Recently I had the opportunity to attend the Web Design World Conference in Seattle, Washington. The conference covered a number of topics related to web design and development such as: Interface Design & CSS Coding & Development Interaction Design It also touched on concepts slightly adjacent of merely building a web presence by discussing wiki’s, blogs, mash up’s, podcasts, social media and the effects these innovations are having on business.

What I had hoped to gain from this conference was a better understanding of the things you need to think about when creating products and services for an end user to consume. I was also interested to see how people outside of Microsoft were approaching user experience.

What I actually gained from this conference was significantly more than what I had anticipated!I attended the two days of the conference missing the pre-conference Ajax boot camp and the post-conference series of workshops. I won’t list all the presentations I attended in detail but I will focus more on the speakers, some of their key messages and a few eureka moments I experienced when what the speakers said made perfect sense. I will also provide links to the public sites of the various speakers if you feel so inclined to learn more.

Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path http://www.adaptivepath.com Peter delivered a keynote titled ‘Diving into Experience’ with his opening slide bearing this title ‘A star to sail your ship by’. Peter was making a point that as we develop products we often take an inside out approach concentrating on the features and functions of our products. The drive for greater functionality, and in many cases technological superiority, becomes the guiding star of our efforts.This can lead to products becoming so feature rich they are practically unusable and therefore the consumer experience is very poor. By changing focus to an outside in approach this usually leads to focusing on the consumer’s wants and needs and often leads to a completely different outcome. For an example of this, consider the game consoles PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii. Both Sony and Microsoft have driven technology and complexity into their respective offerings creating systems that require a greater level of understanding to use. This complexity has also greatly impacted to the profitability of both units (i.e. they both sell for a loss). Nintendo on the other hand dumbed down their product choosing older (cheaper) components and concentrating on the user experience and interactions between the person(s) playing the game and the game itself. The anecdotal sales evidence shows that the Wii now outsells its rivals 2:1, or greater.Key learning’s:-1.   Take an experienced based approach.2.   Employ an experience strategy.This brief outline touches on only one aspect of Peter’s talk and I would recommend reading more from Peter and adaptive path.

Jared Spool - User Interface Engineering http://www.uie.com/ ‘The Dawning of the Age of Experience’ was the title of this presentation, and in my opinion this was quite frankly an outstanding presentation. As with many of the other presentations the icon of good product design was displayed (i.e. the iPod) - however he quickly moved on to a tangible web experience example being that of the competing companies Blockbuster and Netflix.Jared raised a number of points about the two companies and their respective offerings but two statistics really made me believe Netflix has truly managed to create a fantastic experience.1.   85% of new subscribers say an existing subscriber recommended them.2.   93% of subscribers say they evangelize Netflix to friends and family.This is quite obviously an experience design success story and in many presentations all you hear about are the successes. Jared then went on to discuss some design failures and gave some sage advice on how to avoid becoming one of these examples.Some of the key learning’s:-Successful Experience Design1.   Integrate the User and the Business.2.   Is learned but not open to introspection.3.   Is Invisible.4.   Is Multi-Disciplinary.5.   Is cultural.Avoid a complete redesign of your product or service as much as possible and focus on making fast iterations and be guided by your customer’s responses to said changes. The user interface engineering website (listed above) has a wealth of information that goes into detail on the items mentioned above.

Notable Speakers

Below is a list of speakers who provided excellent presentations and whom I believe are worthy of taking the time to explore their work and gain some insights into their opinions in each of their respective fields.

DL Byron – Textura Design - http://www.texturadesign.com/ 

Blogging, podcasts, wiki’s and social media.

Cameron Moll - http://cameronmoll.com/ 

Interface Design and CSS.

Steve Mulder – Molecular - http://www.molecular.com/  

Web 2.0 case studies and research.

Lance Loveday - Closed Loop Marketing - http://www.closed-loop-marketing.com/ 

SEO, design, usability.