Everyone has their own benchmarks for what makes a good conference presentation. Mine is set on whether or not I can take anything actionable out of a presentation, or whether a presentation makes me reflect back on projects I have carried out in a new way. And I can honestly say that I got something out of all of the sessions. Across the board the speakers were generous and engaging. Everyone shared their approaches, frameworks and samples of their deliverables.

My highlights were:

• Tim Fife from Second Road presenting In the service of
• Darren Menachemson from ThinkPlace talking about The four contexts of service design
• Opher Yom-Tov of BT Financial Group’s Customer Centred Design team talking about Designers on the inside; and
• Iain Barker and Janna DeVylder from Meld on Mapping a service

It was also a lovely curatorial note to end the day with a session about architecture – Creating better places to be as a way to reflect back on our own practice of endeavouring to design experiences.

Key takeaways and themes

• As ever with UCD, scenarios are key to representing current and future states.
• Don’t over cook deliverables. Low-fi simple sketches are more than appropriate to communicate ideas and generate discussion.
• As Google says: release early, release often. Test your designs by getting them used in context and iterate.
• Services are delivered by customer facing staff. Service design is as much Staff CD as UCD.
• Service design will achieve nought for the user without balancing its aims with the business objectives and the capability of the organisation to deliver, e.g. understand the technical ramifications of your vision.
• Don’t create blue-sky vision without writing a road map for how you and the organisation can design yourselves there.

Audio and slides of all presentations will be published by the speakers and conference organisers in coming weeks. Thanks again to the organisers and sponsors for putting together such a great event.

Flash 10.1 beta talking points:

• touch apis
• improved audio support
• performance improvements
• Flash mobile applications run on various platforms and devices.
  App stores for flash developers on these platforms are more open to developers than you-know-who.

The touch capabilities of Flash were best illustrated by this video, developed by Struck Axiom, that I crudely caught on my camera.

In the keynote Mike Chambers went on to demo various tablets and mobile devices running flash applications including a live demo of Wired magazine running on a resistive touch tablet. Mike hinted at some sort of workflow from the publishing suite to create interactive flash. At least, I hope this is what he was hinting at.

Greg Rewis, the Creative Suite evangelist went on to outline more flash goodies such as:

• improved text handling e.g. text boxes can be linked for flowing text
• full support of 32 new character sets e.g. asian character sets and left to right, vertical text layout.

Greg was most passionate about the new code snippet library which tackles the learning barrier of action script to newbies. This is best exemplified by his quote: “All the Flash bashing that goes with actionscript 3 — shut up now!”

• Libraries can be imported and exported. This should be a boon for flash communities
• The sample code snippets are generous and code can be exposed and includes instructions

In the Day 1 keynote Mike Chambers from Adobe came out at the gates in defense of Flash (hi Mr Jobs). Acknowledging how CPU intensive flash video can be he spoke of Flash performance improvements on mobile and the desktop. He also demoed the new flash touch apis on tablets, phones and larger screens. Microsoft were there and to the delight of many brought along a Microsoft Surface. It was a blast to play with. It was interesting to hear from Shane Morris about what constraints were put into the behaviour of the Surface. In his talk Shane outlined design principles with case studies of applications designed for ANZ, Lonely Planet and Cochlear. This was my highlight of the conference. Other more technical sessions that I did not attend talked more specifically about touch technologies e.g. Dmitry Baranovskiy demonstrated the gestural capability of his Raphael javascript library.

I am pretty much a wannabe geek, i.e. not very geeky, so I left the tech streams up to the developers and spent most of my time in the UX/team stream. There was a good mix in this stream of usability, design sessions, specifically design for mobile, wireframe design, and a mix of broader project sessions. These included:

• Robin Hilliard introducing a framework to define problems and come up with sound requirements
• Mathew Hodgson evangelising agile. This is a hot topic, but especially relevant to a developer audience from where the concept arose. It was helpful to see this explained through a warts and all case study; and
• Tim Buntel from Atlassian talking about managing developers.

What was great about this year’s webDU was that it was not a tutorial conference, nor were the sessions so general that you came away with nothing but a new vague idea. The sessions introduced applicable principles and approaches that rang true with real life case studies and inspirational examples.

Anyone who knows me knows I take A LOT of notes so instead of trying to summarise my favourite take outs from WebDU in one post I will try and publish a series of webDU posts over the coming days. OK. Weeks.

Until next year!

webDU logo

May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.

As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.

Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.

Shane Morris of Microsoft switched off the microphones (the recording) at the end of his talk, for the Australian debut of Sketchflow; which is all my dreams come true. It’s Visio on steroids and is more of a drawing tool where interactive elements can be produced easily. Not only does Sketchflow provide stencils for re-usable elements like controls and buttons but it lets you use and repurpose data, for instance creating different views. Information can be exported by developers for use as their sample data.

It was interesting to me that Adobe and Microsoft were both on such similar tracks. Both products get the prototype looking more like the design and both the wireframe and design behaving and functioning more like the application. Or as Steven Heintz put it “build[ing] high fidelity earlier in the process and bridging the gap between designers and developers“.

It wasn’t all new product releases though. Richard Turner Jones showed us how to use Fireworks for prototyping. He used it as a hybrid Visio/Photoshop tool. I love seeing how other people work. Richard went from sketch to wireframe, to design, to interactive prototype in an hour. He shared lots of tips and tricks. I had long forgotten Fireworks but Richard’s demo of the Pages utility in Fireworks to walk a client through each stage of the design process was compelling.

Simon Reid bought it back to the user defining user experience as a wholistic change to workflow not a redesign. He took us through his four pillars of user experience in his session “Pixel Envy: The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper” emphasizing that aesthetics should be the last step to avoid mimicry. He then spelled out his seven step design process which included people watching (contextual research) and persona development. My biggest take away from this session will be incorporating a process map to illustrate what a user is thinking at each step and not just drawing application workflows.

Since I am part of the organising team I wont speak to the atmosphere or awesomeness of the conference. I am clearly biased ;-) So I will instead leave you with the following reviews to check out more details of the event from impartial third parties.

• http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/webdu-2009-that-geeky-rock-con.html
• http://blog.magda-stremeski.com/2009/06/webdu-2009/
• http://artselearning.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/webdu-2009/
• http://portal.lacaterinca.com/w-w-webdu/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/28/the-future-of-flash-and-the-return-of-coldfusion/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/04/webdu-2009-how-to-be-a-rockstar-developer/
• http://dalerankine.com/index.php/2009/05/thank-you-webdu-2009/
• http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/29/WebDU-2009-Day-One.html

I cannot wait until next year.