I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle pretty well, so the opportunity to play tourist in a new city was very appealing to me. Luckily, my coworker Libby was coming with me, and she used to work in “the City” so I had the advantage of a guide.

(While I was there, I took hundreds of photos, and even after whittling it down, I still uploaded more than 100 to flickr. Rather than bore you with them, I’ll keep this post limited to discussion of the conference, and if you want to see dozens of photos of beautiful architecture, you can check out the photo set.)

The conference was held in the beautiful Palace Hotel on Market St. in the Financial District. My inner Blues Brothers fan had to suppress a giggle that we’d be going to the Palace Hotel Ballroom (where it’s ladies’ night!). The hotel itself is beautiful, and the dining room you see when you first walk in has an amazing ornate glass ceiling. The rooms we were in weren’t quite as nice, but even they had fancy chandeliers and the sight of hundreds of web people with their laptops and geeky t-shirts (myself included) was a bit surreal.

“If your web site structure in any way resembles your org. chart, you’ve failed.”
– Jeffrey Zeldman

Zeldman kicked things off with a bang, as usual. His modestly-titled presentation “Understanding Web Design” continued themes he touched on in previous years. He gave 12 tips for web designers, of which the first and last were “start with the user.” By focusing on the user’s needs, rather than the designer or the client, it becomes more clear how a site should function. (Though he left out the anecdote he used previously that the only other industry to call their target audience “users” is drug dealers.)

He reiterated an idea that he and Jason Santa Maria have both talked about — “sell ideas, not pixels.” Don’t go to your client with the “green comp” and the “72pt Helvetica Comp.” Go to them with the “Human Interest Comp” and the “Photographic Impact Comp.” It’s easier for clients to talk about the differences between ideas — otherwise they get hung up on design details.

Next up came Eric Meyer with a new presentation called “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks,” where he analyzed several popular CSS frameworks for what they could teach us. Long story short: Don’t use other people’s CSS frameworks except as a jumping-off point. Ideally, you should be creating your own framework. The one really fascinating thing to come out of it, though, was a discussion of the “ideal” font-sizes for headings, which he came up with by averaging the sizes across all the frameworks.

“How did you convince your organization to switch to CSS from tables? Oh really? I’m sorry.”
– Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria talked about the difficulties of designing for the web, starting with the great example of the wonderful design in Wired magazine, and how none of that design carries over to their website, which uses a completely standard template. After talking about why web designs tend to look alike, he came to the example of his recent site redesign as a way to inject some art direction into a template-driven site.

Luke Wroblewski took us through lunch, discussing visual hierarchy, and how to design a site to encourage users to see the important bits and complete the important actions. He cited eye tracking studies that show that users do not read everything on a page — they skip around like mad, looking for anything that seems relevant — and if they don’t find anything quickly, they move on.

“Being community manager is like being a pinata. People beat on you with sticks and you still have to give them candy.”

– Heather Champ

After lunch, Heather Champ came out to talk about the work she does as a community manager for flickr. I was already somewhat aware of her from reading her husband’s website, and I had seen her pop up a few times in the flickr support forums. This was the first time I’d seen her speak, and I have to say, she may be one of my new favorite web people. She is passionate, and the things she had to say about how to manage a community were equally smart and funny. I have a new appreciation for the work that goes on behind the scenes at flickr… and rereading this paragraph, perhaps a bit of a crush on the woman herself.

Liz Danzico spoke next about frameworks, and I’m ashamed to say that I got almost nothing out of her talk. The entire presentation was based on a metaphor of music notation, and I was completely lost. I don’t know anything about music notation, so her analogies might as well have been in another language. It’s too bad, because I know she’s smart, and I was looking forward to her talk.

Dan Cederholm was the last official speaker for the first day, and he talked about “Bulletproof” design. I’ve seen him speak before, and it was great, as usual, but very little new information for anyone who’s read his book or seen him speak before. Still, he got a ton of applause when he said that websites don’t need to look exactly the same in every browser.

Oddly, the day was capped by a presentation from a sponsor. It was tacked on at the end of an already long day, the introduction was brief, and probably two-thirds of the audience had already left. Scott Fegette from Adobe came out and promised that his presentation wasn’t a sales pitch for Dreamweaver (which he works on). We tried to stick it out, but it became obvious within minutes that it was a sales pitch, and we bailed like everyone else.

