Future of Web Design London

As web designers we love to boast about our user centric approach to web design, but what about our clients? Most web designers resent clients, seeing them as a barrier to producing great websites. However, a website doesn't just need to meet users needs it also must meet the needs of your clients. Web design is not just about building websites. Its about providing a service to our clients. In this talk Paul looks at how to establish a collaborative relationship with your clients that produces websites far better than you could build in isolation.

Paul Boag

Paul Boag has been working on the web since 1993. He is a User Experience Consultant for Headscape Ltd, a web design agency that he founded back in 2002. Paul also produces and hosts the longest running and popular web design podcast at boagworld. He is a regular speaker at conferences and author of the Website Owners Manual.

Are you new to jQuery? Maybe you’ve been using it for a while? Regardless of your skillset or previous experience, join Matt Gifford, developer, author, speaker and lover of jQuery, as he reviews why you should be using it, how not to use it, and some vital tips to assist your jQuery development as well as some common pitfalls to watch out for.

Matt Gifford

Matt Gifford is co-owner and primary primate at his own company, monkehWorks Ltd. His work focuses on mobile development and ColdFusion. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. As an Adobe Community Professional and Adobe User Group manager, Matt is a keen proponent for community resources and sharing knowledge. He is the author of “Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion" and "PhoneGap Mobile Application Development Cookbook" and also contributes articles and tutorials to international industry magazines. Matt can be reached at his blog (www.mattgifford.co.uk) or @coldfumonkeh on Twitter.

In this session, Robin will delve into iOS and Android accessibility and what accessible and inaccessible apps look like to end users. He will also discuss the options for successfully creating apps that are inclusive and easy to use – giving you the largest possible audience for your next mobile masterpiece.

Robin Christopherson

After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin was a founding member of AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet’s Web Consultancy services – heading a team that is globally acclaimed as experts in accessibility auditing, disabled user testing and designing attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all. Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility.

Co-founder of Fontdeck and Mapalong, and web typography aficionado, Jon Tan, takes to the stage to guide us through 40 minutes of the best of web typography.

Jon Tan

Jon is a designer living in Bristol, UK, and founding member of the Analog co-operative where he works with friends doing things like the upcoming app, Mapalong, the Brooklyn Beta conference, and running the Mild Bunch HQ. He is also the co-founder of web fonts service, Fontdeck and occassionally does work for organisations like BBC Future Media. He's a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers and serves on Smashing Magazine’ experts panel.

You know it’s time to redesign when your design is becoming your own bottleneck — incapable of reflecting your changes, values and the new direction of your enterprise. If your list of necessary UX improvements is getting longer, yet you can’t meaningfully integrate them in your current design, that’s a clear sign that something has to change. That’s exactly the issue Smashing Magazine's team faced before it decided to redesignSmashing Magazine. In this talk Vitaly Friedman, the founder and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, provides practical insights into the responsive redesign process of Smashing Magazine's new site. The talk explains the decisions made and rejected along the way and describes how designing in the browser using only HTML5 and CSS3 is both necessary and powerful in the responsive design process.

Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, an online magazine for professional Web designers and developers.

HTML5 offers lots of new types of interaction. These new more powerful interactions mean we have a greater set of solutions available to us. But with great power comes great responsibility. In this session Joe Leech will share his experience with user research to show just because we can use sliders & spinners doesn't mean we should. You'll learn how to use the new features of HTML5 so that you and your users get the absolute most from them.

Joe Leech

A recovering neuroscientist via a spell as a primary school teacher to a MSc in Human Computer Interaction, Joe embarked on a UX career 10 years ago. He's conducted over 800 user tests and designed interfaces for people like eBay, Marriott, Virgin and many more. As a User Experience Director for cxpartners Joe heads up a team of user experience consultants. He specialises in designing every aspect of the user experience from initial research to developing online strategies to producing wireframes & managing a design team.

