Workshops

• Estelle Weyl

  CSS: Knowledgeable to Ninja

  

  When: Monday 13 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Estelle Weyl

  SOLD OUT!

  Web development without Photoshop and without IDs or classes? What was impossible 5 years ago is almost simple to do with CSS3. Prototyping with CSS3 (versus sliced up images) has made the development process fun again. Yes, there is new syntax to learn, and different browsers sometimes require slightly different markup, but the power is worth the pain. And, once you understand the syntax, there are tools so CSS3 isn't a memorization game. Improved development time, reduced maintenance costs, SEO, accessibility and site performance? What more could you ask for?

  How about all of it, all in 1 day! In this full day workshop you will learn about the capabilities of CSS3, progressive design principles, time saving techniques, and debugging and development tools. Yes, we'll cover rounded corners, but this skills-based workshop will cover so much more, including selectors, fonts, media queries, colors, border effects, background effects, gradients, animations, transitions and transformations.

  What will be covered

  Many advanced CSS3 features and the issues surrounding them, including:

  • Hacks, browser support and browser quirks
  • Tools for creating CSS3 (once you fully understand the syntax)
  • CSS Debuggers: Use browser tools to debug and pixel perfect

  Who this workshop for

  This workshop is targeted at designers and developers who already work with CSS, and perhaps even use some features of CSS3, and want to become really proficient in advanced features of CSS3.

  What you'll need

  Laptop with Chrome installed.

• Jennifer Brook

  Iterative Prototyping for the iPhone and iPad

  

  When: Monday 13 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Jennifer Brook

  Register now!>

  ($650 if attending conference, $795 if not)

  You've sketched on post-its, wireframed your heart out, and maybe you've even crafted some delicious pixel-perfect apps in Photoshop. But have you seen your sketches move? Have you asked friends or strangers, "Is that what you expected to happen?", after they've tapped, swiped, or pinched those precious little pixels with their paws? We'll start with anything you have, an idea, a sketch, a deck of dusty wireframes, and explore various approaches to on-device prototyping in order to test, evaluate, and improve our designs.

  Who it's for

  Seasoned professionals looking to hone their approach to designing experiences for iOS.

  What you'll learn

  • On-device prototyping, little or no code required
  • Performing heuristic evaluations on the fly
  • Guerrilla low-budget usability testing
  • How to sketch a transition
  • Incorporating feedback

  What to bring

  • Mac Laptop with Keynote installed
  • iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and Apple doc connector to USB cable (note: there will be a few extra devices on hand if you don't have one)

• Dana Chisnell

  Design, Data, and Saving the World: Collaborative techniques to master design challenges

  

  When: Monday 13 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Dana Chisnell

  Register now!>

  ($650 if attending conference, $795 if not)

  This workshop is made up of two major parts:
  Sketching and critique for challenging problems
  and
  Making sense of the data: Collaborative analysis techniques

  The first part

  The first part is all about design constraints and techniques for working through them, collaboratively. Teams are confronted by any number of constraints everyday: business goals and rules, technology and infrastructure limits, users' contexts and imaginations.

  These are the challenges that confront teams in large organizations, small non-profits, government agencies, and well, everywhere design is done.

  Thus, Dana Chisnell will teach you about design studio, collaborative sketching, and critique, and how you can use them to get people on the same page and pointed in the right direction to solve big problems.

  The second part

  Observing users working with your design is enlightening! Imagine, you've just come back from watching people use a prototype. You and your team had some “ah-ha” moments when users did something you hadn't expected. Now, you have a growing list of things you could change. How do you know where to start?

  Your team learned during the sessions. You collected oodles of data, now what do you do with it? How do you make smart design decisions from what you learned?

  Dana will show you how to quickly assess what you've learned and zoom in on the important findings. Dana will walk you through collaborative techniques for organizing everything your team observed. You'll learn practical methods to pare the observations down to priority issues quickly and effectively, and then work with your team to solve the right design problems the right way.

