To start of with was the change with time. Move one hour ahead and what watch what happens to those unfortunante souls that stayed up late. They missed out on a tremendous panel. Speaking from last year. Jason Santa Maria & Wychert (sorry can’t find his first name right now). The panel topic was “Everyone is a Design Critic.”

They started out with a nice little experiment. First they flashed various web sites (Vista, Mccain, Delic ous) etc up on the screen and asked the audience to shout out what came to mind when they saw these various sites. For example shouts came from the audience for the Mccain site:

“Bland, Militaristic, Blue, Conservative” –

Next the two speakers went into a mass amount of information and practical examples for how to combat design critiques that are based on colors.

I will explore more of the illustrated concepts in future posts. A lot of the principles for getting out of tight design situations with clients were outlines structured with some practical examples.

Of course we had the entire Marck Zuckerberg keynote which some claimed to be a “blood bath.” In all honesty it wasn’t that bad. The main problem was we all wanted to hear more questions that were “interesting.” The commenter from the audience put it best with “talk about something interesting.”

Not all the talk on stage felt scripted but most of it did for this keynote. They should have ran this as an open format and let some more people up to talk about what interests us from a technological side. Worse case scenario if he couldn’t answer some questions just say “no comment” and move on. We could have gotten a lot more out of this key note than what was talked about in the time frame.

There is more to come.. .just taking a break from writing.

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Next it was on to the Day Cafe for some more book readings. I think these are mislabeled. What these really are are book discussions about the authors books. They have been the best thing so far at the conference. If you want to suck up a lot of information in the quickest way possible this is exactly what you need. The first session was about the book Stylin With CSS A few chapters of the book look interesting and I may end up purchasing it. It’s nice to have a bunch of new morning reading material.

Up next was High Performance Web Sites: There was an extreme amount of invaluable information in this discussion. I learned a lot about the UI and how you can make some small changes to various lines of code and scripts to provide for a faster load experience. The YSlow application can really help to identify these breaking points and help you isolate where some of your UI problems may reside.

The items I noted of most interest include: Javscript at the bottom of the page because of the way the http request model works. Instead of putting the JS first put it last. I do still have concerns about this regarding pages that load slow and pages are heavily ajaxed.

Next on to the Keynote – I wasn’t thrilled about the keynote and the only one thing that I noted was the comment “People in “pink” collar jobs teachers, nurses etc, that have high level of intellegience and skills but are underutilized. IN fact they must pursue outside activities to express these other levels of competency.” This comment hit home
It is very much how I feel everyday…

Next I ran my ass back to the day cafe. By this time I was pretty beat down. The Ballroom A where many of the “good panels” have been taken place is on the way other far far end of the conference center. So I’ve made about 2 miles of trips back and forth by now. The funniest thing to note was on the far end of this side of conference there is a DEFIBRILLATOR. Hmm wonder if that tells us about usability. Anyways I finally made it back to the day cafe…..

Dennis Shiffman was the next author to speak. Who book was entitled Engage it’s directed a lot more towards marketing. THere were many good points. In fact so many I’m not going to list them all here. I think the most important concept was to narrow down your product to one thing you do and one thing you do extremely well. Apple was used as an example. I think if you are in marketing you shoud get the book. I browsed it quick and it has a lot information.

Next it was on to Ballroom A so after a 10 minute trek back the room was full and so I couldn’t get into the panel I really wanted to see the end result was a went to the basecamp panel which wasn’t interesting at all. A lot of people want these panels to be less about the company and the “look what I can do / did factor” and more about pracitcal solutions and stories and examples that they can modify and use. I didn’t gain a lot of great information here so that was dissapointing!

Last it was to the “Worst Web Site Ideas Ever” This panel took ideas that were outlandish and presented them in a mock format to a venture capitalist. The interesting thing to note about this one was that no matter how crazy the idea was thier could still be some merit drawn off the idea and I started to see other potential ideas and directions forming that could actually be legitimate. That was the new thing about the whole thing.

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Last night attended the mix at 6 party. It was much more crowded then last year. Met a few people in line, but once inside it was really too crowded to socialize. Once again they failed to listen and cranked the music loud. So we all had to yell at the top of our voices to talk to other people. Why didn’t they listen to last year and actually keep the music a bit lower like background noise. It was much easier to talk to people outside.

After staying there a few minutes met some new people and headed to dinnner. Moved location to the Spider House Bar and then off to a musuem for some more socializing. The art on display as Latin virgins and saints. One particular painting really was disturbing. It was a large mural of hell and heaven. The night was going to continue to the next venue but it was nw 11:30 or 12:00 so I opted to head back to the hotel and get a good nights rest. As you could tell from up above that did not happen!

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Next up was the dicussion for Robert Hoehkman’s new book. I really feel this books story approach will offer some good insight when it’s released. Much like the other one above this was a book reading. I met an intersting person that works in the UK. She has many of the same problems in the corporate world and was locatd in the UK. I hope to get to speak to her some more. It’s all about sharing ideas!

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