Art direction in traditional media involves the measured and meticulous control of a visual style across a product, exhibition or campaign. An art director would oversee all aspects of the visual, establishing structure and layout, whilst ensuring graphic elements such as typography, illustration and photography communicated a consistent visual message. The web has moved the goal posts however, handing over increasingly more control to end users and third party tools. So what role does art direction play in a world of choice, customisation and user generated content? In his presentation, James will discuss the role of the art direction within large web projects and teams, exploring the challenges of delivering brand consistency across multiple devices, environments and applications. Whilst also proposing a more flexible and dynamic approach to brand guidelines, calling on developers, UX, writers, marketeers and clients, to help champion the principles of good design, rather than simply adhere to a strict, rigid set of rules. So what role does art direction play in a world of choice and customisation? In this talk, James will discuss the role of the art direction in large web projects. Exploring the challenges in delivering consistency across multiple devices, operating systems and browsers, whilst looking at the shift from the purely visual, to communication based on content strategy, UI patterns, feedback, transitions and user experience.

James Fenton

James Fenton has been providing graphic and UI design for e-leaning products since 2001. Now Art Director at Tribal Group, he is responsible for establishing a 'good design' culture across a suite of digital learning tools, delivered through mobile, desktop and the classroom. He sketches, codes and builds things, and appreciates a good wallpaper (on real walls).

We've often been taught to "go for a walk" when we are stuck for inspiration, or to let our ideas "incubate". However, there is a fine line between ruminating and thinking in a vacuum. Sharing a few practical tools in her user experience strategy toolbox, Steph will introduce some simple but powerful techniques to help you unpack the design problem you are trying to solve, and show how user research can inspire relevant ideas. Whether you're building a web or mobile app, thinking about a new product or planning a new business venture - this session will empower you with tools that you can use right away.

Stephanie Troeth

Steph is a user experience strategist who loves maturing ideas and making things real. She has worn many hats, including a product lead for a startup in digital publishing and a studio director at a digital agency. She is also known for her grassroots contributions to best web practices through the Web Standards Project and the W3C. Well-travelled and living on her fourth island, she speaks several flavours of English, a few languages, and possesses an indecipherable accent.

With the rise of mobile we, as web designers, now have a few more things to worry about. No longer can we simply concern ourselves with browsers and screen resolutions. These are no the only things that impact how our design will be accessed. Now the physical environment in which our UX is used plays a huge role in the design process. Web design is not just about building websites. Its about providing relevant content and functionality to the user within the context in which they are accessing our services. In this talk Rob looks at how to understand your users context and the potential implications for the services that we provide.

Rob Borley

Rob has been working with the web since 2002. Starting life as a techy he moved through project management and business development and today he is the co-founder of Dootrix (www.dootrix.com), the U.K. based enterprise mobile software consultancy. You may have seen Rob speaking at conferences, writing for blogs and featuring on leading web design podcast boagworld.com Rob has been involved in the wider web community as a host of leading web design podcast; Boagworld.

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, said that "in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience." But how do we define, create and perfect ‘user experience’ in our web apps? In this talk we'll examine the very best web apps from around the world, analysing design trends and the latest development techniques, and taking away practical tips to help create a wonderful user experience in our own applications.We'll also discover that the choices designers and developers make every day can illicit powerful emotional responses in users. By understanding how our work affects user experience we can start to build web apps that users have a positive relationship with, turning 'great' into 'awesome' and 'usable' into 'joyful' along the way.

Richard Shepherd

Richard is a web designer and developer, Front-end lead at VoucherCodes.co.uk, and contributor to Smashing Magazine. He's also half of the team behind OmooHQ.com

The web is not fixed width and I think we are remembering that. If our medium is fluid should our process be fixed? I prefer designing within the browser, especially when responsive design is a requirement. Fireworks and Photoshop are not flexible enough to demonstrate media queries, button and menu states, HTML5 and JavaScript behaviours, dynamic resizing of elements and navigation flow. Because the medium is fluid, I think our approach to design has to be fluid as well. A responsive process is a responsible process, matching the medium. I've been working with many companies and organizations helping them transform their process to fit a responsive workflow and I'm going to share the goods. One web to rule them all!

