Pre-Conference Workshops

Start your week off with one or two of these half-day workshops designed to give you a firm foundation in specific Web design techniques and approaches.

Tuesday, 9:00AM - 12:30PM, June 10

Stylin' and Codin' the User Experience
Charles Wyke-Smith, Director, User Experience Group, Benefitfocus.com, Inc.

User experience (UX) is what happens to the user when they visit the Web sites you design—for good or bad. Good user experience cannot be tacked on at the final stages of development, but it’s the almost inevitable outcome of a unified, well-planned, and carefully executed development process.

In this three-part, three-hour hands-on seminar, Charles Wyke-Smith takes a deep dive into the nature of user experience, and provides practical techniques from thirteen years of site development experience to show you how to consistently deliver sites that delight your client and the site's visitors.

• Part One: Business, looks at the relationship of UX to branding and customer confidence, and provides guidelines for balancing business objectives and user needs.
• Part Two: Design, looks at interaction design as the model for translating the site requirements and visitor segments into the task paths, user cases, site architecture, and wireframes that provide a clear development roadmap.
• Part Three, Development, offers practical advice and demonstrations of using XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in creative and coordinated ways, to deliver on your design and build interfaces that are intuitive and plain fun for your visitors to use

This fast-paced seminar brings together the business, design, and technical issues surrounding Web development into a coordinated and logical process that helps you work solo or lead a team to develop sites that deliver great user experience. You’ll also work with and receive a free set of development files, so bring a laptop with wireless connectivity, a code editor (e.g., Dreamweaver), a browser, and Microsoft Word.

Adobe® AIR™ for Designers
Larry Ullman, President, Digital Media and Communications Insights, Inc.

The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is an exciting new technology that enables Web developers to create cross-platform desktop applications using the knowledge and tools they already possess. Companies as diverse as eBay, Yahoo!, AOL, the New York Times, MTV, and NASDAQ are already using Adobe AIR to interact with their customers and audiences in improved ways.

This workshop demonstrates how you can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to turn a Rich Internet Application (RIA) into a fully functional desktop program that runs equally well on both Windows and Mac OS X. Presenter Larry Ullman, author of more than a dozen computer books including Adobe AIR: Visual QuickPro Guide, will teach the following concepts in easy-to-understand, jargon-free English:

• Using Dreamweaver, Aptana Studio, or a text editor with Adobe AIR
• Creating custom windows and menus
• Working with files and directories
• Using a client-side database
• Pairing desktop applications with Web sites
• Application branding, distribution, and deployment

Attendees are encouraged to work along! Bring a laptop, your favorite development tools, and a curious mind; sample files, the necessary software, and other resources will be provided. Knowledge of HTML is assumed, and some basic JavaScript familiarity will help. After just over three hours, you'll have a whole new way to promote your business or Web site—or those belonging to your clients.

Tuesday, 1:30PM - 5:00PM, June 10

Bulletproof Ajax
Jeremy Keith, Technical Lead, Clearleft Ltd.

Learn about the power of Ajax and how it can be used to add advanced interactivity to your Web site through the principle of progressive enhancement. Using the Hijax concept, you’ll learn how to create highly flexible applications that degrade gracefully.

By the end of this workshop you’ll have a full understanding of how the XMLHttpRequest object works and how it can be used to transport data between the server and browser without causing a page refresh. You’ll learn how to add Ajax interactivity to your page in a way that doesn’t break the fundamental concepts of the Web and helps improve usability..

This workshop is perfect for developers with a good understanding of CSS and markup, and a basic grasp of JavaScript and the Document Object Model.

Communicating Design: Improving Your User Experience Documentation
Dan Brown, Founder and Principal, EightShapes, LLC

Wireframes wacky? Personas painful? Flows farkakt? These and other information architecture documents can be difficult to create and use in the best of circumstances, not to mention the tight time-frames and politicized organizations in which we work. Web sites and interactive products are becoming more complex and so, too, must the design documentation that describes them.

If you’'ve spent any time pondering the ins-and-outs of any of these documents (or feel like you need to), then this workshop is for you. Spend the afternoon with Dan Brown, author of Communicating Design—the only book on user experience design documentation—as he leads you through an exploration of wireframes and flows.

During the course of the workshop, you’ll hone your skills with wireframes and flows, essential tools for communicating Web design concepts. By the end of the workshop, you will have worked through these two deliverables and gathered best practices that you can extend to all your documentation. In this hands-on workshop, you will:

• discuss success criteria for wireframes and flows
• explore how different circumstances affect the content and format
• define a process for creating documents large and small
• critique examples from Dan’s portfolio and other sources
• create different versions of these documents
• practice your documentation presentation skills