Nathanael Boehm (Canberra, Australia) web user interaction designer

Posted by Nathanael Boehm on September 26th, 2008 in Events and Conferences, Free Australia Wireless, General, Web Design & Standards

This is the fourth Web Directions (Essentials) conference I’ve attended and I’m just about to head off to Day 2 but before I do, a quick debrief on yesterday.

Headed in early as JJ and myself were setting up the Meraki mesh network for the conference venue as iBurst and Free Australia Wireless are jointly providing free wireless for the conference attendees. There were a few complaints about the Internet access throughout the day however I was using it fine the whole time except for a total of 15 minutes outage when the iBurst modems disconnected. We weren’t getting terribly fast speeds but then again we had 150 users who downloaded 3 GB through the mesh network all going out via iBurst’s wireless connection! So I’m happy with how it went.

But onto the conference itself.

Lynne D Johnson’s opening keynote was pretty average I thought. I’m not sure if she was nervous (she doesn’t appear to be the sort of person that would get nervous) … but she came across as not being really familiar with the content or perhaps the presentation. Maybe someone else did the presentation and have her the PowerPoint file just as she was walking on stage? But she was talking about the transition or evolution of information communication mediums from print to online and about the medium being the message; technology being extensions of ourselves. So not the best presentation but the content was ok.

Derek Featherstone was awesome as always, talking about accessibility and usability. Small interface tweaks might make a minor different to a fully-capable user but could introduce big barriers to users with disabilities. And vice versa, designing for users with disabilities could make a page impossible to use by a fully-capable user.

Teale Shapcott spoke about apply usability and user-centered design principles in an Agile development environment. Some new and odd principles introduced (INVEST?) but a few was at least interesting to see how other companies and organisations do it.

Craig, Cameron, Ben and Earle were on a panel facilitated by Jason talking about JavaScript libraries. Until then I just assumed JQuery was only data-oriented but Earle demonstrated some cool stuff with it so I’ll have to check it out now; till then I’ve pretty much only used YUI.

Then Jeff Croft on elegant web typography … which was interesting from a design point of view but a bit light on in implementation and application of accessible-design principles. Tweeted Jeff afterwards about that and he said that he certainly wasn’t being intentionally dismissive of accessibility. Fair enough.

Lastly was August de los Reyes … a Microsoft design visionary or something. That was a pretty in-depth presentation on design philosophy and theory about emotion in design, dualism and fusion of organic and mechanical thinking and … something, and the development of contextual intuitive interfaces, demonstrated Microsoft Surface and things like that. He quoted various literature that I said I’d have to read - Donna offered to lend. Others agreed it was a good presentation, better than the opening keynote.

Then after that it was upstairs for WDS drinks and then off around 6:30pm to the Pontoon Bar across Darling Harbour for AussieTUB … and that was epic. We peaked at 30 people there at one point and had around 50 people come through there during the evening, well at least when I left around midnight. I know more people came after that. Met some really cool people - musicians, designers, policy developers as well as people I knew through Twitter which I was meeting for the first time in real life like @freygan @colinwilso, @misswired and @flungabunga.

Tags: aussietub, conference, media, microsoft, social, sydney, twitter, wds08, web