OSCON 2006 Interface / UXP Presentations

I have two presentations at OSCON last Thursday, and as usual, I promised to post the slides. A little delayed, perhaps, but here they are. I recommend them in the order I list ’em… although there’s no audio to accompany it, you can still probably glean some good infos!

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Speaking of audio… would anyone be interested in purchasing an audio track to go along with the slides for these presentations or the Javascript Bootcamp? I didn’t get recorded at OSCON (should have thought of that), but if there’s any interest, I’d be willing to record my talks and offer them up for about $35-50/ea (depending on: bandwidth costs, the difficulty/cost of syncing a slideshow with audio if even possible for someone who’s not a big company, etc.) Let me know yes or no… drop me an email (amy aht infocookie dawt com) or comment.

User Experience, Pain-Free

Download:

• Slides (PDF, zipped) (6.5MB, high quality)

Talk Description

Users are becoming more UI-conscious than ever before, so the time to act is now. Good user experience goes beyond simply “clean” and “readable” — making your users happy results in buzz, repeat business and repeat visits, higher conversation rates, and a warm fuzzy sense of well-being (for both of you).

Plus, it never hurts to crush the competition in the looks and user-friendliness departments.

Better yet, instead of 45 minutes of boring theory you’ll learn practical solutions from examples of real projects, redesigned to be more effective (with before & after shots) or designed from scratch. You don’t have to be an expert HTML or Photoshop jockey to enjoy learning from this session; all design decisions will be explained in plain, sensible English. There may even be cartoons.

When Interface Design Attacks!

Download:

• Slides (PDF, zipped) (8MB, high quality)

Talk Description

Little things like the way a person enters a date on a form, or where you stick the “home” link, can make a big difference in a user’s experience of your web application. When these seemingly trivial design decisions come to rest on the shoulders of product managers, developers, and others, things can go terribly wrong. But only because these folks haven’t had background training in the basics of interface design — a discipline that is less an art and more a science, and yet one that is sometimes feared and sometimes downright derided by technical people.

How much user empathy do you need — and how much is too much? When should you listen to your customers about specific interface/feature requests, and when should you serve as a judicious editor of their demands? Should you follow the interface lead of your competitor? What is, after all, the ultimate goal of your interface? And what on earth is the best way to lay out forms (everyone’s most-hated design task)?

These questions are less tricky than they may first appear, and they are chief among the topics covered in When Interface Design Attacks!. Anyone is capable of improving his or her interface design skills.

Resources

Note: I wanted to post the slides ASAP, but I’ll update this page later today with links to ALL the resources I mentioned in the presentation. I promise!