Steve Fisher

Steve is an internationally renowned interactive designer, speaker and open source evangelist. He has done work for companies all over North America and travels the world talking about design, user experience and open source. Currently Steve is working as the UX Director for Yellow Pencil, serves as the national vice president of web for the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and can be found hanging out with some of the core teams contributing to open source projects like Drupal. Steve likes running, fancy shirts and twitter. Find him at www.hellofisher.com or on Twitter: @hellofisher

Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those familiar desktop widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn to craft touchscreen interfaces that effortlessly teach users new gesture vocabularies. The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark (author of O'Reilly books "Tapworthy" and "Best iPhone Apps") mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.

Josh Clark

Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s author of the O’Reilly books “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” and “Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders.” Josh’s outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help creative companies build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

There is no question that social networking has significantly impacted the nature of the on-line experience, from an experiential and economic point of view. My sense is that the impact of those changes are going to be matched, and perhaps even exceeded, by the social networks that are going to emerge amongst the diverse range of devices with which we connect to, and interact with, the web. As I have said for years, the diversity of web browsers tomorrow will match the diversity of ink browsers (a.k.a. paper) today. Likewise our expectations and experiences with them – collectively as well as alone. The presumption of this talk is that, working backwards from such a future, we can make better decisions around planning today. If nothing else, the narrative will hopefully help us frame a discussion around doing so.

Bill Buxton

A Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Bill has had a 30 year involvement in research, practice and commentary around design, innovation and human aspects of technology. Following a 20 year career as a professional musician, he morphed into a researcher at Xerox PARC, then Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc. He has been awarded three honourary doctorates, is co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, received an ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of the ACM. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto and Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design at the Technical University Eindhoven. Besides his family, mountains and rivers are his first love.

Lover of beautiful web design and firm FOWD favourite, we're delighted to welcome Sarah Parmenter to the stage for a session on the future of iOS design.

Sarah Parmenter

Sarah specialises in User Interface Design for iOS devices and the web, she regularly makes contributions to online web design related websites and written features to various magazines. Sarah also speaks at web design conferences around the world and is lucky to consult, and work for, many companies that we all know and love.

Are your stylesheets a mess? Do you find that changes to your CSS have unintended consequences? Sass & Compass give you a rich set of tools to enable you to craft maintainable stylesheets. Chris Eppstein, the creator of the Compass stylesheet authoring framework, will review a number of best practices, tips, and tricks to get your stylesheets back on track so that you can spend less time debugging and more time being awesome.

Chris Eppstein

Chris Eppstein is a Software Architect at Caring.com, with over 12 years of experience building web sites and web applications. He is the creator of the Compass stylesheet framework, and a Sass core team member and has many other contributions in the Ruby open source community. Chris graduated from the world-renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2000 with a degree in Software Engineering.

WordPress is now so much more than just a blogging platform. Find out how to do some really awesome things with it and start using it as a refreshing and straightforward framework for your web projects. Packed with sample code and practical solutions, Jack will introduce some innovative and insightful ways to use Wordpress and hopefully persuade any doubters that it's the best thing since the waxy wrapping paper that stopped sliced bread going off (because sliced bread on its own isn't actually that great!)

Jack Lenox

Jack has been building websites since he was 11 and has gradually got better at it! At university he set up a newspaper and built a website with accompanying iPhone app. He then established a small development company and has built websites and web apps for numerous startups and established entrepreneurs including former Dragon Doug Richard. For the past four years Jack has specialised almost exclusively in WordPress web solutions (http://wordpress.org/) and is a staunch believer in its application as a framework. Now going it alone, Jack is taking the entrepreneurial route with his award-winning startup Jottify (which is of course built around WordPress).