  Dana will get you on your feet as she shows you how to:

  • Identify patterns from your users' behaviors that will inspire innovative design ideas
  • Prioritize the most important issues in under an hour
  • Test your team's inferences through a proven technique that ensures the right design direction
  • Avoid writing lengthy reports that no one ever reads—get results instead!

  Who it's for

  Anyone who wants faster, more effective methods for getting to the meat of their user research findings will love this workshop.

  This is a session is for people with a passion for design, who want to know how little things can make a big difference — and they can even change the world.

  If you're trained in information architecture, interaction design, usability, or experience design, or if you're looking for a way to effect positive change in your organization (or the world), then come to this session. Together, we'll work on solving a design problem at the core of world peace, and give you skills for designing for challenging problems in your organization (and neighborhood).

  • This is an advanced workshop for people who have been doing user research for a while.
  • You have to be fearless, but might currently be a little bored. This will shake you up!
  • You have to be ready for challenging approaches and gung-ho for going back to the hive and kicking some butt.

  What you'll learn

  • Basics of collaborative sketching for design.
  • Framework for true critique.
  • The awesomest, most democratic technique for team-prioritizing, ever.
  • Collaborative, in-time data collection for user research and usability testing.
  • Super powers for getting your team from raw observation to the right design direction

  Outline of the morning

  Sketching and critique for challenging problems

  • Introduce concepts: design studio and collaborative sketching
  • Assign groups (we will be working collaboratively, after all)
  • Introduce the design task and goal
  • Introduce personas
  • First round of sketching: Individuals designing for particular personas
  • Introduce critique: process and practice
  • Activity: Critique within groups
  • Discuss constraints on the design
  • Introduce collaborative sketching in practice
  • Activity: Sketch designs as a small group
  • Activity: Present and critique in larger groups
  • Activity: Sketch designs as uber-groups
  • Wrap up of part I + Call-to-action

  Outline of the Afternoon

  Making sense of the data: Collaborative analysis techniques

  • KJ technique: Setting priorities collaboratively, democratically
    • Activity: Do a KJ!
    • Teach one
  • Story telling: Sharing users' experiences
    • Observing: Hearing and seeing
    • Visualizing
    • Activity: What happened in your last user session?
    • Who, what, when, where, how
    • Answering a focus question
    • Acting out
  • Tracking rolling issues during a study: Consensus on observations in real time
    • Observers contribute
    • Constraints revealed
    • Instant “reporting”!
    • Activity: Role playing rolling issues
    • Business, IT, and UX contribute observations & constraints
  • Collective analysis: Ending opinion wars
    • Activity: Guess the reason game
    • Opinion
    • Inference
    • Opinion
    • Design direction
  • Wrap up + Q&A

  What to bring

  • Brains
  • Beginner's mind
  • Sense of fun
  • Felt tip pen

• Ethan Marcotte

  Responsive Web Design

  

  When: Tuesday 14 February, 9:00-12:30pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Ethan Marcotte

  SOLD OUT!

  There's been a healthy amount of discussion about responsive web design in the past year, with flexible grids, flexible images, and media queries covered in great detail. But let's face it: those are really about layout, and design is so much more than that. In our half day together, we'll look at design pattern and processes for thinking more flexibly about designing for the web.

  Who it's for

  Attendees should be proficient with HTML and CSS, understand media query syntax, and are comfortable sketching out their ideas on paper. (Disclaimer: Ethan is an abysmal artist, but loves paper prototyping.) And while there's no requirement that you're fluent in JavaScript, it'd be great if you can look at a block of jQuery without shrieking in terror.

  Ideally, the attendees will have read the original article on responsive design, and worked on at least one small screen-friendly site (whether a mobile-specific site, or a more responsive/adaptive one).

  What you'll learn

  They'll have a more complete understanding of how the three components of responsive design–flexible grids, fluid images, and media queries–can inform our design *process*, and then integrate them more responsibly in our HTML/CSS. We'll also discuss strategies for determining when a responsive approach is the right one to take, and when it might be less than ideal.

