I was totally enamored by the Microsoft Surface at WebDU. Here is a mix of what I learnt, filmed and experienced.
Touch Design Principles
Shane Morris outlined some design prinicples when designing for the Surface, but many would apply to designing for smaller touch screen devices.
- Don’t deploy a desktop application to a new device, consider the specific requirements of a touch interface
- You may be designing for more than one simultaneous user. Users may be interacting from different directions so the app should be ‘direction-less’.
- Non functional gestures need to be acknowledged. (Vapour trails have been built into the Surface platform to orient the user and show non consequential hand gestures.)
- Use large targets. Avoid traditional controls.
- Design for the super real i.e. design digital objects using real world objects as inspiration. Think about how the object behaves in the real world, to design how the virtual object responds to touch.
Collis Ta’eed spoke at webDU a few years ago on how to start a web community. He should know, Collis founded the Envato network which publishes PSD Tuts, Vector Tuts, Active Tuts, Freelance Switch amongst other titles. It’s inspiring to hear about web success stories. The Envato network employs 25 people and attracts ‘a few million visitors a month’. Impressive.
Often it is difficult for speakers to share lessons learned in work, because of client confidentiality, and because sometimes it’s not good business to give too many secrets away. To solve this dilemma Collis delivered his presentation on how to start a web business by discussing a hypothetical case study. His words of wisdom are summarised below.
How do you come up with an idea?
- Solve a problem you have yourself experienced.
- Observe and look for audience niches that experience this problem.
I have been to 4 webDU conferences and this was the first year that I was not on the Daemon organising team. It felt strange to not have to do anything but enjoy myself, and that I did.
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.
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“.
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