Monday, March 30, 2009

Robert Hoekman Jr - The essential elements of great web applications

A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Direction Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Presentation slides

Session description

Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?

In this closing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design. See why it’s important to build only what’s absolutely essential, apply instructive design, create error-proof interactions, surface commonly-used features, and more in this informative session that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your software feeling productive, respected, and smart.

About Robert Hoekman

Robert Hoekman, Jr PortraitRobert Hoekman, Jr., is the founder of Miskeeto, a product development and web design consultancy focused on socially-conscious projects that improve the world.

He’s a passionate and outspoken interaction designer, writer, and user-experience evangelist who has written dozens of articles and has worked with Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, Go Daddy Software, and countless others to create superior user experiences for a wide range of audiences. He also gives in-house training sessions and speaks regularly at industry events like Adobe MAX, Flashforward, SxSW, Future of Web Design, and others.

Robert is the author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious, which focuses on seven guiding principles of great web-based software and how to leverage them in any real-world project. Learn more about Robert through his blog at rhjr.net.

CSS doesn’t suck

During Web Directions North last week, the tired old issue of tables for layout raised its head again, by way of a blog post at Ajaxian.org, referring to a recent rant about this very subject. Nicole Sullivan, who spoke at the conference last week, has posted her own rant on the subject, in the tradition of Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript doesn’t suck”, entitled “CSS doesn’t suck”.

Lovely Facebook data visualisation

Just found this via Seb Chan at Fresh + New(er). Nexus is a little app that takes all your Facebook connections and their connections with each other, and creates a visualisation of this.

Here are my constellations.

That large galaxy, as you would expect, are people I know through work, then there are a couple of other much smaller galaxies of “friends from life”. But I especially love those solitary little souls out there, connected to me only, or those at the outer edges of my universe.

It’s a really nice visualisation of which people in your network are connected to others in your network - the best I have seen in fact.

Llumo - Feed reader for image and photo based feeds

Here’s something new and neat for people who collect a lot of image based feeds, from local developer Anson Parker. Llumo is a feed reader which makes the experience of looking at image and photo based feeds much nicer than it is if you’re using a plain old feed reader like NetNewsWire or Google Reader. In fact, I always found looking at feeds of people I follow on Flicks for example so uninspiring in NetNewsWire that I always ended up deleting them and going back to just checking them in Flickr directly.

In a nutshell, you just set up an account, then add your feeds. After you’ve done this, there’s a really lovely interface that lets you scroll through the images.

This is a great tool if you are an image based thinker, or if you’re looking for a nicer way to scan through photos - check it out!

Object Oriented CSS - the video

At Web Directions North, the highly talented Nicole Sullivan debuted her “OOCSS” concept, to much interest. Yahoo Developer Network video recorded a number of the sessions, including Nicole’s.

Well have the podcast, and transcript courtesy of Opera Software, up and running soon, but for now, take a look at the video, take a look at the slides, or read Nicole’s detailed introduction to the concept.

Does (web) design matter?

Reading about Doug Bowman’s departure from Google, and some of the responses and coverage that has ensued (Kevin Fox, who was a UX designer at Google; Joe Clark, who always has something unique to say; Valleywag), has got a lot of people thinking about something we haven’t questioned for a while: does design matter?

Google’s data driven design approach could be seen as taking design decisions out of the hands of the designer with their wealth of knowledge and talent, and reducing it to something best decided upon by the vast army of users of the site. They don’t see design in the same way that say someone like Philip Starck might see design, ie, as an art form to be evaluated by expert review and design critics. People like me who delight in good design as an end in itself, and who love web design enough to organise conferences and workshops where Australian designers can learn from the very best, can lose sight of the fact that outside the world of web design, very few people care about web design. And no matter how good it gets at its very top end, they probably never will. But that doesn’t have to mean that if you care about design yourself, great web design isn’t something you shouldn’t aspire to.

Afterall, as a wise man once said, “If not everyone appreciates this beauty - if not everyone understands web design - then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.”