Notes from Web09

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Web09 conference in Auckland, New Zealand with Adobe’s Paul Burnett, Andrew Spaulding and Ryan Stewart. I took a few notes from some of the sessions. While this isn’t a complete run down of the conference, and does not include comments on every speaker, here are some of the remarks I picked up on.

Rod Dury – http://www.drury.net.nz/

“NZ has a huge internet bandwidth… fiber to the home is a proposed solution but the real problem is incoming bandwidth to the country.”

Dan Rubin @danrubin & Steve smith @orderedlist

Designers coming from print to web need to learn about the “backend” of sites and the limitations, just like they had to learn about the printing process and limitations of presses.

Jarred Bishop – @jarred
“APIs allow you to do cool shit with other peoples resources”
Twitter = Command prompt for the web OS
Baker sends tweets when things come out of the oven! http://www.bakertweet.com/
Pamela Fox @pamelafox
Online Maps – Avoid “Red Dot Fever”
Usability tips for online maps – label dots
visited states for markers
categories / filtering / sidebars
clustering
Use Poly not points e.g. Search Auckland and you get one point, Auckland isn’t a point!
If you need something to click add a centroid marker
Data Resources: shapeWiki, DynGeometry
Use custom markers (but include a legend!)

Dan Rubin @danrubin
Use the cpu power in our brain
Instinct overrides learning – eg door with handles on both side, people will pull over and over even if it says push.

“The real world is a series of highlights and gradients” 🙂
If your interface requires instructions, redesign it!
eg – Mint.com – subtle use of design to make people instinctively know what to do.
Attractive things work better – Donald Normal
“We all want the sexy car – we fool ourselves into believing its better”
Photography – Very easy way to add to a site – everything else builds around it.
Stop searching online for textures, make use of your scanner and the real world textures around you – Use Photoshop Offset Filter and clean up the image to make repeating textures.
Look around you, get away from the computer screen and use what is around you for inspiration.

As usual the Twitter back channel in effect at #web09;
Good use of Twitter by @jarred to answer questions live during his session.
Adobe @ryanstewart was able to explain his jokes post presentation!

Web09 was a great conference and the Adobe team and I enjoyed being there!