Event: Interaction 09 | Vancouver

by December 16, 2008

On February 5-7, 2009 I'll be presenting a workshop and speaking at the Interaction 09 conference in Vancouver, BC Canada. This year's program looks great and I'm very happy to be part of it.

Interaction 09

On Thursday, February 5th, I'll be teaching a full day workshop on Web Form Design. This workshop was the top-rated session at last year's Web App Summit and I've updated it with material on just about every aspect of form design you could imagine including: form organization, rich interactions (with Ajax), gradual engagement, global design, and lots more! Sign up to attend today and save $50 on the workshop.

On Saturday, February 7th, I'll be presenting a talk titled Parti & The Design Sandwich. Official descriptions for both sessions follow:

Web Form Design

In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions.

In his full-day workshop, Luke Wroblewski, author of the bestselling book Web Form Design, will walk you through design considerations and best practices of form design culled from international site-tracking, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over eleven years of designing Web applications. He'll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not.

Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior. The workshop is structured to provide attendees with an understanding of the right "best" practices for their specific context, so they can quickly go from the quintessential design answer of "it depends" (on the business goals, user needs, and context of your forms) to actionable solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again.

Parti & The Design Sandwich

In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling?

Design principles are the guiding light for any parti. They articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough.

Every design consideration has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the parti. Designers who want to bring coherent visions to life need to learn the detailed ins and outs of design considerations so they can select the best solutions from the options available.

This combination of design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom allows interaction designers to fill in the middle with meaningful structures that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done.

In this talk, Luke Wroblewski will illustrate how the World’s most accessed Web page, yahoo.com, was redesigned with a parti and the design sandwich.