I gave the following benediction before my honoured speaking engagement on this magnificent ingot of volcanic rock:

Ég færi ykkur kveður frá landi sem forfeður ykkar ferðuðust langa leið til að flýja harðræði heimafyrir – aðeins til að upplifa sama harðræðið or í Kanada. Nú geta íslendingar notað veraldarvefinn til þess að miðla menningu sinni og sögu. Einnig til að varðveita hið einstaka tungumál sem þjóðin býr yfir.

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Wee but well-proportioned Shaun Inman took the stage after me at 2006.04.28 15:06.

Responsible asynchronous scripting is synonymous with Ajax, but the difference is it can be used with HTML.

Traditional request model:

• Client requests resource
• Server serves resource
• Repeat

Subsequent requests replace the previously-viewed resource.

In the asynchronous model, the first two steps are the same.

• Client requests resource
• Server serves resource
• Client issues subrequests
• Client updates the existing resource

The original resource is not replaced by subrequests.

It’s been around for a long time, as long as there have been Flash or Java applets. Originally you had to rely on a third-party technology, usually proprietary, like a Java applet, ActiveX control, or Flash movie as a proxy (for the interaction between client and server). In 2000, you could pass data to a server by sending an image and receiving a cookie. But cookies have certain size limitations (4K on a user’s machine before it starts deleting the older data).

Another technique is submitting data to an invisible iframe. A solid approach, but there are small browser bugs, like a click sound effect in IE/Win.

Yet another technique is attaching a new script element to the document, receiving a response in JavaScript (JSON: JavaScript Object Notation).

And now, using the XMLHttpRequest object (“XHR”), receiving an XML, JSON, JavaScript, or XHTML response. Encapsulates all the advantages of the other methods, but modern browsers interpret this in a standard way. Supported by IE 5+/Win, Firefox, Safari 1.2+, Netscape 7.1+, Opera 8+ (including apparently mobile Opera), but not IE5/Mac.

(Shows code samples and explains them.)

Ajax is excellent for small actions that happen in the page, but it’s terrible for navigation or large sections of content. Live search is good; any sort of navigation isn’t. Some sites, like blogs, use XHR to navigate category entries, with no fallback at all. So you can’t even bookmark the category page. Good: Autocomplete and as-you-type data validation (e.g., RemembertheMilk.com, which checks for your username as you type your real name); bad: the one-page E-commerce site (HiDefDVD.com). Good: Content rating and tagging (Flickr); bad: inline login forms.

Leaving a comment on a blog is a good candidate; adding or deleting an item from a shopping cart is, too. Replacing a list with a detail page for the item you just clicked on is a bad idea, because it isn’t bookmarkable. Remoting doesn’t break the back button; developers making bad decisions in using powerful technology break the back button.

(Shows yet more code samples and explains them. They look fabulous on their dark-grey backgrounds with live highlighting, but I can’t read them from here.)

Spinners (“synonymous with Ajax”), hourglasses, and progress bars inform the user that something is about to happen or has happened. Also animation and motion. Zip the old content upward, insert the new content, and expand it. The motion draws your eye to that content. And I guess that goes both ways: If you want to make a change that’s not really important, you can skip that technique. The yellow-fade technique was popularized by 37Signals.

(Scribe did not report audience questions.) Except: How do you notify a screen-reader user if the yellow-fade technique doesn’t work? (Shaun asked me [“Joe is just gonna shake his head at me”] and I said Derek Featherstone is the one who’s going to figure that out.)

Thus does IceWeb 2006 draw to a close (2006.04.28 15:49), and now we have cocktails.

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

A bit of a grand title, but really, when we think about it, aren’t design and creativity about making things that people enjoy and use rather than something that just looks good?

I want to start off by talking about movies, about visual people. I was surprised yesterday when I asked how many visual designers were in the audience, and there were like three? Visual designers like me tend to think differently than people who write scripts. We’re always thinking about the visual end result. It’s also our tools – Photoshop, Illustrator – that are visual tools. Sometimes it’s very hard for us small-minded, small-brained people to conceptualize, to a larger extent. So all the tools we use are visual.

