Human Factors

I’ve just returned from Sydney, where I attended my favorite conference – webDU. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the conference in general here – others (such as Dale Fraser or Michael Plank) have done that in great way already. But I thought I’d quickly share my main personal take-aways from some of the sessions. Since most of the attendees were hardcore developers, I guess I’ll have a different view on some of the topics covered. Here are my thoughts about selected events/sessions:

Software Requirements without Tears by Robin Hillard

Define your requirements by asking the right questions. A mini-manual to get those requirements right before starting the design/development. Robin finished his presentations with a little quiz, and I teamed up with a friendly chap next to me. Although I paid attention during the talk, we really sucked at identifying some requirements. Certainly something I need to follow up on.

Usability: Thinking about the user, not for them by Richard Turner-Jones

Richard was around when I had the second-scariest experience of my life. Only 3 people witnessed me freaking out on the horrible ferris wheel at Disneyland during the conference party at MAX in Anaheim a couple of years ago. Surely I had to attend his session, especially since it wasn’t solely development focussed. The main take-away for me was the link to www.guimagnets.com for some sort of a prototyping on a fridge (or whiteboard), which I wasn’t aware of before. The talk covered some of the basics only, which was ok since it was advertised for general audience and it was my own choice to still go there…

Wireframes – From Screen Concepts to User Interaction by Mia Horrigan

Mia presented a case study and shared her experience with a project that went wrong in several areas, and she explained how she brought it back on track. I always appreciate a speaker’s personal experience – you can read about the theory behind a topic in books, blogs and magazines. But if someone tells me “That’s what I did and that’s why it worked or didn’t work”, that’s when it gets useful for me.

The Hotness of Agile Software Development by Matthew Hodgson

My favorite of webDU. I fell in love with Matt’s presentation style at last year’s webDU, and he didn’t disappoint me this year either. Unfortunately he gave some insight into how his team works, and that totally made me want to work for them. Look for yourself.

The Mobile User Experience by Rod Farmer

I now have a deep respect for all the designers/developers out there, who manage to deliver a consistent user experience across different mobile platforms, screen sizes, networks, carriers, etc, etc, etc.

The Value of a Ruber Chicken: better team development through shame… and tools by Tim Buntel

Tim just recently moved to Sydney from the US, and it was great so see that he and his family seem to have fully adjusted to life in the southern hemisphere. His talks are always fun and enjoyable – it doesn’t really matter what he’s talking about. I would probably even go and listen to him speaking even if it was about some alien hardcore coding language, but this time I was lucky and I learnt more about different approaches of version control.

After a Round Table session with some of the key speakers (highly entertaining, but no women on the panel) sadly the conference came to an end. On the day after the conference, us Adobe user group managers from New Zealand and Australia held a mini UGM summit (including a surf lesson), and in the evening I interviewed Peter Bell (which is available on createordie.de or interpreted by a robot via Google Translate). The legendary Aftershow-Party at Deamon HQ brought the whole conference experience to an end.

The slogan of the conference is”Like a Rock Concert for Geeks”, and I can totally relate to this statement. And for me it was a “Beach Party with Friends” as well!

* Photos from the webdu2010 Flickr stream

I kicked the day off with two labs (hands-on sessions at a computer which allow you to try out the things you see). The first one was “Buildung Your First Application Using LiveCycle ES”, and that’s what I did – I built my first LiveCycle Application. Not too bad, but could be that it was the last LiveCycle Application I’ve ever created, it’s not overly exciting…

The second one was “Video Basics”, which helped me increadibly to overcome my fear of Premier Pro. After installing Pr CS4 at home I only had a brief look at it and got scared by all the unknown features. After 90 minutes playing around with some videos I’m much more confident that I can work with it.

In the afternoon I learned more about Acrobat 9 and went to a presentation of the new features in Photoshop CS 4, skipped the last session and ended my personal MAX 2008 experience by hanging out in the Community Lounge. That leaves one more night for catching up with people and one full day of sightseeing, yay! MAX 2009 will take place from 04. to 07. October in Los Angeles.

Yesterday afternoon after the MAX Awards show (one of my favourites, Scrapblog, won RIA and People’s choice) we had the chance to look into some things the Adobe folks are currently working on. Jen deHaan has covert this perfectly on Flashenthusiast.com, so no need for me to repeat this here. :-)

Right after the Peeks we were picked up by busses for the great “Customer Appreciation Event” – I think that’s what they’ve called it and I’m sure that in previous years it was always just referred to as “the night event”, but I could be wrong. The journey ended at the California Academy of Science and the De Young Museum, where food, drinks, shows, and heaps of geeky stuff were waiting for us to be explored. One of the highlights was the new planetarium at the Academy (all digital now, no longer theses big metal machines in the middle of the theatre that we know from our childhood). There were heaps of live animals, in aquariums and other enclusures, but I’m not a big fan of living creatures in way too small cages, especially when they are ripped out of there natural day/night rythm and have to listen too loud music of not their choice. I tried to think that Adobe must have paid heaps of money for this event and that finally the money goes back to the animal by ensuring the museum doesn’t run out of funds. Apart from this it was a great night, a fabulous opportunity to catch up with people and the best food I have encountered in the US so far… Unfortunately we were kicked out at around 10.30 pm, I would have loved to stay a bit longer…

