Yesterday Utku and I popped down to the Future of Web Design conference in West London to learn things, meet people and set off fire extinguishers.
Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong line-up of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.
My personal highlights included:
Steve Pearce (Poke) & Andy Clarke's (Stuff and Nonsense) discussion on User Experience vs Brand Experience. Steve's view on creating a team with overlapping abilities and crossover of skills is something we particularly value at Mint.
Next up Andy Budd (Clearleft) gave a fantastic talk on Designing the User Experience Curve. Taking influence from other more "human" industries we should strive to push for richer and more enjoyable user experiences. This is something we feel massively strongly about at Mint. The main points he covered were:
- First impressions - Creating a cohesive visual and usable website right from the word go is essential.
- Attentive service - Make sure a user's needs are always looked after.
- Personalisation - When we have any idea of who is using the site, try to make them feel as at home as possible, allow customisation and flexibility here to encourage a richer user experience.
- Feedback and managing expectations - Andy gave an interesting statement about error handling, and how this is the perfect opportunity to turn a negative user experience into something positive and engaging.
- Make the whole experience fun.
During the afternoon we watched a live Photoshop battle, heard interesting words from
Larissa Meek,
Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Farnell
(Litmus),
Jon Hicks before the day came to a close with Daniel Burka from
Digg &
Pownce. When I first came across Pownce I really fell in love with the strong and stylish yet functional visual language employed. Daniel raised some interesting points on his approach:
- Watch how people interact with a site and use whilst re-aligning or developing new features. We should be consider reducing features and streamlining the interface as much as we consider adding to it.
- High / Low road architecture. Pretty much every Mint site is required to be very quick to develop and easy to evolve so the concept of employing a more modular approach to design was particularly interesting.
- Use consistent visual language. Begin with an identity or related graphic style and work outwards from that point.
- Innovation should be used wisely. People are familiar with certain trends in web usability and we should strive to maintain usably whilst creating stimulating and engaging interfaces.
All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. Well done to Jo at Carsonified for putting on such a strong event. Here are some FOWD 08 photos.