When it comes to designing for the Web, we’ve got other concerns that we need to take into account. (Shows a slide with three faces in their own 35mm slide frames.) “This very pleasant-looking bunch of ladies. And Joe” really come to symbolize the type of additional or external influences that we have to take into account when we’re designing something. For example, there are accessibility concerns (slide shows me) – what technologies do people use to read our sites? We aren’t just talking about assistive technologies like screen readers; we’re really talking about usability in the widest sense. What happens if I want to read my content on a mobile phone? After a long day, what if I want to increase the font size? And that’s an accessibility as well as a usability concern. We’ve got to be thinking of accessibility in the widest sense rather than the sense of “Can somebody access this with a screen reader or screen magnifier?”

When it comes to usability (slide shows Kelly Goto), (it’s a question of goals). Quite often you’d think these would be in conflict with visual designers. Usability and accessibility can sometimes be seen as a limitation on design.

Then we come to validation (slide shows Molly), which can be a strong word, really. In art school, I specifically took a course that didn’t tell me what to do for three years. These type of terms don’t generally fit within the creative thought of a designer. At first instance, we look at these as being limitations on creativity rather than falling into the scope of what it means to be a designer on the Web today.

Let’s look at some other stakeholders or influences. The first thing has got to be brand. Quite often we can’t make things up from scratch. We’ve got to be working with the established brand guidelines. Marketing departments. Business goals: There’s an enormous different range of them, advertising being a prime example, or sponsorship. Where do the ads fit? How does that affect the visual design we’re trying to make? Owners’ goals. Web sites that are structured exactly as the company is make no sense to outsiders.

These could all be considered limitations, but are really part of the idea of designing something for the modern Web. When I talk about putting these all together into “modern design,” I like to look at something that sums up the combination of all of these – movie Web sites.

But what would we expect to be sites that conform to this idea of brand/marketing/business etc.? (Shows Amazon.) Does anybody here like it as a design? Anybody here really think it sucks? (Several hands.) From a visual design (standpoint), it’s horrible. I find it very cluttered. I know something about Amazon’s methods, so I know they’ve tested every little thing. I’d like to do something cool with Amazon, and I know a lot of designers who do. What would be the perfect tool to avoid having to deal with browsers and complications? Flash. There’s nothing wrong with Flash; there’s only something wrong with what people do with it.

Using Flash may or may not accomplish these goals, but as a designer this is what I want to do. So the first thing you do is make two versions. (Shows fake Amazon splash screen with Flash and HTML options.) There’s lots of banking geezers here today, right? If you went on your banking site and it asked you which version you’d like to use, Flash or HTML, which version are you gonna use? HTML. Users will primarily choose the thing that they think is easiest. Often we’ll find that the HTML version is far less well thought out than the Flash version is.

First of all, we’re making assumptions that users know what the bloody hell Flash is. I wouldn’t know certain internal banking software; we assume people know what Flash (and HTML) is. I’m also making the assumption that people know something technical about their computer: “Best viewed at 1,024 × 800.” So it’s not a great idea to be making certain assumptions.

(Shows mockup of eBay slide with browser and plugin requirements.) For the men in the audience, I’ll explain: A washing machine is the white box in the kitchen that you don’t use very often. But for the ladies in the audience, do you know what model number your washing machine is? I have no idea what model number my telly is, and I watch it a lot. We shouldn’t make assumptions that people know exactly what it is that we know we’re talking about.

Anybody use Flickr? What would happen if we had a versionchoosr where the user could choose between Ajax or just plain ol’ JavaScript? Again, we’re making assumptions. But people couldn’t even be bothered to choose. Don’t they just want to get stuff done?

Anybody familiar with this site (Zen Garden)? Anybody fairly competent with their CSS knowledge, of CSS1 vs. CSS3? What if we came onto the Zen Garden (with CSS-level choosers)? We’re not designing for ourselves here; we’re designing for things that people want to use.

Let’s move on to some movies. (Shows King Kong animated site with trailer and sound.) What’s the purpose of that site? (Audience: Sell the DVD.) “Sell the DVD” now, but when that film was in release, it was there to build hype and build interest and put bums in seats in cinemas. So the site has slightly altered its focus since the DVD came out. So I would expect this site to be absolutely amazing, what with all the production money put into it.

What it does for me, as a lot of these sites do, is it really sums up what I was talking about before – brand guidelines, brand “experience,” business. Out of all of this visual material that’s going on on the screen, how does one get into the site? My eyes is immediately drawn to the movie clip that keeps continuously playing. (“Enter site” is at least nearby.) They’ve also made some other miserable mistakes, like sponsorship ads. This is a worldwide site; it’s not versioned. Does anybody know what Papa John’s is? It’s pizza. What is that doing there, and why is that being placed over the New York skyline? Why is it so much bigger than really interesting information, like if I buy the DVD there are some really interesting Easter eggs in there? I don’t understand why, as a fan of the movie, they’ve laid out the site like this.

