Armchair Designer - AEA San Francisco 09

The 'An Event Apart' conference series really stands out among the web design conferences out there. It's a great mix of designers, developers and IAs. Have I ever been? Well...  no. But with the majority of attendees tweeting up a storm, it's a nice way to live and learn vicariously from the comfort of your office chair. There's even been 'unofficial' feed aggregators set up for the last couple conferences.

 

So, in order to allow you to live vicariously through ME living vicariously... here are some notes and general coolness that came out of the most recent AEASF09 twittersphere.

 

Sarah Nelson's 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox talk

- # Silent sort: tool for breaking stalemates (conversations that keep going around). First define the question you need an answer for. In silence, let people list all their ideas, then collaboratively sort them on the wall. You end up with loosely related groups of elements, which you can then discuss how to label. This helps people collaborate instead of discuss.

-  Dot voting helps people decide between concepts by voting. Does not mean the group is making a design decision but it helps give designers a sense of the room and people’s opinions.

 

Facebook's Julie Zhuo Design Lessons From 350 Million Presentation

- Mockups lie. They lack content and context. You need to use real content and page designs to understand how the design will work.

 

Andy Budd's 'Seductive Design' Slides: remarkable how a single image and a few words on each slide tells a great story. I'm sure hearing Andy present would be even better, but this is a good quick overview. (If you wanted to see this presentation, he gave the same one at Build and there's video here.)

 

Jeff Veen "They're Letting Designers Code Now?"

-  Web designers must code. There may be some gray areas but you need to be familiar with your medium.

- Much discussion of CSS3, and all the graceful degradation and progressive enhancements that we're looking forward to.

- Designers need to be careful with jQuery. Pay close attention to good coding practices

 

So in my uninformed opinion, those were some of the key points from AEASF09. I'm sure you get a ton more actually attending, but what do you want for the free version? The recurring theme that I keep hearing echoed from the mountaintops is that designers need to move away from creating static photoshop comps and throwing them over the fence. As web designers we are all interactive designers, prototyping and collaborative handoffs are the future!