Do you spend half your day on mockups in Illustrator and the other half on Javascript in a text editor? Know anyone who does? The way we work is changing. Rigid, traditionally defined roles like "Designer" and "Developer" are being displaced by interdisciplinary skillsets and a culture of collective product ownership. In this talk, we’ll investigate how treating Coding as Literacy can affect the way decisions are made and work gets done, describe how varying levels of literacy among teammates facilitate effective agile design and development, and discuss how designers can get literate in technical topics.

Jonathan Berger

Jonathan Berger is a designer, developer and technologist who’s been active in the NYC technology scene since around 2005, helping to organize events like the Agile Experience Design Meetup, Startup Weekend, Barcamp, Fashioncamp, and Ignite. He spends his days building software with Pivotal Labs and his nights and weekends working on Market Publique. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelors in Philosophy at Vassar College and a Masters in Media Studies at the New School. He has worked as a designer, developer, video editor, animator, and technology consultant for institutions as diverse as Eyebeam, MTV Networks, Yahoo!, Ogilvy, and the American Museum of Natural History. He speaks about startups and technology at events like O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, New York Tech Meetup, Fashion 2.0 Startup Showcase, Startup Weekend, North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, The Product Group, and others.

Sometimes we can obsess over the technical elements of responsive web design, trying to make up for our lack of understanding in how to design for it. I will discuss the exciting new design challenges brought about by the responsive web design revolution. I will use the practical experience gained from real projects, such as the Future Insights Live and Future Of Web Design websites, to explore ways to adapt design workflows for the responsive approach and create device-agnostic design systems for content. She'll also help to uncover the huge number of considerations involved in designing for a flexible web.

Laura Kalbag

Laura Kalbag is a designer easily excited by web design and development. Among her list of ever-changing pet subjects are mobile web, semantic web, web fonts and WordPress, but she's really fascinated by anything in the areas of web, mobile and design. Laura has been a freelancer for the whole of her professional life. She revels in working with small and meaningful clients, creating websites, apps, icons, illustrations and the odd logo.

In this session, Paul Bellows will dive into what the CMS of the future is going to have to solve by looking at what types of problems – small, medium and astronomical – technology is going to be asked to address and how future-CMS needs to manage complexity for real people. Come and listen so that you can sound like a prophet when you talk to customers, or compile a list of reasons to make fun of Paul when we get to the future. "Robot Butlers" may or may not make his list.

Paul Bellows

Paul has been working on Yellow Pencil since the mid-1990s, but it wasn't called Yellow Pencil until the end of 1996. After graduating with a lofty but impractical degree focusing on literary criticism of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he began a career as a voyageur-songwriter. He recorded several critically acclaimed records as he rode the Greyhound from depot to depot. Non-stop bus travel is terrible on one's muscular-skeletal health, however, so he slowly transitioned to new media and marketing, starting with a position heading up the North American sales team for the CD-ROM division of Peter Gabriel's Real World Records. The day that everyone stopped buying CD-ROMs was the day before the day that Paul became a full-time Internet marketing practitioner, which barely preceded the day that he took a position as Webmaster for the legendary Alberta radio network CKUA, and led their award-winning web transformation project. Following that, and a year as the Website Editor at the Capital Health Authority, he officially closed the chapter in his life wherein he could blame others for his mistakes, and founded the Yellow Pencil we know and love.

Web sites are complicated. We've all been burned by endless QA cycles where each little change you make means everything needs checking before the client gets to see it. As mobile browsers gain market share, the number of platforms you need to test on is increasing all the time. Automated testing can give you the confidence to move fast without worrying about breaking things, and with the tools we have now it's easier than ever to get fast, accurate feedback about your code on any platform. In this session I'm going to show you how to get started and how to squeeze the most value out of your client-side tests.

James Coglan

James Coglan is a developer at London live music start-up Songkick. A full-stack programmer, he hacks Ruby web services by day and open-source JavaScript by night. His recent obsessions include Faye, a pub/sub networking library for the web, and Fargo, a programming language written in JavaScript.