  What you need to bring

  Do bring a notepad and your favorite sketching pen/pencil, as well as a laptop. Bonus points are awarded for bringing a web-ready mobile device.

• Jeremy Keith

  Responsive Enhancement

  

  When: Tuesday 14 February, 1:30-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Jeremy Keith

  SOLD OUT!

  Responsive design is one of the most exciting developments to hit the web for some time. But there's a common misconception that it involves merely slapping some media queries on to an existing desktop-centric site and labelling the result “mobile-friendly.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

  This workshop will demonstrate that truly effective responsive design must begin with the content first, which is then progressively adapted to a multitude of screen sizes and environments.

  Who's it for

  This workshop is aimed at both designers and developers (and if you're a content strategist, there's some good stuff for you too). There will be a healthy dollop of code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) but it's the concepts that really matter so don't worry if you're not that confident with development.

  What you'll learn

  This workshop will help you to construct web sites that will feel natural on a whole range of devices, from mobile phones to tablets, laptops, e-readers and devices we haven't even thought of yet. You'll learn how to:

  • Ensure that no visitor is denied access to information.
  • Decide when to switch layouts using media queries.
  • Apply fluid layouts based on percentages.
  • Serve up different sized images for different environments .
  • Prioritise content.

  What you'll need

  Bring some paper and a writing device (I find a pen works well). If you want to bring a laptop to play along with some of the code examples, you can but it isn't necessary. I'll give you all the slides and examples so don't worry about frantically taking notes.

• Kathy Sierra

  The Nine Superpowers of User Awesome

  

  When: Tuesday 14 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Kathy Sierra

  SOLD OUT!

  The best products don't always win. Having the better service, company, business model, social network, funding, marketing, publicity, viral video, amazing app doesn't guarantee a hit. But, we can up the odds of success by focusing on what matters most to users: not what the product does, but what the user does. Not product, company, app awesomeness, but user awesomeness.

  What we WANT

  Users that are...

  • happy to pay for the premium version
  • ready and willing to upgrade
  • want and build accessories, add-ons, plug-ins, learning products
  • contributing to a thriving user community
  • evangelizing the product *without* incentives
  • tolerant of problems, glitches, buggy versions, mistakes, setbacks
  • evolving the product and ecosystem around it
  • resistant to seduction by competitors
  • sustainably loyal and active, in it for the long haul

  Let the competition focus on out-featuring, out-marketing, out-friending, out-spending while we focus on out-enabling our users. You may never be The Best in your product category, but you don't have to be. Our users care far more about their own ability than ours. They care far more about what we've added to THEIR skills than what we've done to build our own. They don't care how much our product kicks ass, they care about how we can help THEM kick ass.

  What we'll LEARN

  The last few years gave us dramatic new insights into how people build expertise including how they get and stay motivated, how and what to practice, how to move up in the quickest and most effective way, how to build knowledge, skills, ability, and creativity. How to consistently increase the challenge levels without becoming frustrated, how to withstand plateaus, how to trigger behaviors we most want to reinforce, how to become better in a deeper, sustainable way, how to find and generate the flow state of engagement.

  When researchers reverse-engineered people who are truly awesome at something — those who have deep expertise from musicians to gamers to athletes to coders — we find nine common meta-skills. Nine things that everyone who seriously kicks ass at something has been doing. By infusing your company, app, service, marketing, user documentation, social media with these nine User Superpowers, you have the best chance of building sustainable, robust user communities.

  Most importantly, we'll figure out exactly what it is your users most want to be better at, using a tool to help you find the most motivating way to engage your users. Users don't want to be better at using your app, they want to be better at whatever it is that using your app *enables*. (Example: they don't want to be camera experts, they want to be better at photgraphy)

  And even if you cannot change your product, what matters most is that you can start changing your users immediately. Learning to build better users is a far more effective (and rare) skill than building better products. And the Nine Superpowers give us a clear path forward with implementation possibilities on any (or even zero) budget.