“Your stylesheets SUGGEST the way a website should look. The user decides how your site WILL look.”

– Jeremy Keith

Day two of the conference wasn’t quite as strong. Jeremy Keith kicked things off with a presentation about the process they use at Clearleft. It was interesting in that it’s always interesting to get a peek behind-the-scenes of another agency, but I really didn’t learn anything.

Eric Meyer went next to talk about debug and reset stylesheets. If you read his website, you’ve already seen everything we heard, but it’s always nice to see the master at work. Two things I walked out not knowing before: 1) for testing purposes, use outline: 1px solid red; rather than border because outline doesn’t affect layouts, and 2) reset stylesheets are much more popular than I thought. Probably 90% of the room raised their hands when Eric asked who used them. I don’t make CSS decisions based on the “wisdom of the crowd” but with that number of people, maybe it’s worth taking a closer look.

Derek Featherstone gave a talk called “Accessibility Beyond Compliance” which had one of the best opening lines I’ve ever heard. He walked up on stage, cleared his throat, and started with “The person on the other end of the phone said ‘I’m sorry sir, but I have to hang up now.’” He was telling a story about a blind user whose bank wouldn’t help him because he was using a screenreader — and they thought that meant there was another person in the room, violating their privacy policies.

Beyond the stories he told, which were very powerful, and helped to illustrate the point that accessibility is more than just alt attributes, the thing I walked away with was that managing focus in your web applications is incredibly important.

After lunch, Kelly Goto gave a talk about agile development. It was pretty good, and she’s a good speaker (I enjoyed a presentation I saw her give on the future of mobile at An Event Apart Seattle in 2006), but my lack of interest in agile combined with a big lunch was like a sleeping pill. No fault of hers, but I was really struggling to stay awake.

“I wore a shirt that says ‘Math is easy. Design is hard.’ You know what’s not funny at Google? That shirt.”
– Jeff Veen

Jeff Veen gave the last presentation, and I have to say, he’s probably the most compelling public speaker I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t even know where to start summarizing it. His larger theme seemed to be how to present data in such a way that users can “find their story.” He discussed infographics, from Snow’s cholera map to Minard’s Napoleon map. (When he got to that, he suggested a game called “Web Conference Bingo,” which would include the Minard map, an iPod, LOLcats, etc.) He even mentioned that the look of the charts in Google Analytics were inspired by the flyover maps from Raiders of the Lost Ark. None of this really captures the fact that he is just an amazing speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him, take it. You’ll be glad you did.

All In all, I’ve got to say that An Event Apart remains the best web conference I’ve ever attended. You definitely get your money’s worth, and even though I’ve come three years in a row, I always come away having learned a lot, and with a renewed excitement about my job. The single-track format makes a huge difference, too, because you don’t have to stress about which sessions are the best to attend, or sneaking out of a bad session to go to your second choice. Plus — and this might seem minor, but if you’ve ever been to a conference, you’ll know it’s a big deal — they take a 15-minute break between every speaker. This means time to go to the bathroom, grab a drink, and just stretch your legs for a few minutes. Plain and simple, these guys get it.

Slides:  http://www.popart.com/files/Web_Accessibility_SPIN_January_2008.pdf

Summary:

It is clear that the web is the platform for most of our content and applications going forward. It is important that we are all good web citizens and produce content that is easily consumed. To that end, this seminar focused on practical techniques that can be employed to reach and serve the broadest possible audiences in the best possible way. The topics included how to provide services that are accessible to people with disabilities and usable from mobile phones or other devices — without destroying the development budget.

This seminar demonstrated the considerations that go into building successful web applications and the tools that can assist the quality assurance process.

“I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions.”

– Aaron Cannon, in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness

For a standards zealot like myself, this was hard to hear. Like most deciples of Zeldman, when someone asks me why we should use web standards for a site, I go back to the CSS talking points in this article from A List Apart. First, web standards mean dramatically improved accessibility, even degrading gracefully in older browsers that don’t support CSS. Secondly, standards-compliant sites tend to be cheaper to produce and maintain when compared to older table-based layouts, and finally, standards mean that a site is “future-proof” because they will be much easier to maintain and update as time passes and coding standards continue to change.

