WebVisions: Day Two
The sessions today were generally not as interesting as those yesterday. I began the morning with Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits, and that was well done. It made me want to buy the book but after the session it was sold out. Dan was a very good speaker and had some excellent material prepared.
I attended a few more sessions which were ok – either the material just wasn’t what I was hoping for or the speakers were doing a lousy job of keeping things running smoothly, or both.
The two keynotes were so interesting that they made up for the dull sessions. The first keynote was by a design lead at Frog Design who was trying to explain how the gap between technology and everyday objects is closing, and if we don’t change how we design the technology then we won’t be able to make that bridge a success. His focus was on understanding the brain and how it develops relationships with real-world objects, and then analyzing how we interact with those objects. Those lessons should be applied to how we interact with the future of tech. Plus, he was probably one of the best public speakers I’ve seen. VERY COOL.
The next keynote was about usability (the speaker works for User Interface Engineering) and the user experience, trying to figure out what makes for a good experience versus bad. Common examples included Netflix, the company that came from nowhere to dominate the movie market with little money and minimum advertising, while power-houses like Blockbuster were unable to compete. Another example was Apple conquering the music industry in a matter of years while the big-wigs at Sony, Warner, etc watched in shock.
They were able to do it because they made the user experience a very positive one, while other companies failed. It was a nice little convention and it was certainly a nice prelude to the biggy next week, OSCON.
I’m pretty lucky in that I live in Portland and don’t have to worry about travel. However, today it reached 108 on my way home from the convention center.
P.S. Here is a list of flickr photos tagged webvisions2006 (it’s funny, you can see how interested in everyone was in the juggling convention next door).
P.S.S. My head is in this picture. The tallest head by the right wall just right of the screen.
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