  (Note: this is not the same as the "Creating Passionate Users" workshop from earlier Webstocks; this one takes the single most important element of passionate users and dives deep into how to make it happen.

• Erin Kissane

  Content Strategy in (Your) Real World

  

  When: Tuesday 14 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Erin Kissane

  SOLD OUT!

  Launch delays; giant pages of text; overwhelmed staff; ill-tended, unfocused copy: all disasters for UX and web design projects. Without early, informed attention to content, even the best-planned projects can come to a bad end. And with the proliferation of online communication channels, content planning, development, and management is getting harder, not easier.

  On the bright side, smart content strategy work can make everyone else's job easier, from designers and front-end developers to the writers and editors who create and revise final copy.

  You don't have to become a content specialist to put the principles, tools, and methods of content strategy to work on your projects. In this workshop, Erin Kissane will show you how to jump straight in and incorporate content strategy methods into your existing practices—and how doing so can help your users, clients, colleagues, and employers.

  What you'll learn

  Using hands-on examples rooted in real projects and deliverables, you'll learn how to:

  • do a lot more (for your users) with a lot less (content development)
  • integrate content strategy into multidisciplinary UX and web design projects
  • apply familiar UX and user-centered design principles to content
  • develop (and fix) content creation and maintenance workflows
  • measure and analyze content
  • keep your content on target—and your strategy alive and useful—in the long term

  Who it's for

  Designers, UXers, web editors, writers, and anyone else who wants to apply the principles of content strategy in the development of mid-size and large web projects.

  What you'll need

  A laptop, a pen, and your brain.

• Garr Reynolds

  Presenting Naked (with or without visuals)

  

  When: Wednesday 15 February, 9:00-12:30pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Garr Reynolds

  SOLD OUT!

  In this interactive, upbeat seminar, designer and professor Garr Reynolds will discuss how to prepare, design, and deliver powerful and visual presentations that connect, engage, and move audiences to make a change or take action. As always, Garr will be drawing on lessons from Japanese aesthetic principles and the tenets of simplicity to show you how to create and deliver messages with more connection and engagement regardless of what digital tools you use.

• Nick Mihailovski

  Optimize your site using Google Analytics

  

  When: Wednesday 15 February, 9:00-12:30pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Nick Mihailovski

  SOLD OUT!

  Say you want to improve the performance on your website, where do you begin?

  On the web, almost everything is measurable and using free tools like Google Analytics give you a wealth of data. But where do you begin to turn all that data into actions you can take? More importantly, how can you put all that data into the context of your business decisions.

  In this action packed session we'll work through advanced strategies to approach your web analytics data. We'll start off by looking at Google Analytics underlying user-interaction data model. Then we'll look at common user behaviors the report data represents, which business question we can answer, and what actions we can take to improve performance.

  As we start answering more complex questions, we'll look at how different features like advanced segments, report filters and custom reports affect the processing of data.

  Finally we'll look at ways to send data into, and extract data out of Google Analytics to make the data better reflect the way your business is organized.

  Who's it for?

  Anybody who uses Web Analytics and specifically Google Analytics. There will be high level takeaways for everyone. Beginners will learn where to start analyzing data. Experts will learn how to master the platform.

  Whether you want to increase visitors, improve conversion, or understand user behavior. Or if you use Google Analytics today and want to get a deeper understanding of the product and how to get the most from the reports. You should definitely come to this workshop.

  What you'll learn

  • How Google Analytics represents user behavior
  • How different types of tracking features, like events, ecommerce and social map onto the model
  • How Google Analytics processes data into reports
  • Mastering advanced features like Advanced Segments, Filters and Custom Reports by understanding how they influence data processing
  • Using Custom Variables and our API to integrate Google Analytics with your internal systems

  What you'll need

  Google Analytics is free. Bring a laptop, set it up on your web site and we can start analyzing the data together.

• Jared Spool

  Practical Design Tools for Team Innovation: Personas, Principles, and Vision

  

  When: Wednesday 15 February, 9:00-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Jared Spool

  SOLD OUT!

