An Event Apart DC 2011

Sunday, October 23

1. 5:30pm–8:30pm

   WebINK Cocktail Party

   

   Sponsored by Extensis

   Jamieson Grille (located on the first floor of the Westin Alexandria)
   400 Courthouse Square
   Alexandria, VA 22314-5700
   (703) 253-8600

   Flying in early? Before the conference gets into full swing, join your fellow attendees and speakers for an evening of appetizers and festive libations plus a chance to win an iPad. Once you check-in step on over to the Jamieson Grille. We’d love to have you join us to mix and mingle with other web enthusiasts. RSVP to save your spot!

Monday, October 24

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Content First!

   

   Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Ed.

   The rules of design engagement are changing. You may no longer be in control of the user’s visual experience. Learn the number one job of every web designer, how to persuade clients and bosses not to subject users to dark patterns, why the days of “Best Viewed With…” are finally behind us, and how a mobile (or small screen) strategy can help you improve your content, rethink your web experience, and put the user first.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Design Principles

   

   Jeremy Keith, author, HTML5 For Web Designers

   All software is inherently political, reflecting the biases and beliefs of the people behind it. These beliefs can be made explicit through the publication of design principles: pragmatic rules of thumb that underpin a shared endeavour. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it’s a website, a framework, or the World Wide Web itself.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Persuasive Web Design

   

   Andy Budd, author, CSS Mastery

   Every day we make thousands of small decisions. We like to think that these decisions are conscious and rational. However, the latest advances in cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience show that this is often not the case. In this session Andy will look at some of the most common “cognitive biases” and how concepts of trust, reciprocity, social proof and liking are used by sales people and marketers around the world to persuade people to do their bidding. Using examples ranging from architecture to menu design, Andy will show how these time honored techniques can be employed on the web. The result is not only a site that looks good and is free of usability errors, it’s a site that’s designed around the way we think and optimized for the maximum return on investment to know to become a master in online persuasion.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Mobile Web Design Moves

   

   Luke Wroblewski, author, Web Form Design

   Mobile dances to a different beat. Learn how to transition what you know about designing for the Web to Mobile and pick up a bunch of new moves along the way that’ll help you rock the mobile Web.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Web Content

   

   Karen McGrane, founder, Bond Art + Science

   For years, we’ve been telling designers: the web is not print. You can’t have pixel-perfect layouts. You can’t determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will “live” on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works “just like Microsoft Word”? Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won’t work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Responsive Designer’s Workflow

   

   Ethan Marcotte, co-author, Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition

   There’s been a lot of great discussion about responsive web design: merging media queries and flexible, grid-based layouts to create more adaptive, universal designs. But how does a responsive approach affect our design workflow? And when is responsive design right for your project? We’ll look at sites and strategies to try and answer these questions, and learn to become more responsive designers.

8. 7:00pm–??pm

   Opening Night Party

   

   Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple

   Ted's Montana Grill
   2451 Eisenhower Avenue
   Alexandria, VA 22314-4684
   (703) 960-0500

   Media Temple’s opening night parties for An Event Apart are legendary. Join the speakers and hundreds of fellow attendees for great conversation, lively debate, loud music, hot snacks, and a seemingly endless stream of grown-up beverages.

Tuesday, October 25

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Using Flexible Boxes

   

   Eric Meyer, author, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed.

   Off in a mostly unregarded corner of the CSS modularization effort, the Flexible Box (a.k.a. Flexbox) module has quietly charted a course into three of the four major browser rendering engines. In this practical, real-world session, Eric will take a tour of the surprising features and robustness of Flexbox and consider its place in our toolbox as well as ways to use it now without leaving older browsers grasping at shards.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX

   

   Whitney Hess, User Experience Designer, Happy Cog

   The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, pattern and direction (and others) are widely recognized and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience. In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design. Guiding principles are the broad philosophy or fundamental beliefs that steer an organization, team or individual’s decision making, irrespective of the project goals, constraints, or resources. Whitney will share a universally-applicable set of experience design principles that we should all strive to follow, and will explore how you can create and use your own guiding principles to take your site or product to the next level.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Idea to Interface

   

   Aarron Walter, author, Designing for Emotion

   When you’re working for the man, it’s hard to find time to make something fun for yourself. You’ve got ideas swimming around in your head for your next website or app, but translating abstract thoughts into a usable, successful interface is no easy task. Should you wireframe, prototype, or both? How do you know if your idea is even worth building? Aarron will share practical advice from the interface design school of hard knocks that will help you make your ideas a reality.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

   

   Andy Clarke, author, Hardboiled Web Design

   Animation on the web has traditionally been low-fidelity and shares much common ground with the work of early animators. Web animations have always been the domain of Flash because equivalents couldn’t easily be created using open standards. That is until now, with ever increasing support for CSS3 Animations. Learn about the latest CSS animation techniques and how to create effective, accessible fallbacks for all browsers, including those with limited capabilities.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   A Content Strategy Roadmap

   

   Kristina Halvorson, author, Content Strategy for the Web

   How to make a website: discover, define, design, develop, deploy. It’s a familiar framework for most of our project processes. Now along comes this content strategy thing. Sure, it sounds like a great idea, but how does it fit in with what we’re already doing? Kristina will walk us through a typical website project to demonstrate why, how, where, and when content strategy happens.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Secret Lives of Links

   

   Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

   Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site. Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site’s links.

8. 6:00pm–??pm

   Closing Night Party

   

   Sponsored by Typekit

   Hotel Monaco
   480 King Street
   Alexandria, VA 22314
   

   Public transportation to party: Walk to King St Metro Station, take the 2E down King Street, get off at N. Pitt St.

   End the conference on the right note and share a drink with your fellow attendees and speakers! The Hotel Monaco is located in the heart of old town Alexandria, central to many restaurants and pubs, so you can head off to dinner after toasting the conference with us.

Wednesday, October 26

A Day Apart: Accessible Web Design

In this full day post conference session, you’ll join Derek Featherstone as he helps you explore the true meaning of accessibility for the modern web. We’ll look at how the long-established principles of progressive enhancement help ensure a baseline level of functionality in your sites and applications and how you can make them shine to create truly useful experiences. Add to that a mix of modern technology such as CSS3, HTML5, ARIA, JavaScript and even service design for bulletproof functionality on web sites that works for everyone, including people with disabilities.

We’ll have a special section on mobile accessibility considerations to make this truly A Day Apart.

• See how modern technology fits in with our traditional view of accessibility.
• Understand the impact of assistive technology and browser support on the solutions we build.
• Feel the impact of progressive enhancement on user experience for people with disabilities.