Day 1: Full-day Tutorials

We start with four full-day tutorials covering the most critical topics for your success. Between them, the world-renowned experts leading these seminars have more than 100 years of experience designing applications for practically every industry, from financial services to entertainment. They've created an information-packed day designed to get every question you have answered and deliver you the essential insights for creating great applications.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

8:30AM-5:30PM

Deconstructing Web Applications: Learning from the Best Designs

Hagan Rivers

Hagan Rivers, Two Rivers Consulting

Are you currently building web-based applications? Do you know what makes a good design? Do you feel like you're inventing every little detail, even though dozens of sites have already faced similar challenges? Web application developers want to avoid “reinventing the wheel,” yet there aren't any resources available to learn what others have already tried.

That's why we've asked Hagan Rivers, a pioneer designer of web applications, to teach her popular seminar exploring some of the web's most sophisticated applications. In this information-packed day, Hagan will walk you through dozens of examples of web applications—some great designs and some awful. You'll look at applications ranging from banking and investing to educational software and system administrator tools. By deconstructing the designs, you will leave with a head start for building and improving your own web applications.

Over this day, you will examine dozens of web applications in-depth. You will learn how to characterize the types of web applications, see how they were built, and investigate the strengths and weaknesses of each one. You will come away with the basic building blocks of web applications. 

Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs

David Malouf and Bill Scott

David Malouf, Symbol Technologies and Bill Scott, Yahoo!

Are you tasked with adding more interactivity to your web applications? Do you want to learn interaction design skills geared towards adding interactivity and richness to your web-based solutions? In this full-day seminar, David Malouf and Bill Scott, expert interaction designers, will provide you with a solid foundation for designing your own Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Information spaces on the Web are becoming increasingly filled with complex interactions. Even simple transactional solutions like shopping carts and document management systems are becoming more complex with richer desktop-like interaction models. Today’s web designers and information architects need access to disciplines like interaction design and software design to create powerful and successful web applications.

In this full-day tutorial, David and Bill will guide you through the entire process of conceiving, designing, and managing the implementation of RIAs. Through interactive exercises, David will teach you interaction design theory you can leverage when implementing an RIA, including how to select a technology, communicate with stakeholders about design decisions specific to RIAs, and design your own RIA.

Usage-Centered Application Design: An Intensive Introduction

Larry Constantine

Larry Constantine, Constantine & Lockwood

The key to better applications is to directly base the design on the most salient aspects of your users, their activities, and their goals.

This intensive hands-on seminar introduces Usage-Centered Design, a model-driven process with a proven decade long track record for delivering software and web applications that better fit the genuine needs of users. Larry Constantine, one of the premier experts in application design and co-author of the landmark book, Software for Use, will show you streamlined modeling techniques for quickly and effectively capturing insights about your users.

Using low-tech tools including index cards, sticky notes, and simplified schematics, you will have the opportunity for hands-on application and skill building with a realistic applied design problem. In this tutorial, Larry will cover topics including an intensive introduction to a model-driven design process, techniques for developing core models, and ways to understand users and user activity through essential models. You will also learn how to create user roles and personas, tasks scenarios, and abstract and realistic prototypes. You will come way from this tutorial with a solid understanding of the usage-centered design process and new techniques that you can put into immediate practice in your own work.

Measure Twice, Cut Once: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Web Applications

Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer

Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer, Adaptive Path

The world of next-generation web applications requires novel approaches to design. What are the new methods that will ensure success in your work? Join Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path where they will share proven steps that have shown valuable in the development of web applications.

Peter and Brandon will focus on tools for developing the strategy and planning for your web applications. Drawn from time-tested techniques of product strategy, the design experts at Adaptive Path have evolved these approaches to suit the expedited pace of web application development. You will learn how to focus your web app on the things that truly matter to your organization, how to quickly prototype design solutions with stakeholders, and how to communicate an elevator pitch for your application.

Peter and Brandon will also teach you the key methods for Scope Planning. Successful web applications are feature stingy doing a small set  of things well rather than boiling the ocean. You'll practice methods for controlling the scope of your application, including concept mapping and road mapping, proposing a staging of features into meaningful expansion of the user's experience.