  The primary obstacle prevent teams from producing great, innovative designs is not having a shared understanding of who the users are, what they want, and how the team will meet their needs. Without shared understanding, everyone moves to their own beat of the drum, and the resulting design is convoluted, complex, and frustrates when it should delight.

  In this workshop, Jared will share proven and effective tools to help teams deliver innovative experiences for their users. He'll show how teams march in the same direction when they weave together user research, persona and scenario development, design principles, design critique, and experience visions. It's perfect for teams working with Agile/Scrum, traditional waterfall, and other processes where a shared understanding yields the best results.

  Morning: Research, Personas, Scenarios, and Principles

  The Power of Knowing Your Users

  • User research techniques that uncover opportunities for innovations
  • Why your team needs to separate its inferences from design observations
  • Customer journey maps: an effective tool for tracking your current experience

  Project-based Personas and Scenarios

  • How personas and scenarios help you capture your the important details about your users
  • Scenario-driven design - great for agile user stories and traditional requirements
  • Methods for creating useful, project-specific personas and scenarios in a single day

  Project-based Design Principles

  • How specific, meaningful principles raise the overall quality of the team's production
  • What makes an effective design principle (and why Google & Facebook got it wrong)
  • Integration tricks to combine personas, scenarios, and principles in every day work

  Afternoon: Creative Briefs, Critiques, and Experience Visions

  The Magic of the Short-Form Creative Brief

  • How a simplified creative brief brings focus to every design meeting
  • The basic components of the short-form creative brief

  Growing Your Team's Design Skills Through Constructive Critique

  • What makes a critique most effective (and what traps to avoid)
  • How to train your team to facilitate their own constructive critiques
  • Simple tricks for refining your team's understanding of good versus bad design

  The User Experience Vision

  • What is behind innovative products of Disney, Nokia, and Apple
  • Techniques for choosing an aspirational experience for the team to achieve
  • Ways to guide the team towards achieving the vision (and what to do when it changes)

• Scott Hanselman

  ASP.NET MVC: From Baby Ninja to slightly older and more competent Ninja

  

  When: Wednesday 15 February, 1:30-5:00pm
  Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
  With: Scott Hanselman

  Register now!>

  ($375 if attending conference, $495 if not)

  Join Scott Hanselman as he explains ASP.NET MVC from File -> New Project to more advanced topics and ninja tricks! We’ll dig into the details and try to put MVC into perspective. Is WebForms going away? What’s better about MVC vs. WebForms? How does MVC sit on top of ASP.NET and how was it written? We’ll play with call stacks, and avoid PowerPoint slides! We’ll start with a brief introduction to ASP.NET, but it’s not a “basic” session.

  We assume you have web development concepts down or perhaps you’re a professional ASP.NET WebForms developers who is just starting out with ASP.NET MVC. We’ll work our way through Models, Views, Controllers to more interesting topics like Dependency Injection, jQuery, Mobile Views with jQuery Mobile, Custom Scaffolding, hybrid WebForms/MVC apps, as well as powerful NuGet packages like Glimpse, MiniProfiler, and more. We’ll even learn about realtime apps with SignalR.

  Who's it for

  Folks who know ASP.NET and perhaps pieces of ASP.NET MVC but want to really round out their full understanding of how ASP.NET MVC 4 works and how it all fits together into the ASP.NET ecosystem.

  What you'll learn

  Like, a bunch.

  • MVC with Dependency Injection
  • jQuery techniques, Templating, etc
  • Mobile Views with jQuery Mobile
  • Custom Scaffolding
  • How to make hybrid WebForms/MVC apps and when
  • Powerful NuGet packages like Glimpse, MiniProfiler, and more
  • Make realtime apps with SignalR

  What's you'll need

  A laptop with either Visual Studio 2010 and a copy of and MVC 4 installed, or Visual Studio v.Next (beta, preview, whatever) and a copy of MVC 4 installed

  You can get all that stuff for free at http://www.asp.net/downloads. Load it before you come.