Conference October 8th

Andy Budd

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

So you’ve designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren’t using it. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control.

Simon Collison

Adaptive Systems for Multiple Devices

The desktop browser is vital, but users also access our data on numerous alternative devices such as tablets, smartphones and consoles. It is our responsibility therefore to ensure the systems we create are as sympathetic to the browsing environment as possible.

Simon will explore CSS media queries and other methods for creating incredibly flexible adaptive layouts for varying devices, viewports and orientations, and better approaches to repurposing content for print and offline use.

The session will be based around a website containing all the examples that attendees can download and experiment with afterwards.

Karen McGrane

Content Strategy for the Web

Web content: it’s the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations fail to deliver content that meets user needs and serves their business goals. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building new features and creating new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be somebody else’s problem.

Ever wonder why so many websites feature dense, unreadable prose? Force you to navigate through pages of brochure copy and legalese? Look like they backed up a truck full of PDFs and dumped them in the content management system?

No content strategy, that’s why.

When done the wrong way, creating new content and managing the approval process takes longer and is more painful than anyone expects. But planning for useful, usable content is possible-and necessary. It’s time to do it right.

Tara Hunt

The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities

Everyone knows about blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. And they’ve heard about someone who has used them to grow a huge customer base. Everyone wants to be hands-on, grass roots and interactive. But what does this mean? And more to the point, how do you do it?

As one who has actually launched a company using the power of online communities, and who now advises big and small companies, Tara Hunt is the perfect person to do this book The San Francisco Chronicle, in fact, named her as one of the Digital Utopians who populate Web 2.0, along with luminaries like Jimmy Wales and Tim O’ Reilly.

People see the huge business potential of the online world and the first impulse is: let’s throw a bunch of money at it, to which Tara Hunt says: “Stop! Money isn’t the capital of choice in online communities, it is Whuffie – social capital – and how to raise it is the heart of this.” In the Web 2.0 world, market capital flows from having high social capital. Without Whuffie you lose your connections and any recommendation you make will be seen as spam, met with negative reactions and a loss of social capital.

The Whuffie Factor is essential (book coming out with Crown Publishing in Fall 2008), providing the strategic map and specific tactics for success in the lucrative, but strange and elusive world of online communities. Online success comes from building a community and being part of it – not by pushing a product or service. If you want to learn the secret sauce behind Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, you have to use them until you love them.

As one who has actually launched a company using the power of online communities, and who now advises big and small companies, Tara Hunt was named one of the Digital Utopians who populate Web 2.0, along with luminaries like Jimmy Wales and Tim O’ Reilly by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Relly Annett-Baker

All the small things

Microcopy is the ninja of online content. Fast, furious and deadly, it has the power to make or break your online business, to kill or stay your foes. It’s a sentence, a confirmation, a few words. One word, even. It isn’t big or flashy. It doesn’t leave a calling card. If it does its job your customer may never notice it was there.

In this session, Relly will show you how you can bolster sales and reflect your company and client’s values through just a few well-chosen words. Designers? Do you get lumped with the interaction copy? Developers? Do you get left trying to make meaningful error messages? Ecommerce managers? Do you want an easy increase in sales? This session will help. It will be a lot of fun. You should definitely come.

Jonathan Stark

Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

JExplore is an alternative approach to creating mobile apps. The free PhoneGap framework lets you build native iPhone apps using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – a technique that also lets you create Android and Blackberry apps from the very same code base.

Discover the pros and cons of this approach as you learn to create native-looking animations with jQTouch and hook into advanced iPhone features (accelerometer, GPS, vibration, and sound) without ever touching Objective-C.