iamfrankstallone

Theresa Neil did her talk titled, “Rich Patterns in UI Design” and shared some amazing incite into user interaction research that she has done. The focus was on giving the user more control like undo and redo, contextual tools, and giving very clear cut choices for the user. Breadcrumbs were another useful tool she said would help give users a way back which is important because nobody wants to be trapped on a page where they do not know where to go. I can relate because it gives you a claustrophobic feeling! Theresa, who admitted to not getting on the blog scene until recently, was kind enough to share her study findings, “30 Essential Controls” which, “…is the second article in a three part series on patterns and principles for RIA design.” She also shared with us a few tools that she uses for prototyping and gave us an activity although most of us were unable to do this because the internet at NYCpoly was not able to handle all the traffic we threw at it for those to days.

Designing Interfaces for Social Transaction with Joshua Porter was brilliant. I was happy they were able to extend his time because he had a plethora of knowledge to share. A special thanks to Fritz and Joshua, my friend Joe Simoncelli won a copy of Joshua’s book, “Desinging for the Social Web” and was very pleased to receive it. Joshua gave us great examples of what works and how the little things can really make the user reach in a positive way on your web site. There was emphasis on how copy should be an engaging conversation, and having loading bars to give the user some sort of feedback even if the server is taking a lot of time or just something to show users that what they click actually worked are great things to have. He had a great argument for testimonials too, instead of putting some of your testimonials, if you are going to make a testimonial page put all of them up. Educating us about Harriet Klausner and how Amazon reacted to upset customers; Amazon had a problem they needed to solve and fast, their rating system was getting people mad and there was no way that anybody could logistically read more than 5 books a day and rate them like Harriet had (somehow?) been able to accomplish. So Amazon came up with another rating scenario so that the old rating way was still available (since so many put in so much effort) and others could rate reviews and learn that way. The new ranking system was a good way to make everyone happy.

Now I knew nothing about Agile so when Anders Ramsay came on stage to explain the methodology in “Agile for UX Practitioners” I was excited. Since the conference had a lot of user experience reflections his talk mainly spoke about how user experience is something that can and should be thought about throughout the entire process of completely a client project. Development and design can work together and drew out a nice staircase of how you can marriage the two together which would create a better product. Reflect and Adjust. Agile breaks communication barriers because instead of designing something and sending it off to the developers the developers are there from the beginning to help aid the design because they have useful ideas as well. Overall Agile is much better understood now and although it may not work for all scenarios it can work well for many.

I never heard of Todd Warfel before Delve and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised with his presentation called, “Prototyping in the Wild”. His emphasis was that anybody can prototype and proceeded to go through tools. From paper and pencil which is pretty much free, to Fireworks and HTML there are many ways to prototype so do it early and often to reduce risk. Explaining to us how the process works at his firm was the best, from 6-8-5 drawings to the five minutes he tells people they have to do this prototyping to keep the results pure and fast there was plenty to talk about. His highly collaborative process creates nothing but a transparent strategy that gives the client the confidence to work with him because they are in the process the entire time. Todd admitted that he uses an Apple computer so he has not gotten into many PC software so my new acquaintance Dan Kruse gave me the heads up on Axure, “…is a wireframing, prototyping and specification tool that helps user experience professionals, business analyst and product managers design applications and web sites.” Mr. Warfel made prototyping look easy and was super knowledgeable about client relationships, definitely the diamond in the rough of this conference and I can not wait for his book, A Practitioner’s Guide to Practical Prototyping to come out on Rosenfeld Media!

Considering the knowledge I gained from the experience of being in the room with some of the most influential people in the user experience and web world I am humbled and overwhelmed with joy from being able to listen to all these great speakers. At times I was literally blown out of my seat, and there were plenty of ah-ha moments. I am looking forward to FOWD 2009 and meeting Elliot J. Stocks and Dan Ruben but DelveUI will always have a special place, oh you know where. =)