An Event Apart - Chicago 2007 - Day 2

This is part two from my original post. Once again I am blogging my personal experience of An Event Apart – Chicago ’07 conference.

Day 2

Overall my note taking was a little more anemic today which is probably not a bad thing when it comes to turning my notes into a blog post. Even so I have managed to bloat this post out to mammoth size. Here it goes.

Jeremy Keith – Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave.

Who would have thought that I would have enjoyed a presentation dealing mostly with JavaScript so much? Well I did and it was not merely because Mr. Keith was a pretty funny guy that worked a LOLCATS joke into his presentation.

This was an interesting comparison that he made, got me thinking about CSS in a whole new way. Comparing CSS to DOM scripting:
#foo is doing the same thing as document.getElementById(“foo’);

Progressive Enhancement
The idea behind this concept is to develop an application to work completely free of JavaScript and then once you have it working, roll the JavaScript on top of the application to enhance the user experience. This is about being as “pure” as possible. The “vigilant” part comes from not mingling behavior with structure, so avoid things like this:

href=”javascript:…”
href="#” onclick”…”

Okay so I am guilty of using these methods which Mr. Keith equates as being the “spawn of Satan.”

Moving on, he showcases a “star” rating system that he build first by using a select menu as base markup, then using JavaScript to swap the select menu and its child ‘option’ nodes for an unordered list with some fancy CSS styling and JavaScript behavior.

Another interesting term:

“hijax” – create an AJAX site by creating a non-AJAX site first, then layering javascript in. Use the Javascript to intercept or “hijack” the functionality.

Interesting Break Scenario

I hear Peter Bjorn and John playing again (they pipe music in over the sound system during the breaks). I’m not complaining. I actually like the song, but I suspect that the music that we are hearing is coming from someone’s iPod or MacBook. There have been several good songs that are unfamiliar to me so I head up to the stage to ask the A/V guy about the play list. Turns out that it is a play list indeed, and it was put together by Jeffrey Zeldman specifically for this conference.

I head out into the hall to get food and drink where I suddenly find myself face to face with Mr. Zeldman. I tell him I am enjoying the conference and right as I am about to ask about the playlist he looks at my name tag and said, “hey I know you.” Huh? He knows me? He thinks perhaps he reads my blog. My wife won’t even read my blog, that couldn’t be it. Then he said my name was just really familiar. Ah yes, there is another more famous and well-connected Mark McClellan. He is a former commissioner for the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and brother to former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan. Incidentally, I also have a brother named Scott, but he’s a computer encryption engineer that lives in SoCal (we hail from NorCal originally). Ah yes, that’s it.

So this other Mark McClellan, the one with his own Wikipedia page, the one with more letters after his name and more zeroes in his bank account, we butt heads again. It first happened back in the day I was trying to pick the domain for my personal site. MarkMcClellan.com was taken (by him) which meant I had to go with something else. Well, no more. He let the domain lapse and I grabbed it. Someday that other Mark McClellan might be meeting someone he admires for the first time and they’ll say, “hey, I know you, you design websites or something right?”

Luke Wroblewski – Best Practices for Form Design

Web Forms! Forms are how the user “talks” to a company online. Forms are a way for a company to “speak” with their customer. Forms make money. Most forms are an artifact of the data structure behind them. Nobody likes filling out forms so minimize the user’s pain. “Illuminate” a clear path to completion.

Best practices in labeling form inputs:

• For reduced completion times & familiar data input: use top-aligned labels
• When vertical screen space is a constraint: use right-aligned labels
• For unfamiliar, or advanced data entry: use left-aligned labels

Try to avoid optional fields. If it’s optional, why are you asking it? Trim the crap out of forms for more successful form completions. Field lengths can provide valuable affordances. If you only want the first five digits of a zip code, give them an input that is five characters wide.

If possible, get rid of secondary actions like “reset form” or “cancel.” When you need a secondary action, provide clear distinctions between it and the primary action. This slows users down some but provides better completion rates.

Man, this presentation was packed with goodness and useful data. If nothing else I have some new ammo to back my design decisions up.

Derek Featherstone – Accessibility: Lost in Translation

We suffer from “Checklist Syndrome.” We want to know how we stack up to the checklist. Accessibility as User Experience rather than Checklist.

Derek Featherstone did an Iron Man triathlon and created a website to document his experience. He was using Google maps to map his route and in working with the API found out that none of the map inputs for navigation, zoom, etc. were accessible. It appeared that Google had engineered custom elements but it did not have to be done that way. He created his own version using standard form elements which lead to an accessible map, one with controls that could be “read” by a reader browser.

Mr. Featherstone made an accessible crossword puzzle. At least this was in my notes. I cannot seem to recall this part of the presentation. I feel bad. This was a valuable presentation and my afternoon fatigue and information overload got the best of me. I zoned part of this speech…

Eric Meyer – The State of CSS in an IE7 World

So Microsoft told the world that the standalone browser known as Internet Explorer 6 would be the last of its kind. They were integrating the browser in with the operating system. Then they said “just kidding” and announced that there would be an Internet Explorer 7.

The Gorilla Awakes
Everyone was nervous for what IE7 would do (or not do) to their web sites.

Here is what they fixed:

• Fixed positioning
• min-width, max-width
• min-height, max-height
• Attribute selectors (holy crap these look cool!)
• Child selector
• Adjacent sibling selector
• :first-child
• Chained classes and pseudo-classes
• Arbitrary-element :hover
• Full background-attachment: fixed
• Alpha channel in PNG images (YAY!!!!!)
• abbr tag

Interestingly enough, Eric Meyer recommends using Dead Edwards’ IE7 script to deal with IE6 and older browsers. He strongly suspects (even believes maybe?) that the IE7 engineers used Mr. Edwards’s script to decide what to fix in the new version of the browser.

Many parsing bugs are now gone including the beloved “Holly Hack” but now we have IE Conditional tags (which are quite useful I might add).

Look out for Eric’s diagnostic stylesheets which he is creating (now completed and published) to help users see if they are forgetting things like alt or title tags on images, links, etc.

Jeffrey Zeldman – Selling Design

Selling Design was another Zeldman-esque presentation. It was very enjoyable in person, so much so that I did not take a single note. I enjoyed the showmanship of this gifted presenter. However, using the slides from the presentation I was able to pick out a few tidbits to share.

The “Great Client” Myth

“The only way to do great work is to have great clients.” –Lou Dorfsman, Former Creative Director, CBS

The client is not an idiot, or, don’t choose idiots for clients. Brilliant. Choose good clients, avoid bad clients, and learn to smell trouble. Bad assignments pack paperwork! Also watch out for rush projects with impossible deadlines. Failure to procure a solution until the last minute could be a tell-tale sign of a bad client. Their emergency caused by lack of planning becomes your problem.

Our job is to convey the meaning of design. Sell ideas, not pixels.

Jim Coudal – Dealing With The Both of You

No slides, no real clear format, yet he grabbed my attention and held it. This guy gets me. You do the design work to pay the bills but you have all of these little side projects that you are dying to try out. There were a whole lot of heads nodding in the room. Coudal Partners make movies. Jim shared a few. Here are the links:

• Regrets
  If I had an unlimited supply of money I would be just like this guy.
• Unsolicited Pitch
  Nice tongue-in-cheek commentary (or jab) at agency self-promotion.
• Copy Goes Here
  Entertaining piece on writing copy and combating illiteracy.

That is all, thanks.

May you find something useful from this post.