February 14, 2007

Web Directions North: Day 2

February 14, 2007, 8:44 PM | 0 Comments

Day 2 of Web Directions North picked up where day 1 left off and was another great day packed full of inspiring speakers and good times.

The opening keynote for day 2 was a great talk about designing for lifestyle by Kelly Goto (that’s pronounced ‘Go Toe’ in case you’re wondering). The main point Kelly talked about was design that mimics physical environments, such as the iPhone, touch screens and more.

To start the day I attended a session called ‘Web Apps: Developer to Designer’ that was put on by George Oates and Paul Hammond of Flickr and Yahoo respectively. For the most part it was a great look at some of the things that Flickr has been doing over the past few months. Having heard Cal Henderson (lead developer at Flickr) speak back in July in Toronto, it was interesting to hear about the design side of Flickr from George who mainly took us through the design process that Flickr went through when developing its new geo-tagging (mapping) features.

During the afternoon I was able to take in a session by Veerle Pieters and Dave Shea about ‘The Design Process.’ First off, it was great for me to be able to attend this session, as this was one I was really looking forward to before the conference even started. Dave and Veerle are 2 very influential designers and have inspired me time and time again.

Despite the design-centric title of the talk, Dave and Veerle discussed a lot of important business practices - everything from work environments (both good and bad) to proposals. In a very humourous segment of the day, Dave (the client) and Veerle (the designer) did a little bit of role playing and took us through the design process of a site. It was a fun time and they really had the audience’s attention from start to finish. I will say one thing for those who weren’t able to make it out to WDN: if you’re currently freelancing or running a business, listen to this session when the podcast comes out because there were a lot of very good suggestions that were offered when it came to dealing with clients, projects, time lines, etc.

The closing keynote for Web Directions North was a great session by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. I’d never heard of Jared before the conference and wasn’t sure what to expect, but his session was an excellent talk about user-experience. Jared is a very talented speaker and quite funny; so if you have the chance to hear him speak, go for it because you won’t regret it. He took us through some examples of companies who are very good at user experience design and some that aren’t so good. It was a great closing session for Web Directions North.

The (mt) Media Temple closing party was a great time where I was able to meet so many different people and even play a little table hockey with Dan Cederholm. Those Massachusetts boys are apparently pretty good at the table hockey; Dan humbled me by winning 3-1. Next time I won’t be so nice ;)

Sorry that this day 2 summary is a little late, I’m still on vacation here in Vancouver, so I’ve been piecing this together in my spare time, which there hasn’t been much of. A final summary of the entire conference will hopefully be coming in the next couple of weeks, because there are more things to say and some people to give some shout outs to. For now, check out some other posts from WDN attendees and speakers.

Technorati Tags: webdirectionsnorth, webdirectionsnorth07, wdn07, webdirections

Posted in: Design, Web Development, Web Standards