@Media 2006

On June 15th and 16th, two web developers (Andrea Hill, Juree James) and one graphic designer (Ben Leedham) attended the @Media conference in London, England. The sessions were very informational and interesting, and it was good to see that we are in good company as we move towards designing with standards and accessibility in mind.

I attended the following sessions:

Keynote Presentation (Eric Meyer)
A brief look at the history of CSS, how it has developed over the past decade and its impact on the web.

Using DOM Scripting to Plug the Holes in CSS (Jeremy Keith)
CSS is a great technology... in theory. In practice, there are a lot of powerful CSS features that we can't use because of poor browser support *cough*IE*cough*.
Fortunately, the Document Object Model enjoys very good cross-browser support. Not only that, but the DOM can be used to update styles. Using a combination of JavaScript and the DOM, you can achieve effects that are indistinguishable from the more advanced aspects of CSS 2.1 and CSS 3. Waiter, there's presentation in my behaviour!
This talk will demonstrate some examples of this kind of CSS patching. It won't stop there. You will also learn how to use DOM Scripting to achieve stylistic effects that would be impossible using CSS alone.

IE7 and Beyond (Chris Wilson)
Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team, talks about the implications of IE7 for web designers and developers and the future of IE and web standards.

The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 (Andy Clarke, Patrick Lauke, Gez Lemon and Ian Lloyd)
The W3C's long-awaited new accessibility guidelines are just about to drop, but do you know what they're all about? In this panel, we'll try and get to grips with the philosophy, the content, the good, the bad, and the controversies of the second edition of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and look at how they impact on areas such as design, or the use of widgets.

Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (Jeffrey Veen)
As the buzz and excitement around Web 2.0 continues to increase, much is already changing in how we design and develop online. In this presentation, Jeffrey Veen will look at how new thinking is being infused into design practices in trends such as Ajax, syndication, tagging, progressive enhancement, and anticipatory interaction, philosophical shifts in business towards openness, generosity, and collaboration with users.

Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cederholm)
Embrace the flexibility that's made possible with XHTML and CSS while creating compelling designs. Prepare your designs for worst-case scenarios, increased user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content. Dan will attempt to help you "let go of pixel precision", while explaining the importance of lean markup, flexible CSS and planning for the unknown. We'll also tie various components of a page's design together by walking through the construction of a bulletproof, single-page template.

Beyond a Code Audit (Robin Christopherson)
When considering web site accessibility most people tend to concentrate on ensuring that code conforms to the WAI guidelines when, in reality, there are many issues that can only be identified by employing a range of access technologies and disabled end users. For example, did you know that many people with a vision impairment using magnification software miss vital fields when filling out badly laid out forms, or that voice recognition users can't click on image buttons if their alt text doesn't correspond exactly with the image text? Not everyone appreciates that most screen reader users have JavaScript enabled and hence won't be accessing your noscript content, or that dyslexic users will see rivers of white in your fully justified text? Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet's Web Consultancy Manager and himself blind, will be explaining these issues and many more with practical demonstrations of access technologies.

Internationalization: Awakening the Sleeping Giant (Molly E. Holzschlag)
The W3C has been involved in developing technologies and techniques to manage the various aspects of internationalisation, localisation, and multilingual document management and design for a very long time. But most Web designers and developers are only beginning to learn what's involved in building sites for the global environment. In this overview, Molly will cover the primary concepts within internationalisation, giving insight into the general topics that Web designers and developers will face as they begin to work on global sites.

Strategic CSS Management (Rachel Andrew, Andy Budd, Roger Johansson, Dave Shea)
Who's in charge: you or your Cascading Style Sheets? Authoring a simple CSS file for a static page is easy enough, but the story gets complicated when you're talking about multiple pages and varying layouts across an ever-changing site driven by a content-management system. Factor in the management of browsers and their quirks -- and teams of people and their quirks -- and it becomes obvious that a sound project-management strategy is necessary to make the most of your code. This panel discusses how to gracefully deal with legacy browser issues, handle layout and file management demands, and manage team coordination when building Web sites with CSS.

