Will is going to show how Cars.com tests designs with large segments of real website users with the A/B testing solution Optimizely. Learn how Optimizely lets you test changes at any time on your live site to see how consumers respond to different user interface elements, labels, and task flows. Optimizely runs almost completely in the browser and allows you to inject custom jQuery or other JavaScript. Will's talk includes Optimizely's test creation console and reporting.
CoffeeScript offers a more succinct syntax to many idiomatic JavaScript patterns. These patterns are absolutely essential to understanding modern JavaScript development. In this talk, I explain these patterns and demystify the JavaScript produced by CoffeeScript. With these patterns in your toolbelt, you'll be ready to write sophisticated JavaScript applications with or without CoffeeScript.
Finding the best way to approach website development can be a daunting task. Not only do projects vary widely in size, scope, and team composition, but there are also several different development process models to choose from.
In this session, we’ll look at the lifecycle of various Web development projects through the lens of Hollywood storytelling. We’ll examine how the narrative structure of various films compares to different process models for site development. And along the way, we’ll talk about some best practices for delivering successful projects that are on time, on budget, and meet customer expectations.
Not only will you come away with a better understanding of how to approach your next Web development project, but you’ll also gain a greater appreciation for the life lessons taught by some of your favorite Hollywood films.
Mobile web use will overtake desktop by 2015. Your website needs to accommodate your users' new devices, but where to start? Mobile first isn't the only way to design responsively - I talk about how you can retrofit your sites to target web-enabled devices from smartphones to tablets to televisions, with the best practices for laying out your responsive designs and the code you need to get started. And we'll rebuild a decade-old site for mobile with minimal CSS in the process. No more excuses for ignoring your mobile users, just what you need to make it work right now.
Sometimes, stacking divs and fiddling with CSS just doesn't cut it. The canvas tag gives us an escape hatch - an infamous blank rectangle. Unlike applets and Flash, canvas is orchestrated by the same javascript you already use to run your web site. Canvas is a strange beast however; while it gives us a "blank canvas" perfect for painting and blending effects, the API is largely vector based, which makes it easy to do shapes and outlines that can be smoothly transformed.
We'll take a (brief) peek at how this bizarre combination came about, and then dive into the way canvas "thinks" - the drawing model that you'll need to bend it to your will.
Take your desktop and mobile Web apps to the next level with true, real-time connectivity. Learn how to build real-time, multi-user interaction and collaboration into your Web apps using HTML5 and WebSockets. Whether you want your app to be a real-time retail experience or a fast-paced MMO, you’ll learn hands-on skills to turn your mobile apps into live apps, by building peer-to-peer mobile apps, mobile-desktop interaction, and even turning your smartphone into a Nintendo Wii-style remote control.
Now that many smartphones, tablets, and now computers ship with high-density (or, as Apple calls them, “Retina”) displays, web designers face a new challenge. How can we design and deliver crisp, beautiful web graphics to this new generation of devices, where a pixel is not always a pixel?
I’ll talk about techniques and strategies you can use to support these devices on your sites and applications today, as well as emerging web standards that will make Hi-DPI support even easier in the years ahead. And because so many of these are mobile devices, I’ll also discuss how Hi-DPI support relates to responsive web design, for the best possible experience on every kind of screen.
The pixel is dead—long live the (device independent) pixel!
HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when we try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.
This presentation will introduce you to AngularJS through a short set of slides and then a live-coding demonstration building out a small AngularJS application.
As our websites, applications and teams grow larger and more complicated, so does our CSS. Before we know it, we find ourselves no longer with cute little stylesheets, but sprawling, surly teenaged CSS that doesn’t always play nice with others. We need to learn how to manage and optimize our CSS no matter how large the project or diverse the team. If we start early, we can use best practices for organization, formatting and syntax, along with tools like pre-compilers (especially Sass and Compass), frameworks and style guides to raise full-grown stylesheets any designer or developer would be happy to work with.
Making things usable is about being human, it's not about techniques, processes or "users". This session will provide a more human approach to creating great user experiences, introduce you to the red onion test, and show how anyone in your organization can contribute. "UX for Humans" ends with a set of instantly appliable actions to try out when you get back to work.
A crash course of tools and techniques for developers to develop better products by considering the user experience.
Sometimes ideas drive technology; sometimes it's the other way around. We'll show data visualization projects they've worked on and talk about coming up with ideas and their technical execution. Data examples will be drawn from crime, criminal justice, political transparency, and public transportation. Code examples will include D3, Highcharts, and some homegrown methods.
This hands-on session will cover a low cost, yet powerful design approach that will help you make better design decisions.
We'll work in 2 different modes:
1. Individual sketching against requirements
2. Collaborative group sketching against requirements
Each mode will include a "Pitch & Critique" phase that provides areas of excellence and areas of improvements that will guide teams to clear design direction.
In a more standard workshop approach, attendees create questions and engage with users to obtain even further refinement details and direction, and in this abbreviated version we will explore how this can be applied on your own.
Think you can't sketch or draw--or think your designs will be the worst in the room? Don't be; you'll be provided with the core information that you need to be effective.
"When you're a programmer you tend to think of solutions in terms of code. When a problem comes along your mind jolts to thoughts of potential implementations. Clever ideas. Libraries that could be leveraged. Databases that could offer interesting solutions. This is our job to think about these things. But unfortunately we're not listening.
In this talk we'll look at two different approaches to building an application. First, we'll look at how a "code first, ask questions later" approach can lead to poor architecture and make developing a UI very difficult. Then we'll take a look at my proposed approach that focuses on users via UX and can be helpful in leading us to design a cohesive system that solves the right problem."