(Scribe stepped out at 2006.04.28 13:00 to practise his Icelandic.)

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Talking about CSS after Eric Meyer is a little bit intimidating, so thanks for that. It’s been an amazing experience so far.

This is stuff that I find valuable in my own work. It’s not necessarily information that everybody is going to take away and use immediately. Like in San Francisco, developers from Sun.com told me, “We have about 37 million pages on our site, and we pretty much disagree with everything you said.”

CSS setup and how you’re going to build your CSS files in a way that makes them easy to manage: Naming, breaking into multiple files, debugging and management. [continue with: Dave Shea: ‘CSS Project Management’ →]

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

In late 2005, Alex Robinson published “In Search of the One True Layout.” There’s a whole bunch of things that fall out of what he did that I don’t think even he understood. (Makes joke about Icelandic word for “layout.”)

One of the main tools for doing layout in CSS is the float. In the early days of Netscape 1.0 (which many in the audience, by show of hands, remember), there were no tables, or in any browser save for privately-developed browsers on Dave Raggett’s computer. There was no font tag, so in some ways things were better back then. There was no way to align images in content. Netscape 1.1 added tables, font, basefont, align for images.

Wow, we have this ability to stick an image to the side and have text go around it. Amazing! At the university I worked at, we spent all this time going “What will we do with this incredible new power? Why would we ever need anything else?” And this is all that floats were ever supposed to do – take something small and contained, like an image or a sidenote, and put it to the side. Never meant to be a layout tool at all. Of course, at the time they were not used as a layout tool, because there was no such thing as CSS. But we had tables, and we had David Siegel, who wrote Creating Killer Web Sites, and for five years we had sites that basically killed the Web.

If we’re not going to use tables for layout, what are we going to use? Floats were pretty much it. You could float pretty much anything; you could float a div. You could use divs to create columns. We used floats instead of positioning for one reason and one reason alone: With float came clear. You could clear the footer below all the columns that came before it. Now, it is arguable that this is no less of an abuse of a Web technology than using tables for layout. Floats were only ever meant to push things to the side so you could float content around it.

There is one advantage here. With floats or any CSS-based layout, you’re freed from worrying about how your content is ordered, for the most part. With floats, you can, if you work at it, put the content in the order of main content first, then the other stuff second and third. Floats have some source-order dependencies, so some people started adding divs. It was still better than tables, but it seemed kind of… dirty.

That’s how things were from 2000 till the end of last year, when Alex Robinson published his article, where he introduced “Any-Order Columns.” The key here is it requires no extra markup, and it only uses CSS1 properties to do it – only published nine years after CSS was finalized. As far as I know, nobody thought about it before him – or if they did, they didn’t document it, so they don’t get the credit. (He proofed the article and had to read it twice before he believed it.)

(Explains any-order columns.)

“Why didn’t I think of that?” was kind of my reaction. However, there’s one little sort of fly in the ointment here: This still uses floats for layout. From a design point of view, there’s still a problem. Column heights are not equal. Floats are only as tall as the content they contain, as opposed to table cells that stretch to the entire height of the row irrespective of how much content they have. Most people would have said it was impossible to do with fluid-width designs, though Dan Cederholm’s method works with fixed-width. Except Alex did it – in the same article. This is the part where I kind of start to hate him. And it uses just a bit of CSS2, which is only 7½ years after CSS2 was developed.

(Explains the method, which uses a very large bottom padding, an equal negative bottom margin, and overflow: hidden. Use a value less than 2³²–1, like 32,767.)

I should also acknowledge Alex’s dogged persistence in hacking through all the browser bugs. I don’t think I would have had that kind of patience.

There comes a point where I want to say: If this is the One True Layout, do I really want to be right? Because this is a lot of code (with browser hacks) that a three-cell table could easily handle. If you had a URL that targeted a named anchor, the item with that anchor would be pushed to the top of the column. That’s arguably what CSS says should happen, even though it’s plainly crazy. Alex came up with a fix for it with a container around the target that is absolutely positioned.

