Human Factors

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.

I’m at Adobe MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco and enjoyed the first keynote this morning. Some of the things that impressed me can be found in my Twitter timeline, for more of a developer’s perspective see AgentK’s Twitter timeline. Detailled information about the amazing stuff Adobe presented can be found at www.adobe.com/go/keynote, and photos from Andrew Muller are on flickr.

The first session I’ve attended was called “Lazy Innovation – Strategy for the Design of Innovative User Experiences”. Not much new stuff, but a good wrap up of things designers should consider when creating user experiences, spiced up with nice examples. In summary: Laziness is good. You can find more information about this session in Steven Webster’s blog.