After yesterday’s keynote I had two more sessions to attend. The first one was “Web Application Development: The Error of Our Ways” with Robert Hoekman Jr. I saw him last year on a similar topic after I had bought his first book “Designing the Obvious”, and he didn’t disappoint me at that time. 2008 he’s back, with a new session topic and a new book (“Designing the Moment”), and he’s still one of my favourites, very interesting and inspiring. Check out his website/blog/books (http://rhjr.net), it’s definitely worth it.

Next session, and my last one for yesterday’s afternoon, was “Accessibility Basics: Making Websites More Useful for More People” with Derek Featherstone. It was exactly what the title said it was  and I feel I need to mention this because I saw some guys in front of me marking something different on their evaluation forms. There were a few nice tipps how to pimp the accessibility of your website in some very quick and easy steps. Great presenter, useful hints, although not much news, which again was absolutely ok, given the title of this session.

Today’s keynote was a great show. Tim Buntel and Ben Forta aka Agent B and Agent F (wonder if Kai aka AgentK gets some loyalty fees for the stolen theme :-)) presented new features across the range of awesome Adobe products. There was something in for everyone: designers, developers and deployers – productivity was the key message. Curtis J. Morley has blogged a nice summary of all features, so go to his blog and have a look there if you are interested in more details.  And Andrew Muller has again uploaded some photos into his flickr account.

My last session for yesterday was called “Creating Attractive, Usable and Accessible Forms”, held by Rob Huddleston. He seemed to be a very experienced teacher and that always helps in sessions where you want to learn something. The way he presented was very educational and I took a lot home from this session.

The night ended with a reception in the Community Pavillion with the chance to catch up with people and get in touch with businesses.

I’ve started this morning with “Developing Exceptional Brand Eperiences” with Ken Martin. As long as he had some slides to work along all was fine. Unfortunately he reached the last slide after about 25 minutes and after answering two questions from the floor he just chatted around with some individuals. Took him another 15 minutes to do the raffle for the book that follows every session. Not very communicative. I really appreciate the knowledge some of the presenters have, but in my opinion there’s more to a good session than only knowing the subject…

Right after lunch Kai joined me for “Forms gone wilde 2008″, this year’s edition of Duane Nickull’s legendary talk about forms. Fun and inspiring Duane presented his personal Top 10 of worst forms he had to deal with during the last 12 months. The message is quite simple: don’t force your users into doing things you hate yourself. Should be a no-brainer, but everyone who ever had to fill out an online form before, knows that form designers still often just translate existing print forms into some online content without putting further thought into it. Funny enough the evaluation form that is handed out to rate each session/presenter has one question on it that doesn’t make any sense at all (“The session was at the educational level I needed” with tick boxes to answer “excellent”, “above average”, “average”, “below average” and “poor”). Excuse me, Adobe, if you have in-house form-specialists, why don’t you use them to check your own forms?

The next session I tried to attend was called “Designing with Web Standards Using CS 4″ by Alan Musselmann and I would have loved to learn more about this topic. Due to technical issues with Alan’s Microsoft notebook (why are presenters not required to use Macs????) the session couldn’t take place and will be recorded after MAX. It took them half an hour to make this decision, so it was already much too late to go to a different session – so an hour of wasted time, thanks to Bill Gates.

Some general thoughts on this year’s MAX: With more than 5,000 attendees this is the biggest MAX ever and with some more people to attend MAX Europe and MAX Japan in the near future,  an incredible number of people will have seen the keynotes, presentation and hands-on sessions. But there are some things that are really annoying and should have been better thought trough from a user experience perspective. First of all, the venue is split between the Moscone West Conference Centre and the Mariott Hotel. While I can understand that it might be easier to set up the labs for the hands-on sessions in the Mariott across the road, it’s quite annoying for those who have to go there and who get lunch over there, missing out on precious catch-up time with others in the Moscone.

Another big issue is the time it takes to scan everyone’s tag. While in previous years attendees carried a card with a bar code that was scanned, this year they use a different technology and it takes ages and multiple attempts of the scanning staff to get people into the sessions. Having to wait in a long line to attend a session people have paid heaps of money for is just not good enough.

But the number one spot in my personal Top 3 of things that annoy me is the limited internet access! While wireless works fine in the Community Pavillion and in some of the lounge areas, it completely sucks in the session rooms. This is a technology conference, people want to blog or twitter or share their experience in social networks – and yes, they want to do it DURING the sessions. Not afterwards, or when they accidentally get some free time because the session they have booked is cancelled because the presenter uses a PC.