What I learned in this conversation is that only one of those is really something that our Client Services team can sell. Client care about accessibility – not because disabled access is a big issue, but because accessible sites are also more search-engine friendly. We can proudly point to several examples in our portfolio where we refreshed a client’s site with standards and their search engine rankings showed a marked improvement.

On the flip side, clients rarely care about future-proofing their websites. This is perhaps due to the enterprise-level clients that we tend to work with, but our clients rarely want to spend more money today to make things easier in the future. Typically, our clients have to struggle for every bit of their marketing budgets, and web is usually only a small fraction of what they get. So when they hear us say that doing something now will save them money someday, their instinct is to decline.

Most frustrating, however, was when our Client Services VP told me that web standards sites are not cheaper. After going around the table a few times, we managed to agree that we were using different definitions of cheaper. When I say a site is cheaper, I mean that initial production of the site will take somewhat less time than a comparable table-based layout, and that future updates to the layout or design of the site will take much less time than they would have otherwise.

However, her experience with our standards-based designs has been that they take about the same amount of time for both initial production and any future updates. They may not cost more, but they don’t cost less. The problem here is that the sites she was referring to had major content updates, not just design updates. If a design update keeps the same content and markup, but only changes the look and feel, then I can do the entire update via CSS, and save a great deal of time because I’ll be updating many pages at once, rather than updating dozens of table-based pages. But if the client wants us to add new features or anything else that requires changing the markup as well as the CSS, then she’s right that the updates take about the same amount of time as they would have in a non-standards site.

That kind of thing causes a nightmare for the Client Services team. If we tell a client that updates to their site in the future will be cheaper (without qualifying that we’re talking about certain kinds of updates), and then we come back with a price quote that’s not cheaper, the client gets upset, and it puts the Client Services team in a bad position.

Certainly, this kind of thing can be avoided by properly educating the client, but that’s a whole different can of worms. The important take-away for me was to immediately stop claiming that standards-based sites are cheaper without adding the qualifier that they are only cheaper under specific circumstances.

The way to sell standards to Client Services is to tell them that it will dramatically improve accessibility and search engine rankings, and won’t cost more than a comparable table-based design.

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.

Mike Davidson pointed me to this Nietzsche quote in a post by Jeffrey Veen, who was referencing a slide by Steve Mulder (how's that for attribution?) which applies neatly to this situation:

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Jeff struggled to defend himself, but the problem is that his most vocal critics had missed his point. As he points out, they see accessibility as a black and white issue, where you either provide access or you do not, when it's actually a continuum. No web designer can possibly cover all the bases in the real world. Budgets and deadlines make it impractical to support users that make up less than 1% of your base. That's why we quit supporting NN4.

Jeff actually makes this point very well, discussing how web designers eventually have to draw a line in the sand and say "that's enough." It might be because there's not enough time left in the project, it might be because the client can't or won't pay for the work to be done, or even because the accessibility goals are incompatable with the business goals. Regardless, at the end of the day, it's unreasonable to expect every site to work for every person.

Once again, my web slogan of All Things In Moderation applies. The web designer should make every reasonable effort towards accessibility. But users should understand that no site will be fully accessable, and users who fall into a minority, whether because of a disability or an uncommon browser, should not expect every site to work for them. These users can expect to receive support from their operating system and web browsers, in the form of accessibility tools like magnification, stylesheet overrides, text scaling and screen readers.

Light text on a dark background is not inherently evil or even inherently unreadable. Certainly, white text on a black background gives me a headache just like everyone else. When I read Ron Moore's blog, I have to cut-and-paste the text into Word. But I also remember using WordPerfect back in highschool, and how everyone had it set to display white type on a blue background, because it was less intense than staring at black text on a white background for hours.

Allow me to repeat my web mantra: All things in moderation.

White text on a black background is an extreme. So is black text on a white background. Everyone please stop talking about studies showing that black text on a white background is easier to read. Those studies refer to print. Remember that on a monitor, large fields of white are like looking directly at a light bulb. Consider taking that white to an off-white like, say, a nice tan or green, and if you want to reverse type, that's fine, but don't go for white on black – the contrast is too much. Try off-white on a medium-dark color, like Veerle's site. Extreme contrast is bad. Moderation is good.