tonyballinger.com

The kind folks at Gerard Design sent me to Webvisions 2006 last week in Portland. In particular, I was excited to be able to attend Jared Spool’s all-day session on “Design and Usability Techniques for Successful Websites“. He discussed a variety of subjects, but I was particularly interested his thoughts for designing for scent, writing for trigger words, and using design patterns in web design. It reminded me that I received the book “The Design of Sites” for Christmas, and hadn’t read much of it yet. It gets into the details of design patterns for web sites, which basically boils down to “here’s what people expect – here’s what we know works”.

He also got into the details of a variety of usability and user research methods, which I’m particularly excited to start using in my web projects. In the past I’ve been a bit intimidated to attempt user interviews and ethnographic research, but I think through this session I’ve found a new enthusiasm to use try and use them both.

Day two was a little less exciting. The first session of the day was Mark Wyner’s “Building Better HTML E-mails”, which was useful information, but not particularly exciting. Next up was Garrett Dimon’s “Improving Front-End Architecture”, which seemed like it was taking a long time getting to any kind of useful information. So I left 20 minutes into his session and finished out the hour in Kelly Goto’s “Designing for Lifestyle”. Her talk dealt mostly with Web 2.0 applications and the mobile web, so didn’t have a lot to do with my immediate web projects. But it was an interesting view into what other people are doing, which I’m sure will come in handy in other ways.

I had to catch a flight back to Chicago, so my last session for day two was Christopher Schmitt’s “Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7″. That was a particularly helpful session, because I’ve been a little concerned about the clearfix method I’ve been using to clear floats in all my site designs. So I was relieved to find out that I only have to change one line of CSS to make my sites work as expected in IE7.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.