Edge of the Web 2009

Web, Technology, Social Innovation and Events

The Edge of the Web conference is an annual web industry event held in Perth, Western Australia.

The “edge” in Edge of the Web refers to the fact that Perth is on the opposite side of the country from where most Australians live on the east coast, however even though Perth is geographically distant from other capital cities there is no shortage of innovation, creativity and cutting-edge design and development here.

I say “here” because I’m still in Perth as I write this. The conference ran for two days – Wednesday and Thursday – with workshops being held today (which I’m not attending) and the Australian Web Awards taking place this evening.

It was a bit disappointing attendance was down this year; there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand the full benefit of attending good conferences such as Edge of the Web, Web Directions, Oz-IA and UX Australia. It’s not just about coming to learn new stuff – and if you a conference “junkie” going to several such conferences a year then it’s unlikely that you’re going to experience a lot of revolutionary new technology and techniques at each event. Understand that, and move on.

Learning about new technology, frameworks, projects, initiatives etc is only a third of the benefit of attending a conference. The other important aspects of conference attendance is networking, building your professional profile, being part of your industry, making those peer connections and being motivated by others who are passionate about the web and doing some really cool stuff.

So Edge of the Web 2009 wasn’t the mind-blowing revelation that my first conference Web Essentials 2005 was several years ago before I really started building my professional network and keeping in regular contact with my peers all over the world. However I don’t believe the benefit from networking and being motivated by others ever diminishes and that’s certainly a personal key benefit from EOTW09. Following are my summaries of the sessions I attended. As there were three tracks outside the keynotes I missed out on twelve presentations.

Anil Dash delivered the opening keynote at Edge of the Web, speaking about his thoughts on the future of the web and what we might see happening over the next 12 months. Anil went through the history of a number of high-profile companies: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, and spoke about the decentralisation of social networks away from application hubs such as Facebook out to people for peer-to-peer social networking online.

Gary Barber spoke about which user experience and UCD design techniques are essential and which ones can be discarded in order to trim down the UX component of a project to something manageable by freelancers and marketable to SME clients. He discounted persona development, focus groups, competitor reviews and surveys, and recommended wireframes, remote usability testing and peer reviews. Miles Burke, managing director of BAM Creative in Perth and author of the recently published The Principles of Successful Freelancing spoke about freelancing and gave great practical tips on how to go about freelancing and how to decide whether freelancing is for you.

Alex Payne’s history of programming languages and how our choice of language shapes design and implementation of applications was quite interesting and thought-provoking. He did pose the question of whether we’d see a convergence of front-end and back-end script languages and although I immediately countered with a “UI design is a different discipline to back-end business logic and data handling” in the backchannel I realise I need to go away and think about the validity of that perspective.

Kevin Yank presented on CSS frameworks and while he looked at Blueprint, 960 and YUI the main message was not recommending any one framework but rather deciding what your priorities are first and then selecting whichever supports those goals because none of them are perfect. Personally I don’t like CSS frameworks primarily due to the non-semantic markup reason that Kevin did talk about, however I did learn some techniques for mapping non-semantic names in Blueprint using scripts. Kevin also demonstrated Sass and equivalent dynamic CSS-generation frameworks with variables for PHP and other languages.

Ash Donaldson and Matt Balara both gave fantastic presentations around user experience and interaction design. Ash looked at persuasion, excise-reduction, compliance psychology and the work of BJ Fogg while Matt focussed on e-commerce, removing barriers to purchase and enhancing the experience. The closing keynote from Derek Powazek was fantastic. Very entertaining and packed with practical, useful tips on online community management and handling “crazy” people who can upset the balance of positive experience in online communities. He used the fantastic XKCD cartoon YouTube in his presentation.

Kevin Yank’s presentation on CSS frameworks that covered

Some great quotes from the Edge of the Web 2009:

“Nerds have terrible taste in music” – Anil Dash

“If someone claims to be a mega guru, they’re full of shit. Don’t hire them!” – Gary Barber

“At the start, OpenID was impossible to use. Now it’s just unbearable” – Anil Dash

“4chan is like a social psychologist’s wet dream” – Derek Powazek

“Yahoo Answers is the most depressing site on the web” – Anil Dash

“Try Lisp or Haskell. It’s like dropping acid” – Alex Payne

Thanks to all the sponsors this year. It’s been tough financially and economically the past 12+ months so it’s great to see companies still willing to support their industry. There were also a number of competitions, and while I’m sad I missed out on winning the iPhone 3G (won by Ruth Ellison) I did win a bottle of wine and 6 months free hosting from FAST.hit, thanks guys! I don’t think I’ll want to drag this back across the country with me so I might have to share it with my hosts Rachel and Edward over the weekend.

Many of the conference presentations are now available on SlideShare.

// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.