Microformats: Evolving the Web (Tantek Celik)
The microformats community believes that standards should do less, not more. Data formats should adapt to current web publishing behaviours and reuse existing broadly interoperably implemented standards. Easy to adopt formats are enabling a diverse set of web designers and developers to visibly publish, share, and consume all kinds of common information, and microformats are leading the way.

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In addition to the sessions themselves, it was very interesting to get a sense of how the industry is developing. At the “An Event Apart” conference in Chicago earlier this month, I got a sense of the community surrounding web development, and it was even more apparent in this forum. The speakers were friends as well as colleagues, and spoke freely about their blogs, their friends on Flickr, and the implications of Jeffrey Veen moving to Google. There were mentions of specific articles and techniques that definitely gave me a sense of wanting to get further connected with other developers. There is no need for us to re-invent the wheel.

I have had the sense that here in America, the trend towards css-driven layout is still in its infancy, whereas over in the UK it is an established methodology. Whereas we had felt that we were encountering new challenges in moving to this type of development, attending the @Media conference made me feel as though we are in fact simply catching up to what is becoming a tried and true standard (no pun intended).

Since returning home, I have set up a del.icio.us account (http://del.icio.us/afhill) to house technology-relevant links. I had heard of this site before, but did not realize its social and networking ramifications. I gained some good insight into the types of people using del.icio.us when I first signed up, and the #1 “hot” link was Jason Santa Maria, the graphic designer we heard at An Event Apart. This is not a teenager’s fave bookmarks site, but a legitimate information sharing tool. I am also working on compiling my notes from the conference on another blog: http://www.afhill.com/blog/category/media/

An Event Apart - Chicago 2006

On June 2 2006, several members of the Web Dev team attended "An Event Apart" in Chicago. This one day conference focussed on css and standards-driven development. The sessions included:

• One True Layout Code Review - Eric Meyer
• Textism - Jeffrey Zeldman
• Solving (Re)Design Problems - Jason Santa Maria
• Bringing A List Apart Together - Eric Meyer
• Fully Em-Based Designs - Eric Meyer
• What’s the Story? - Jeffrey Zeldman
• Staying Happy in a Creative Business - Jim Coudal
• Design Critiques

The sessions covered a wide variety of subjects. The sessions by Eric Meyer were very code intensive, whereas the Zeldman sessions were less directly relevant to our discipline.
"One true layout" reviewed a new technique for css layout, as outlined here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/

"Textism" focussed on the importance of the written word, interesting in theory but geared towards other shops that do not have a tech comm discipline as we do.

"Solving (Re)design Problems" was given by a visual designer and was very interesting. In their case, the visual designer seemed to take some ownership of how to semantically lay out pieces of the page (specifying what is a header, etc). When asked, the designer stated that he does not like to use wireframes as often it appears a client may become married to a wireframe, which is an information architecture element, not a design. The division of labour in this development process was stated to be very rigid, but the lines did not completely mirror what we have here in house. There seemed to be more work on the behalf of the visual designer to ensure elements were semantically united across the product; right now I believe that often comes moreso from the HF team.

"Bringing a List Apart Together" was the continuation of the previous session. Eric Meyer was the coder who realized the designs Jason came up with. What was interesting was that Eric did not request specific details from Jason re: headings, etc. He attempted to determine their semantic importance himself without regard to the specific visual treatment they'd received. If his rendering of the page then was in agreement with Jason, they knew they had a strong underlying IA. If not, there were some refinements to be made.

"Fully Em-based designs" looked at how the use of 'ems' rather than pixels or points for measuring elements on a page can allow for a fully scalable website. This was a very intriguing idea, as it meant that the overall page layout was not compromised when the user zoomed in, but it has its own drawbacks, in terms of dealing with cascading multiplication of element sizes. As well, I am not sure this could feasibly be implemented in our current development processes.

"What's the Story" looked at client relations.

"Staying Happy in a Creative Business" was a touchy-feely session that encouraged you to love your work and always be open for new opportunities.

