outbreak

Image by adactio via FlickrSo I’ve come home from London where I visited the Future of Web Design conference. I decided to only visit the conference on Thursday, not the workshops on Friday. The reason for this is that I like to learn stuff by myself or by talking to other people – I’m not into group therapy.

This was my first Carsonified conference, the makers of web apps which help you send large files and match advertisers and newsletters and also a resource for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs.

Their conferences happen often and I’ve thought of going to a few of them before but I’ve usually been too busy. I decided to go this year and I’m not sorry I did – even though I heard some harsh comments about the program. I liked the conference – most of the talks were thought provoking enough even when what I already knew most of what the speakers presented. I must agree with those that complained over the sponsored talks – the first one was weird to say the least and the second one seemed more pristine (or I was just in a more naive mood).

The venue was ok – it was big enough for the 850 crowd but the lounge was way to small. The food was lacking, another problem being drinks – fortunately one of the sponsors was kind enough to give out water at the beginning and me being smart enough to take one then since it ran out even before the conference started. I was surprised at how the breaks were set – I would have expected them to be shorter and the lunch break to be longer – there was a huge crowd that had to find something to eat and be back in 30 minutes.

The pre-party sponsored by Media Temple was held in a pub with an open bar. It was great, but I was tired as hell so I left quite early. The after party was a completely different story – the free drinks ran out in the first 40 minutes, the club was way too small and the music was way too loud. I ran into Andy Clarke and invited him to Slovenia to speak at Spletne urice – I hope he’ll have time to come this year and share his views on the future of the web.

All-in-all it was a good conference with a few shortcomings and it’s well worth buying the conference in a box package.

I’ll also be speaking about the conference this Wednesday at Spletne urice with some of the other Slovenian attendees.

The last batch of presentations:

Unconventional ways to promote your site

Paul Farnell

A really amazing talk that started out by saying that SEO, AdWords are conventional and talked about unconventional means of promoting your site / service / app. The first point being satellites – small freebish stuff that doesn’t need much work but are a constant drivers of visitors to your main site / service (examples: Litmus CSSVista, 37signals Ta-da Lists). Another valid proposition is to join social networks and forums that cover similar stuff your app does – a link in your signature can also make a lot of visitors. A big driver is the word “free” but since you can’t have only free stuff the guys at Litmus decided to launch every payable product/service with a short period when it’s free to use – they’re counting on the buzz since you can test the app without lock-in. This is a different approach to giving 30 days of free service when you register since it creates a bigger buzz when you launch. The main lesson is that you need to be human – you need to show enthusiasm (toward technology and your product) in order to build trust which will in turn give you access to passionate users (if they trust that you can solve their problem they will ask).

Evolving the User Experience

Daniel Burka

There are numerous ways of designing stuff – building complex stuff or building a modular structure. The first will give you a great solution if you know most of the parameters and the second will give you building blocks so you can build whatever you want. The thing is that even the first solution gives you possibilities to change – a nice example are older buildings that are now used for something they weren’t designed for. The web is also a good place to follow the users – what they’re doing is a direction for design and feature list and there is no excuse not to listen to this important feedback (you can also do this in architecture for setting up paths – set them where people walk, cause that’s the user pattern that evolved with the use of the park). Subtraction is also iteration – don’t be afraid to add, remove or just change small thing in the design – if you are you can always only deploy such new features to a limited number of users to see whether it works or not. Fixing things doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch – realigning the design is much more difficult but will land better with the users. There’s also no need to innovate to do something better – stuff that is out there works and you need to find out how it can work in your site. You also need to think of the iteration process – how often you’ll realign the page and how fast you can deploy and roll-out changes.