the release of Adaptive Path’s Charmr – The Design Concept for Diabetes Management.

The day ended with a panel discussion led by DC’s own Dan Brown . Panelists shared their experiences, discussed challenges (aside from RIA) and ways the industry has changed, and even shared what they look for when evaluating resumes/portfolios. I never imagined a single day would leave me so inspired, motivated, and, quite frankly, excited about our industry and the challenges we work to overcome each day.

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