Notes from Industry Conference
Posted on 29 April 2013 by Steve Rydz
Last week I attended Industry, organised by Gavin Elliott. I must say Gavin did a great job and it was a great conference. Here are my notes from the talks:
Rachel Andrew - “All of a sudden… no luck!” Things we have learned while supporting Perch.
There were some good points this talk, such as how email doesn’t scale well for support and how important it is to add features that benefit the majority of your customers, not the noisy minority. Also, Rachel described how engagement with customers makes it easier to determine what you should be doing. Essentially, customer support is your best source of market research.
This led me to think that as well as user testing, we should be engaging more with our customer services team to determine where we can improve things for our customers.
Harry Roberts - Architecting scalable CSS
I was looking forward to this talk as I am in the early stages of putting together the CSS for our new platform. Harry addressed a lot of things I have been thinking about recently.
He talked about breaking code into the smallest possible blocks, and how each block should do one thing well. Blocks can then be combined if needed. A great methodology for this is BEM which stands for Block-Element-Modifier. I also liked the idea of a shame.css file for hacks and quick fixes.
Christopher Murphy - We are navigators
This talk focused on the importance of education in the industry and how important our mentors can be.
Ashley Baxter - Changing a stagnant industry
I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this talk, and it was hard to believe this was Ashley’s first time speaking at a conference.
Ashley clearly has a lot of drive and has achieved some amazing things purely because she is passionate about what she does. I guess the main take away from this is not to let anything stand in your way and if you don’t like the way something is, don’t complain about it, make it better.
Noah Stokes - $50'000 mistakes
Noah has had quite an impressive career, working at Apple and also turning down job offers from the likes of Google, but it hasn’t all been a smooth ride. His story shows that with hard work and dedication, you can achieve anything.
Rasika Krishna - Cross-cultural UX
I’ve had my fair share of working on sites for other cultures. I’ve worked on Arabic, Chinese and Russian sites before and at Easyart we have French, German and Swedish sites as well as our UK ones, but it was really interesting to hear about how different other cultures can be.
I couldn’t agree more with Rasika’s point about it not being enough just running some text through Google Translate or switching the text-direction. I was also surprised to learn that in Malaysia, you need Government sign-off before launching a website.
Josh Brewer - Redesigning Twitter
Josh talked us through the most recent redesign of Twitter and the challenges they faced. There were a few takeaways from this talk, such as the importance of scaling features to meet a deadline, iterating in code early on in the design process and using version control for your PSD’s for collaboration (for this Josh recommended SVN as it handles binary files better than Git).
Jeremy Keith - What we talk about when we talk about the web
Jeremy raised some great points in this talk, some of which we really shouldn’t need to be told anymore, but it was a great overview of how the web works and what we can do to make it better.
The idea that the web is its own medium resounded with me, and that we should not be trying to replicate print. Jeremy also reminded us all about progressive enhancement and how it does not mean designing for the lowest common denominator. The principles behind progressive enhancement and mobile-first go hand-in-hand.