Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m happy to tell you that the new format is a huge improvement. The event no longer feels rushed, and even though there are six sessions every day, there’s a 15 minute break between each one, and a 1½ hour lunch. That might sound insignificant, but if you’ve ever been to an all-day tech conference, you’ll understand what a lifesaver those breaks can be.
The venue was the same as last year, the Bell Harbor conference center on Pier 66, which is just down the street from Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. The room is large, but comfortable. It’s wide, but not too long, so you’ve always got a good view of the stage. Last year, the only real problem with the room was the lack of power outlets – when you’ve got hundreds of geeks with laptops and only a few outlets, you’ve got a problem. This year, they ran extension cords down every other aisle, with power strips every few feet, so there were no problems keeping your laptop charged. They paid for the high-speed wifi, but as you might expect, it still got pretty bogged down with so many people using it.
Like last year, they had a simple gift bag with an AEA-branded notebook, but instead of coming in a plastic bag, they gave out embroidered tote-bags and a notebook containing all the slides printed out for taking notes, which are pretty nice upgrades.
Of course, the biggest change is upping the number of speakers from four to ten. Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer spoke on both days, and everyone else spoke once. The subject matter was varied and interesting, as were the speakers. In fact, if I tried to write a full review for every session this blog post would be as thick as a phone book, so I’ll just give some selected notes here, and assure you that none of these people were slouches.
Eric started the first day with “Secrets of the CSS Jedi,” which was all about thinking outside the box with CSS. He illustrated that the default behavior of all HTML elements is defined by the browser, and each browser defines things slightly differently – especially font handling – which is why he advocates the use of a reset stylesheet.
Next up, Jeffrey discussed “Writing the User Interface.” Briefly, he says that content drives traffic, freshness counts, and language is the main interface on most sites, which is why all sites have large writing and editorial budgets. When everyone laughed, he asked for raised hands if you have a writing budget or a copy czar. When only a few people raised their hands, he said “In conclusion, get a writing budget and hire a copy czar,” and then pretended to walk off stage. After everyone laughed he went on to show how copy is the easiest and often the cheapest part of a site to fix by tweaking the copy on several example sites to make things more clear.
Jason Santa Maria gave a presentation titled “Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag.” It was basically an overview of his creative process. He advocated carrying a sketchbook and making a creative space to work in, as well as researching your subject thoroughly and following an iterative design process that includes “gray box” designs and wireframes before doing comps.
“Jeffrey is fantastic with clients. He can tell them that they’re complete idiots, and they’re like ‘Yeah, we are.’”
– Jason Santa Maria talking about Jeffrey Zeldman
At lunch, Jason sat at our table and recognized me from last year, which was pretty cool. He chatted with us all through lunch, and told us what it’s like working for Happy Cog, jumping between the Philadelphia offices, and working with the New York crew, who don’t have an office yet. He also told us a bit about his plans for the A List Apart books, which sound like they’re going to be very cool.
Also at lunch, I saw some of my former coworkers from Luxury Real Estate, which was cool, because when I was working there, they didn’t want to spend money on things like conferences, so it sounds like things might be improving over there.
Tim Bray gave a lecture after lunch titled “Reporting from the Engine Room.” He told a funny story about how he and Jeffrey used to write newsletters together, and basically his job was to rewrite Jeffrey’s polite letters into offensive rants, which became hugely popular. He jumped from topic to topic, briefly discussing Ruby on Rails, why blogs with good content tend to have bad design, and the evolution of the web away from rich applications. At one point, when an audience member asked if his graphic was made with web-safe colors, he replied “That’s so 20th century.”
Shawn Henry talked about “Getting Real with Accessibility,” which boiled down to testing your work in screen readers and voicing browsers, using proper ALT text for images, and scaling your text size up and down. Most of all, however, she advocated doing real user testing with some disabled people, because no test substitutes for the way real people interact with things. She also talked about how no two disabled people will use their tools the same way, so it’s silly to only test one thing, or only for one disability.
Finishing out the first day, Andy Budd gave a talk titled “Are You Experienced,” which was about User Experience Design. He talked about how people don’t read instructions anymore, and how we based our assumptions about technology on previous experience – interacting with our Tivo or DVD player the same way we used our VCRs, for instance. His big conclusion points were that technology shouldn’t make people feel stupid, and personality counts. Sites like flickr and products like the Wii or the iPod succeed because they understand this.
On day two, Mike Davidson started out by talking about “Civil Disobedience in Interactive Media.” He told us that he was arrested on Bill Gates’ property when he was 19 for underage drinking (they had launched their boat off his dock). His point here was that standards and rules should be viewed as guidelines. If breaking a rule will cause no harm to others, and the benefits outweigh the costs, then breaking it might be the right decision. So even though he got arrested, he had a great time with his friends, and got this funny story to tell at conferences. Speaking about web standards, he said if you’re going to break the rules, then you should look for the most elegant hack. There was definitely a tone of subversion to his talk, with a running undercurrent of concern that large standards bodies and companies are making the rules instead of the people who have to follow them, and it should be the other way around.
Khoi Vinh gave a presentation titled “From Dots to Design,” which was all about grid design, and covered most of the same material as his blog posts about his mock Yahoo redesign.
Shaun Inman discussed “Evolving an Interface,” which was mostly about the changes that he made to his stats program, Mint when he upgraded it to version two. He focused a lot on progressive disclosure, and things like making tabs look like tabs to avoid confusing the users. He also said to avoid “interface artifacts,” which are anything that adds noise to an interface without adding any value, such as colons on form labels. I had never thought about it before, but I guess they are pretty useless.
After lunch, Eric spoke again, this time about “The State of CSS in an IE7 World.” Mostly stuff I already knew, like the addition of fixed positioning, children of element selectors, first children selectors, attribute selectors, etc. Basically, his conclusion was that IE7, while it has some quirks, is on-par with other current browsers. Interestingly, he advocated the use of Dean Edwards’ IE7 scripts to add these behaviors to IE6, which I don’t remember him ever advocating before.
Jeffrey discussed “Selling Design,” which was a repeat of a lecture he gave last year, but it’s a good one, so I didn’t mind. His practical advice was to not sell the art choices you make, but the ideas and feelings behind it. The client wants ideas, not pixels. The best part was when he put up this sequence of slides:
Finishing out the event Jeff Veen talked about “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps.” He laid out the goal of any web app: To develop an experience based on the patterns inherent in our stuff that empowers users to accomplish their goals. In order to do this successfully, you need something that strikes a balance between being business-viable, engineering-possible, and user-desirable. Finally, he said something that really resonated with me – You don’t know what else the user is doing, but it’s likely that your website is just one small distraction in their larger picture.
All in all, I really felt like the conference was a big improvement over last year. The new format means that things don’t feel as rushed, and the much larger number of speakers means more subject variety and fewer opportunities to get bored. Even the little improvements like the swag bag and getting enough power strips really helped make it a great experience. I would highly recommend An Event Apart to anyone in the web industry.