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.

I arrived at the Oregon Convention Center and went in to the entrance on the opposite side of the building from where I wanted to be. I was suddenly surrounded by men riding unicycles and kids juggling as they walked down the hall. Some men were getting lessons on how to juggle sticks and bowling pins. This was obviously not WebVisions 2006.

Turns out it was the Internation Juggling Convention. I made my way down the extremely long hallway and finally found the registration area for the conference I was actually there for (although juggling would have been entertaining). I got my badge and my swag-bag and went in.

WebVisions isn’t the most exciting convention as the sessions were more like a review of the basics for someone who keeps up on the new stuff. It was still interesting though as I saw some presentations on progressions of the latest trends and technologies. One session was particularly interesting and had two speakers – one from eBay and one from Yahoo! – who spoke about their similar-yet-different experiences with building design patterns for their particular sites. It was very general without much technology mentioned, but it was still very interesting to hear how eBay and Yahoo! solved their respective problems.

Luckily it’s common for presenters to post the slides, materials, links, and even audio from the sessions so that you can easily return to something later on. I was only there for three sessions today, but tomorrow I’ll be there all day.

I will be attending a majority of the Webvisions conference this July at the Oregon Convention Center. One of my wishes for a technology-related job was that I would be allowed (and encouraged) to attend technology conferences like this, and OSCON (we’ll be going to OSCON as well, but the schedule is not yet worked out.) Looks like another of my criteria for “that one job” has been met. Anyway, here is the schedule of sessions I will be attending:

7/20 @ 2:00 “Rapid DOM/AJAX Development”
7/20 @ 3:15 “Design Patterns for the Web”
7/20 @ 4:30 “The AJAX Experience”

7/21 @ 8:30 “Bulletproof Web Design”
7/21 @ 9:45 “Improving Front-End Architecture”
7/21 @ 11:00 “Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7”
7/21 @ 1:00 “Beyond Just Content: Websites as Interactive Applications”
7/21 @ 2:15 “Scaling for Your First 100k Users”

More information can be found here: http://webvisionsevent.com/schedule/.