Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Went to An Event Apart, Seattle Thursday and Friday. It was my first conference since 1996 (I’m not a big schmoozer, and many of my big takeaways are things I could have picked up on the speakers’ blogs). Still, it’s nice to concentrate for a couple of days on how things ought to be put together. Perhaps I’ll be able to carry some of that idealism back to my day job! Anyway, here is a quick rundown of the talks and the stuff I thought was significant.

Eric Meyer: Secrets of the CSS Jedi

Mr. CSS talked about browser default stylesheets and how they caused the same page to render differently. He recommended against simply resetting margins and padding, but did suggest resetting things like line height, font size, and the like. He also showed some css wizardy that might make a good interview question.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Writing the User Interface

Zeldman spoke on the importance of text as the primary interface and urged designers to push back on poor text handed to them. He also talked about “guide text”, which helps users find their way around. He said it should be “Clear, Brief, Audience-appropriate, and Brand-appropriate” and cited some great examples of these. Blogger’s create-a-blog page was cited as a model of clarity and brevity, and Basecamp’s login page was the model for brand-appropriateness.

Jason Santa Maria: How to Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag

Jason mostly talked about the design process, including inspiration, brainstorming, morgue files, research, a little bit about grids, and about typefaces and some of his pet peeves. I’m not a designer, but I did get inspired to think more about my own web site.

Tim Bray: Reporting from the Engine Room

This talk was about the future of the design industry. He noted the incredibly large number of quality sites in the long tail that do not seem to have been designed at all and asked why good sites look bad but bad books look good? He suggested that somebody should charge $1/month for well-designed WordPress templates on a subscription basis and make a ton of money. He also observed that there were many more good design jobs than there are qualified designers, so he urged designers to get into places they were really happy.

Shawn Henry: Getting Real with Accessibility

Ms. Henry talked about screen readers, speaking browsers, running without images and the importance of semantic HTML, by which I mean making sure your site makes sense with the styles turned off.

Andy Budd: Are You Experienced?

Budd discussed the importance of the user-centered design. He cited Apple for both the retail store design and the iPod. He claimed that nobody reads manuals any more, so people learn by exploring. He also advocated talking with users, but not relying on them (he says the iPod would probably have failed initial user tests). Finally, he talked about the end-to-end experience, citing the Apple Store Genius Bar, Starbucks, and Innocent Smoothies (see picture) as examples of folks who pay attention to the little details. He told an amusing story about buying an SD card from a vending machine at the airport gate (which he thought was a clever location) but being unable to open the blister pack because he had no sharp objects. Very entertaining.

Mike Davidson: Civil Disobedience

This talk was mostly a rant about standards committees and the slow progress of releases. He gave several examples of revolt against the prevalent authorities, and used them to justify his call for the elimination of the W3C HTML committee with representatives of the major browsers and platforms and an arbiter. Sounds good to me — they don’t seem to be releasing anything!

Khoi Vinh: From Dots to Design: The Basics of Grid Usage Online

Vinh is the Design Director for NYTimes.com. He went through the process of laying out a grid for a 960px wide site, choosing a 14-column layout. He calls them “units”, reserving the word “columns” to the user-seen columns, which are groups of units. It was interesting to see how even the implied grid added some harmony to the site. I also thought it was interesting that he disregarded the grid in some cases (mostly where he had 4 items to spread over 5 units.

Shaun Inman: Evolving an Interface

Inman picked up where Jason Santa Maria left off. Instead of talking about the design process, he showed several iterations of the interface for his stats package, Mint. I liked getting to see the issues that came up over time and how he adapted to them. Solving the expandable horizontal nav problem (Amazon did stacked rows of tabs) was cool as well - he used Javascript to convert the horizontal nav to a dropdown list when his horizontal nav was too big.

Eric Meyer: The State of CSS in an IE7 World

Mr. CSS retook the stage to talk about IE7, the strides it has made, and to talk about strategies for dealing with IE6. Dean Edwards’ IE7 script came up as the best solution here, though an attendee pointed out that it doesn’t work well with ajax-loaded content yet. He also spent time talking about child and sibling selectors and fixed positioning.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Selling Design

Zeldman came back to talk about dealing with clients. His big points were to pick your clients carefully and sell ideas not pixels. He then went through several of his company’s designs for clients and talked about the ideas and what the clients eventually bought.

Jeff Veen: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps

Jeff Veen closed things out with a talk about Web 2.0 apps and what makes them successful. He’s at Google Analytics and was a very energetic and entertaining speaker. He said successful products balance Feasibility (engineering), Viability (business) and Desirability (user expererience) and gave some examples of failures that didn’t have one of them. He talked about localization, designs that illuminate vs those that decorate (USA today graphs), and he talked about the design process for Google Analytics.