. : September 2, 2015 : .

An Event Apart – Day 1 recap

I’m very blessed this year to have the privilege of attending An Event Apart: Chicago. There is a great lineup of speakers with fascinating things to say about a variety of topics in the web dev/design industry.

Here’s my brief recap of day 1:

Jeffrey Zeldman

Career Advice From a Cranky Old Man

Super entertaining and invaluable advice no matter what your career is.

Some things that stood out to me:

Work never sells itself
Attitude trumps work in most big companies
First impressions are forever (I already knew that, but it never hurts to have a reminder)
Blog like no one is reading (ironic… that’s what I’m doing right now)

Cassie McDaniel

Trees for the forest

Things that stood out to me:

millions of Facebook users have no idea they are using the internet – quite an eye opener
Design choices that might seem trivial, such as a font, can have an impact on how people perceive your work
- For example, no one would trust a news site that uses comic sans
Sometimes people are more likely to engage in websites and templates that are less polished because they are less intimidated
- Wikipedia
- Reddit
- eBay
- craigslist
In the web industry we often reach these points of singularity, where everyone seems to be copying each other
- I.E. – lots of marketing sites have dark, full screen images in the background with white text on top

Cameron Moll

Unified UX

This was a fascinating talk. For me, it boiled down to something along the lines of “Things should work the same way everywhere”. One humorous example he gave at the beginning of his talk was about how his fridge does not dispense water the same way that soda fountain machines do, and when people come over to his house, they often spray themselves while trying to get a glass of water.

Some points that stood out to me:

Make sure your site does not disable pinch/zoom
Make your mobile app look as similar to what your website looks like on a mobile device as much possible
77% of mobile searches happen at home or at work. It’s not just ‘people on the go’. We need to design accordingly.
Make things work everywhere
- On all devices, yes, but also… (see next bullet)
- Use server session storage, so if you change devices you are right back to the task you left off on
The best interface should be the one within reach, not the one your IT department singled out to support

Jen Simmons

Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts

Jen really challenged An Event Apart attendees to push the envelope when it comes to type setting. She showed lots of cool examples of typesetting in magazines and then showed how easy it is to replicate designs like that in the web.

Some key takeaways:

We seem to be stuck in a boxy rut of: header, nav, side columns, main content, and footer – how can we shake things up?
In the early days of the web, lots of content was arranged in a circular pattern. We’ve gone away from that, but we seem to be coming back to it now.
We can use things like CSS Regions, transforms, etc. to easily accomplish some really cool stuff – it’s changing our thinking that’s the hard part
Get inspiration from books and magazines – WHY NOT!?!?
truncation is not a content strateg…
- that is a joke, BTW :)

Karen McGrane

Content in a Zombie Apocalypse

Karen is quite a speaker. She makes full use of her index finger to drive home important points.

Her talk centered on the growing need for headless/decoupled content management systems. In a world where devices are popping up in every corner of our schools, places of work, homes and even automobiles, this is something that is worth getting right. Basically, if you want the content to look right and be useable on all these different devices, all the formatting and arranging of the content should be handled on the front end.

She gave a big thumbs down to WYSIWYG editors, which I applaud. The reasoning being that content written in WYSIWYG editors will only work right in the medium that the author intended it for. I can think of many examples where my patience has been tested because of this.

Some key points:

There will always be a “NEXT BIG THING”
- Examples: digital signage, smart TVs, smart phones, tablets, yadda yadda you are smart enough to know where this is going
- We don’t know what it is, so let’s store our content in the most generic way possible
Keep form separate from content
- This includes markup – not just CSS
With a properly implemented decoupled/headless CMS, you can release updates much faster
- You don’t have to do regression testing on EVERY single page – just a few

Ethan Marcotte

Laziness in the Time of Responsive Design

Ethan showed us tons of cool things you can do with just a few lines of code. Two things that stood out the most were responsive video markup/css and a radio button selection animation.

Some mental snapshots from Ethan’s talk:

Don’t rely too heavily on frameworks; you can often accomplish the same effect without them
Words like “mobile”, “tablet”, and “desktop” can be limiting. Instead focus on input methods, screen size, and network conditions. Breakpoints should be about your content, not specific devices.
He brought up the Hamburger icon and all the usability issues around it
- If something isn’t important enough to show it to people on their iPhones, maybe it’s not important enough to be on the site at all
- There might be a better way to design your menu
Design for failure with progressive enhancement
Use a “cut the mustard” test
- Load just enough JavaScript to see what the browser can handle, and then load more stuff based on its capabilities

Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier

ShopTalk Show LIVE!

I got to meet Dave Rupert before the show – super nice, fun to talk to, outstanding person.

They had a large plastic fern on stage. They told silly jokes. They took questions from the audience. There were amazing sound effects. You need to listen to it: http://shoptalkshow.com/. At the moment of this writing, the podcast is not available yet. I will try to remember to update this post with a link when it’s published.

And, that’s it!

I think this was a fairly successful mental regurgitation of the events that took place at An Event Apart Chicago on August 31, 2015.
#AEACHI