UX Week 2007: Better than Ever
UX Week 2007 is almost here and we can’t wait to head to Washington, DC. This year’s event has some new goodies to offer UX practitioners. Thanks to Sarah B. Nelson, our Conference Chair, we’ve lined up some of the most relevant and compelling speakers in the industry. We’ve also put special emphasis on cultivating a larger sense of community at the conference as well as the extracurricular activities.
Plus, we’re taking the experience of UX Week to the next level by bringing onboard the same team that produce the TED conferences. How many more reasons do you need to register? See you in August! As always, our subscribers are welcome to discount code “FOAP.”
Kim Interviews UX Week Speaker Barbara Ballard on Mobile
Kim Lenox, Senior Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path spoke with Barbara Ballard, of Little Springs Design and author of Designing the Mobile User Experience, about her presentations at UX Week 2007 and designing for mobile.
Kim Lenox [KL]: Hello, I am here with Barbara Ballard who will be presenting Going Mobile: How to Choose Target Platforms and Devices? and Mobile Usability Testing at Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2007 this August in Washington, DC. Barbara, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on the mobile space with us.
Barbara Ballard [BB]: This topic is becoming even more relevant with last month’s major product release: the iPhone is the only phone out there, for example, that you can reliably trust to do AJAX. On the other hand, it doesn’t even do Flash. So, while the iPhone is the most complex device out there in terms of what web technologies it provides, it still doesn’t provide all the technologies that other cross-platform applications might want to be able to serve.
Most companies start their process by saying, “Well, Java is obviously the best answer so we are going to go develop in Java and we have Java developers and so that’s our solution.” And other companies go out there and say, “Well, AJAX is clearly the best answer,” but they don’t understand what that means in terms of market penetration, vagaries or even the very nature how mobile applications might be different. To pick on AJAX for a moment, AJAX is great, but wireless connectivity is by its very nature intermittent. So, if you have one part of a page not refreshing and another part of the page refreshes, you’re gonna have different parts of the page reporting different statuses for the same thing. It can get very confusing, just a trivial example, but one that impacts how you design. The new Google reader application and AJAX is pretty good at not having the two panes being consistent with each other.
KL: It’s definitely a design challenge.
BB: It’s very much a design challenge, but the challenge starts before they even bother bringing in the designers and so this is a place where design can lead, but only if they’re educated about the structure of how devices work, how the platforms work and what sort of response latency, data freshness and the like that they need to serve their customers best.
KL: And that’s generally what you’re going be covering in your topic at UX Week and I’m wondering, are you going to be covering anything relative to the market penetration of which phones are in which regions and what the different platforms are? There are so many different platforms out there, how do you go about figuring this out?
BB: I’ve got something on the order of seven to ten points to consider and one of them is geographic focus and which sorts of platforms have good penetration in the different geographic foci. Another one is operator involvement so those are both critical. For example, in the U.S. alone, Verizon supports Flash, Sprint doesn’t to the best of my knowledge, AT&T doesn’t, but I would check that recently. Everybody supports Java, but you have to have the certificate signed and if you’re not going have a partnership with the carrier, you’re pretty much toast if you want to go to Verizon.
Your business model starts hooking in as well. And yeah, it affects design and design affects all of the rest and it gets confusing. And really this is gonna be drawing mostly from one of the chapters in the book, which is on selecting technology, but it’ll be referring to the chapter on industry structure, which seems kind of odd to include in a design book, but if you don’t understand some of these industry structure aspects, your designs won’t ever see the light of day.
Read the rest of Kim’s interview of Barbara Ballard and don’t forget to join us for UX Week 2007.
Peter Evangelizes Customer Experience As Key to Web Design
If you couldn’t make it to Web Design World in Seattle, you can now listen to Peter Merholz’s keynote address: Customer Experience Is Key to Web Design. Peter’s presentation discusses the importance of designing for the user and not the technology.
MX East Takes On the Role of Design in Business
Join us at MX East in Philadelphia, October 21-23 to learn what it takes to get truly great experiences out into the world. Our program is filing up fast: we’ve got Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering keynoting Day 1; Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars; Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google presenting, Managing Experience Teams in Fast-Paced Environments and more yet to come.
Key topics include:
- Perspectives on current business and societal trends for design leaders
- Experience strategies — the key to long-term design value
- Service Design — stop designing products!
- Embedding design practices throughout your organization
- From optimization to innovation — why business is turning to design
- The impact of new technologies (mobile, Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing)
Dan Answers What is Important About the Web
Vitamin recently asked Dan Saffer and 15 other top designers, developers, and entrepreneurs, “What’s one thing about today’s web that you think we’ll look back on in 10 years and say ‘that was important’ or ‘that was really a turning point in the history of the web’?”
Check out Dan’s answer at Vitamin.com.
Microsoft Sponsors UX Week 2007
We’re happy to announce that Microsoft has just signed on as a Platinum sponsor for UX Week 2007. UX Week attendees will get a complimentary breakfast and access to free Wi-Fi and computers at the Internet Cafe.
We’d like to thank Microsoft for their generosity and support of UX Week 2007.
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