8:30AM—9:30AM

The Little Things Matter: Building Apps with a Laser-Like Attention to Details

Jason Fried, 37signals

A few pixels here, a button there. It's little changes like these that have a huge impact on the web app user's experience. Jason will show us 37Signals' proven techniques for successfully managing the development process at all levels of detail.

Part of what made the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band one of the great albums of all time was the work done by George Martin, when the band was all done recording. In the studios on Abbey Road, Martin worked diligently to improve what was already great by carefully attending to the little details, applying exacting precision to get just the sound he was looking for. When done, he created one of the most popular albums of all time.

To create a world-class web application, you need to apply the same exacting precision to the design process that George Martin applied to the Beatles' albums. Getting the overall experience is good, but a great application has all the little details thought through and executed to perfection.

To learn more about this, we've turned to the Beatles of the web application world: the folks at 37Signals. They've redefined what web applications could be with their breakthrough work on Basecamp, Backpack, and their newest success, Highrise.

In this session, Jason, the iconoclast behind the 37Signals brain trust, will show us just how 37Signals applies their laser-like attention to the business of creating great online experiences. He'll talk about how they decide what it takes to get a feature into their applications and the process they use to reach towards web app bliss.

10:00AM—11:30AM

Web App Makeover: Getting From Here To A Great Design

Hagan Rivers, Two Rivers Consulting

So many design books assume you're starting from the very beginning with a blank screen and the world as your oyster. Yet, most design projects have a legacy of code and interfaces to work with. Hagan Rivers shows us what we can do when we're starting with a history.

Someone once said that the largest room in the world is the "room for improvement." Many of our web-based applications live in that room, warranting plenty of improvement. It's not their fault. They were built with the best intentions, but time has taken its toll and now we need to rethink them.

Embedded in an existing design is the DNA that makes up its personality and necessity. How can we give the application an overhaul, while keeping the essential elements in place? How do we bring throw out that tired (and often broken) look and bring it up to modern standards, making our users happy and confident?

For this, we turn to Hagan Rivers who is lucky enough to do this for her day job. She's the premier Web App Makeover specialist, working with her husband David at Two Rivers Consulting. Hagan will walk us through the makeover process, showing both the before and after of designs she's overhauled, explaining her rationale and teaching us how to avoid the common traps. We'll explore changes, from visual design to more abstract interaction design, letting us study the work of others to learn how to better improve our own designs.

11:30AM—12:30PM

Peer-to-Peer Lunch

There will be hundreds of web application designers, developers, and usability professionals at Web App Summit 2008. Wouldn't it be cool to connect up with others who are tackling the same challenges you're facing? That's why we've added a special peer-to-peer lunch for this year's event. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, you'll specify the challenges you're facing and the ones you've tackled. Then, at lunch, you'll connect up with your peers and learn from their experiences.

12:30PM—2:00PM

Making the Translation: Critical Web App Design Deliverables

D. Keith Robinson, Blue Flavor

How do you communicate great interaction design ideas to your implementation team without losing anything in the translation? Keith Robinson will open up the BlueFlavor toolkit and share his tricks for creating successful design deliverables.

For today's application designers, one of the biggest challenges is getting the vision implemented the way we imagined it. In our mind, we can clearly see the design in all its interactive goodness. Yet, when it emerges from the development process, it doesn't work they way we thought it would.

Unless you're doing your own implementation-practically impossible for a serious production application-you need to find a way to succinctly communicate what's important and how it should all work. Mockups in Photoshop work great for static web pages, but what do we use for highly interactive designs, especially when many of the design elements can't be captured in a single screen shot or static image?

As Creative Director of one of the top interaction-design firms, Keith knows this problem really well. In this inspiring session, he'll share his trials and tribulations for developing proven-methods that get the entire development team on the same page. He'll show examples of the design documents they've developed and walk you through Blue Flavor's process, which has resulted in many happy clients receiving stunningly brilliant applications-implemented just the way Blue Flavor intended.

2:15PM—3:45PM

Making Apps that Work for Everyone: Accessibility Beyond Compliance

Derek Featherstone, Further Ahead

The new technologies for web apps open up interactions to a very sophisticated level. Derek Featherstone will show us how, when done correctly, these new technologies can help designers move beyond complying with accessibility rules and enhance the experiences of all users.

Imagine a restaurant whose claim to fame is not their great menu, good prices, or fabulous ambiance, but instead that they've complied with every local board of health regulation. Doesn't sound very appetizing, does it? "Eat here! We're Compliant!" Not a very good approach for a restaurant owner who wants to create a successful dining experience.

Yet, that's how many design teams approach web-site accessibility. They focus on complying with the various rules and regulations, but they miss an opportunity to build a great experience for those people who need a little extra from the design.

Those people, by the way, are a growing market. As the technologically savvy population gets older, they are finding themselves with increasing troubles with vision, hearing, and motor control, adding themselves to a traditionally underserved market of people who benefit from assistance in some form. Organizations are realizing how building a great experience for these folks can create a market advantage that will see results on the bottom line.

This is why we've tapped Derek to come talk with us on just this issue. He's spent the last few years demonstrating around the world how to push the barriers in designing with accessibility in mind, moving beyond a compliance-mindset to thinking about how to make the technology sing and dance when it comes to serving this eager marketplace. Prepare to have your perception of accessible design completely turned on its head.

4:00PM—5:30PM

Doing It All Over Again: Taking the Netflix Experience To a New Level

Sean Kane, GetListed

Sean Kane helped build one of the world's most success web applications at Netflix. Now he's beginning all over with a brand new start-up. Discover the lessons he's learned and how he's applying his experience to a brand new project.

At last year's Web App Summit, Sean shared the brilliant techniques he used at Netflix to determine the best web app designs, by demonstrating how he combined a solid design process with a merger of qualitative lab-based testing and in-depth quantitative analysis from their millions of active users. It was a high bar for practically any organization to strive for and it has paid off with an extremely happy and loyal customer base.

Now Sean is striving for something even greater: Taking his high-powered Netflix approach to a resource-starved startup. Earlier this year, Sean left Netflix to become a founder and VP of User Experience for GetListed.com. Now, he wants to do everything he did at Netflix, but on a startup scale. With some clever changes, it looks like he might succeed.

In this session, Sean is going to share what it's like to transition from the large-resources world of an established industry to a new company where he has to build everything from scratch and develop his own processes. He'll share where the "clean-slate approach" has worked well and the adaptations he's made to adjust to his resource constraints.

This will be a fascinating discussion for anyone who works in an organization where the resources, schedules, and budgets are tightly constrained.