Pat’s Point of View

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This afternoon I presented my session at WebDU on the topic of information architecture for designers and developers. In the particular case of WebDU, these designers and developers mostly specialise in Flex and Flash.

I’m fairly happy with how it came together in the end, hopefully I gave the audience some insight into the field of IA, and user experience in general. Apologies for the messy looking slides on SlideShare, when it was converted from Powerpoint all the embedded fonts had to be replaced with Arial!

Other than my contribution, there was of course a whole conference, and a great conference it was. My initial impressions were that it’s a great location (level 2 of the Darling Harbour Conference centre) which is nicely laid out and spacious. The over all feel is pretty slick, and they gave out some excellent swag, I know it’s quite trivial but a great t-shirt, conference bag (with good stuff inside including a selection of relevant magazines from sponsors) put the finishing touch on an event such as this. Much better than the wads of marketing crap you usually get.

The conference proceedings book is a good idea, with the slides (or at least initial summary slides in my case) from each session, and information on speakers and the conference in general. Sadly there was no agenda for quick reference to the sessions, when and where. There was an A4 sheet with this info on it, but not in the bags or proceedings book. I still think having this in the back of the name tag lanyard is the best approach.

A rather novel thing they did was have trading cards with the avatars for each conference organiser. At first I thought they might have had a card for each presenter too, which sent me into a mini panic at the thought of people trading my face around the place thinking who the heck is this guy? :) It’s a good networking idea and builds a sense of fun around the event, after all it’s not some stuffy academic conference, these are people who make cool websites and apps, it should be fun.

And of course there was the crucial, especially for this audience, free wifi. I used to roll my eyes upon hearing geeks whinging “aww man, no wireless!” but I must admit I now expect it of any conference or seminar. I hate people typing and surfing during sessions, but in between or if you need to get a bit of work done during the course of the day (like I did) then having internet access is crucial.

(At first my laptop didn’t see the free network, and this made me think that it could be a neat little business opportunity for buildings within range of conference centres that don’t offer free wifi, setup a Meraki mesh for a cheap rate…or free)

While there were some interesting topics being presented on the first day, and I was pleased to see the current state of the art in terms of RIA and interactive interface development, I had to take a bit of time out to put some finishing touches on my presentation.

So there are certainly some cool things being wheeled out of Adobe and the like, with the possibility for highly advanced and integrated web apps and desktop apps. Adobe’s AIR in particular is looking pretty good. But of course, as a user experience person, I can see there being many opportunities for all this technology to become a usability nightmare. The ball is definitely in our court, though, so far as we need to work out how we can be part of this new generation and create consistent and useful experiences across browser, desktop, device and all the different usage scenarios that that entails.

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