Steff.me

The week before last I attended the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo in London. While I’m not going to go in to detail on all of the talks and presentations, I’d like to summarise just a few that stood out for me. I would have done this sooner but University work has kicked in big time.

The Talks

First and foremost was a presentation I didn’t intend on going to entitled “The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites”, given by Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet). The presentation was actually a series of demonstrations, showing how to make websites more accessible to those with disabilities, such as visual impairment. Robin showed how Amazon is completely unfriendly to people who require the use of a screen-reader, such as himself.

Thank you to gr3m for this photo.

While the tabs at the top of Amazon’s website may look nice, they contain a long string of words and numbers which is completely unfriendly and irritating to those using a screen reader. Without a “skip to content” link, anyone using a screen reader would have to sit there and listen to those links being called out on every page that they visit inside Amazon. Robin also highlighted sites which had addressed this issue (among others) correctly, showing how to implement more usable websites.

Simon Wardley was one of the few presenters that kept me paying attention throughout. While I would not like to downplay the content of his presentation, it’s the technique that he used to present that I would like to point out. He used a lot of slides, compared to the majority of speakers who were very minimal, with a good portion of them being humorous. I’m not very good at public speaking as I’m very shy, so it was nice to see someone give a different sort of talk that I could possibly adapt to my own future presentations.

Thank you to donkeyontheedge for this photo.

This technique kept me from being bored and having to listen to someone drone on, as I read the slide behind them again and again because there’s nothing else to do. You can view Simon’s presentation here. (Update: My housemate has suggested to me this sentence is a bit unclear… what I mean to say is that other talkers kept the same, boring slide behind them while talking about something I wasn’t interested in. Simon kept me interested by continually putting up new slides and having funny comments, which I found to be a lot more engaging than other presentations.)

Daniel Burka had a very nice stylized presentation which, contrary to what I said above, was minimalist and yet interesting; I believe this is credit to him as a designer. His presentation, “Interpreting Feedback”, was on user feedback and how to use it to further develop your web app. He used examples from his designs of Mozilla.org and digg.com to emphasize his point. He has had a lot of negative feedback from both projects, for example the digg.com comments section and when he first redesigned Mozilla.org people hated it to the point the feedback said “the designer should be fired”.

Thank you to gr3m for this photo.

Burka gave some great advice on how to deal with this slew of feedback—there will be a lot —which is more than just positive and negative and how to use it in development.

The Expo

There were other great presentations and talks throughout the two days, however these were the ones that stood out at me. Other than the presentations, FOWA had a great Expo area where companies were showing off their services and generating buzz.

Thank you to carsonified for this photo.

This was such a great social area and it allowed some downtime in between presentations, to chill and get some food. Microsoft had four Xbox 360’s set up so that eight people could play Halo 3 against each other; this was genius marketing, as I actually now want to go buy it. The employees at Sun really should work on their Wii tennis skills, too, as I owned them at a game in less than a minute. There were also a lot of free schwag to get from the companies and Adobe gave out a lot of beer (thanks Adobe!).

Schwag thanks for:

• Microsoft Expression Web
• dev.aol.com Geek and Nerd t-shirts
• ZOHO t-shirt
• O’Reilly Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for Javascript Developers book
• Wakoopa sticker
• Lots of pens (Microsoft, Zoho, AOL)!
• And more…

Party!

At the end of the first day a live taping of Diggnation was held in the main conference room. While the sheer amount of people was amazing, the atmosphere was just incredible.

I’ve been a big fan of Diggnation from fairly early on and have actually downloaded all the episodes back to episode one, so for me this was just fantastic. I’m sure you can tell, I was really excited for this; yes, I am that sad.

After the Diggnation taping there was a party at a nearby bar. As I paid for the FOWA Expo they gave me yet more free beer (thanks Carsonified!) and, better yet, I got to meet The Totally Rad Show guys.

If I seemed slightly excited about watching a live Diggnation, you have no idea how excited I was to meet these guys. There was so much I wanted to ask and talk to them about, however when I finally got to say hello all that I could say was “Hehe.. hey.” and that was about it. Sad? Yes. Curse you shyness!

While I didn’t go in to depth with all of the talks, if you are interested in what went on and all the presentations I’d recommend checking out SlideShare and searching for “fowa” as many of them have been uploaded there. Also, please check out this post from Stephanie Booth, a more dedicated blogger, who took a few in-depth notes during the FOWA presentations.

All in all, FOWA ‘07 was amazing! I really can’t wait to go to another one; if only I could afford the trip to Miami.