An Event Apart, Day One

This year I was lucky enough that Trekk, the company I work for, sent me An Event Apart, San Francisco. Participating in day one of the presentations thus far I can honestly say that I have a new enlightened understanding of how important specific design features are to the development cycle - that I often in the past took for-granted. Some of these features that I now have a deeper appreciation for are Typography and UX strategies and how they relate to the success of your service.

Tim Brown - Universal Typography

Tim Brown, a TypeKit manager at Adobe, talked a lot about normalization of type between all the platforms. One of the cool things he instructed was that you should not switch font per device, but you should normalize your fonts with JavaScript and CSS. This was interesting to me as I found myself thinking, this is a good idea, but what about performance on these devices? What if a JavaScript library like lettering.js was used on a mobile device, does this iterate over every character before loading the page? Is this needed or is there a better way?
One of the great things Tim Brown said that really struck me was that Designers need to start building web designs in a browser instead of using a design utility, this way a designer can account for the many issues that the developer will run into when they start their iteration.

Luke Wroblewski - It’s a Write/Read (Mobile) Web

Luke kicked off the afternoon sessions with a very informative presentation on how streamlined UX can drive your web service. Luke showed statistical examples of how creating a better UX for your input process, i.e., web forms, can drive the success of a certain product. He backed up these claims by showing us the mobile user experience of hotels tonight versus the airport WiFi service, Boingo. Biongo used to have a three page input process until they took Luke's advice and streamlined their mobile web form to one page. Now their mobile service usage is up 38%. That is a huge percentage!

All in all, I had a great first day at Event Apart, looking forward to tomorrow!