"Design Critiques" gave all the delegates an opportunity to look real life sites and offer up commments and suggestions.

I found the conference very informative, and it was wonderful to be able to network with other delegates, to discover our common challenges and learn about alternative methodologies and practices. It was also a wonderful team-building exercice and I am confident the web dev team will be stronger having attended.

The flickr group set up for the conference is located at http://www.flickr.com/groups/aeachicago2006/

Evolution of Field Research

Tracy Lovejoy is an Ethnographer at Microsoft. Her job is to do in-depth research on whole segments of existing/potential user populations. Her research is different from typical usability testing in that usability testing looks at a user's behavior in an artificial setting, doing artificial tasks, using tools with which he/she may not be familiar. An ethnographer may go into the user's environment and gather information about the user's world for the purpose defining a culture. There may or may not even be a design-related goal for the research. She at times collects information just to learn more about a group such as the 'active aging' population (new industry term for the elderly population).

She uses a number of tools and techniques, some of which we use and some we don't (but might be valuable). Some examples:

• focus groups
• site visits
• shadowing/observation
• journals/diaries
• longitudinal studies
• collage of technology

I found Tracey's talk interesting because her research is very relevant to those of us in a design-oriented UCD group but she tackles her research from a different perspective. She typically doesn't launch a study to solve a specific design problem. Her research is focused on discovering the relevant information about a population that could impact the way they use Microsoft products. Often, the outcome or product of these studies are personas which appeared to be used extensively throughout Microsoft.

I would like to see our group do more of these observational type studies. From past experience, I've always found them to be worthwhile efforts releaving some nuggets of insight into the users' world that I hadn't expected. The downside is that they can be very time consuming and are highly qualitative.

Day 2: MSN home page with UCD...and Ajax at MS !

Most people actually missed the best part of the 2 days as they all fled to the airport...the final part of day 2 was from the marketing department and all about MSN home page. Essentially they listened to user feedback, realised that it was too busy, too many links and too many Ads. So they drastically reduced it - they watched the traffic, saw where people went and then put a line in the sand. If a link wasn't being accessed a certain amount it couldn't go on the home page....you can imagine the internal battles that caused.

Hopefully most of you know that MSN - like Google and Yahoo - parrallel test their new designs. And they did this to be able to guage feedback on a daily basis. Interestingly the biggest reaction? Emotional! They took away the over-whelming dark blue, went white and everyone was mortified. So they put the blue back and then gradually changed it so you could choose between white background or blue. Check out the home page - there's a switch at the top for claissc blue or white. Also interesting was how long it took to see changes in traffic...things stayed fairly level for the first 4 months (good in itself because they could have seen a drop) ...but then after that it scooted up as it really addressed users needs and new users came onboard. So - lesson learnt - be patient when you make a change!

However - THE thing I wanted to tell you about is www.start.com - its a play site that MS have put up to let peopel play around with Ajax. Its basically a portally type page - not artistic or aesthetically amazing BUT its simplicity shows how well ajax works - you can close elements off on a page and to reopen them it doesn't load the entire page...leaving you free to do stuff on another part of the page. It's very RSS-y at the moment - but go...play. And if you feel so inclined you can attach code behind it...even CSS....to manipulate it. I was just blown away that a) MS were calling it Ajax and hadn't tried the "world domination approach" to owning this and b) that rather than labelling it a fad, they're on to it and realise it is the next best thing.

Helmer Wierenga, the tech officer from the Reed Business Amsterdam office is also keen on Ajax. He pointed out to me that in Business 2.0 this month they're outlining the 7 technologies that change everything ....
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1107751,00.html and Ajax is number 1. What he also shared with me is that major players in software are already adopting this including Tibco http://www.tibco.com/company/news/releases/press679.jsp which wil help us propel our conversations with engineering. i.e. it has to be taken seriously. Has anyone heard what the engineers think about it? If its part of our game plan?

anyhoo - i'm off to work out how we can get a VPAT or 3 in place and fiddle with my new friend smart.com...