(Provides typically impossibly corny “analogy” to Lost in Space, which he had to explain to an audience that, perhaps to his surprise, was not composed of Americans.) David Baron says: If you bend CSS behaviours this far, you are making it harder to implement browsers, confine the possible growth of CSS (because if people depend on obscure float properties, those can never be changed), and reduce the pressure to improve CSS. Hixie counters that if browsers consistently implement CSS, what’s the problem? That’s kind of what we wanted all along. Why are we complaining now that they have implemented it consistently?

There’s a hard way and an easy way to do things, and, given the choice, most people will choose the hard way. Are we choosing an ungainly contraption to get this done? No, because there is no easy way to do it in CSS. But in Web design, there is an easy way; they’re called tables (unless you want your columns in a different presentation order from the document source). So until we have something better than either tables or complicated CSS constructions, there you have it.

Can CSS fix the problem? Yes… eventually (via CSS Advanced Layout Module).

So where do we stand now? Personally, I feel that the any-order columns solution is pretty robust. It seems to work in all recent browsers. If you keep your units consistent, any-order columns are pretty easy to do. Equal-height columns to me seem a lot more fragile, probably because there are so many hacks piled on top of it. My gut tells me that this is pushing things a little bit too far, but everybody has a different gut.

I think the reason why this sort of thing should be encouraged is to keep people experimenting with CSS. This just shows you how much depth there is to CSS – how, in some ways, little we understand it. Nine years after CSS1 had come out, nobody had looked at it in quite the right way before. We kind of don’t know what we can do with it, in a way. Some would describe that as a bug; I think of it as a feature, because I really like a simple system with complex repercussions that come out of them.

CSS does have quite a ways to go in certain areas. It’s great if you want to colour text, as long as you want one colour; it’s lovely if you want to set margins. But if you want to do advanced layouts with variations in height and width, it’s not so great for that. But it should help people provide layout to the Advanced Layout Group that is working on the Advanced Layout Module. If you unleash a technique on people, you get way more examples than if you sit people down in one room. Eric Raymond: “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” In this case, many designers bring design problems to the surface.

I do harbour this secret optimistic hope that this will actually kick browser makers into doing the advanced layout sooner. If David Baron really wants us to stop using equal-height columns, OK, start working on the advanced-layout stuff. (Same for Microsoft.) Web design is still young, right? It’s still growing and it’s maturing and it’s expanding outward in ways we might not have imagined. If we knew everything we could do with Web layout, it would be kind of boring, wouldn’t it? I like the idea that I can still be surprised by the tools I work with. Even at a code level, that to me is really interesting.

So… there you go. I came here not to give you answers [or present substantial new work], but to give you the ability to come up with your own answers. Equal-height columns work great if you don’t have named anchors. I try not to use named anchors; Jakob Nielsen said they were bad, so there you go.

1. (Question from woman.) Why are tables so evil? That was a really bad paraphrasing. The big one – and I don’t want to get too far into this, because Joe will come up here and beat me senseless – is that tables for layout can be very inaccessible. Not always, but the people who use them tend to make them that way. (Buzzing alarm goes off.) Apparently I’ve just given the wrong answer. I didn’t know Joe had a buzzer back there. Molly has a recording of a speech browser reading a table-based layout. It announces the start of the table, how many pixels wide it is, and how many cells there are. With nested tables, it takes like a minute before you hit the content. Table layouts don’t always have to be like that, but they usually are.

   99.999% of the time, if you have more markup than content, that’s just wrong. That to me is the reason why I don’t like to use tables. A simple three-cell table will do what equal-height columns will do quite easily, if you don’t care that they’re in one-two-three order.

2. (Question from man.) Aligning boxes vertically. Yes, that was the part I didn’t cover. In the same article, (Alex fixed that, too). Maybe with baseline alignment.

3. (Question from man about left/right alignment.)

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Corny introduction from Halli. (For some reason, Molly insists on writing “internationalization” with an S, as though she were British. Neither of us is, so I won’t. [There was going to be a joke about that later – “Which part of this presentation was internationalized?” – but Molly forgot it.])

I am not an internationalization specialist. I was asked by Richard Ishida of the internationalization working group at W3C, who had attended my session on colour and culture. Helps get the guidelines out, education especially. “So I’m officially the outreach girl.” Has cards with internationalization quick tips.

What is internationalization? Why does it matter, or why should it?

I look at internationalization as being the giant that’s asleep, but it’s got one eye open; it’s just waking up. Within a few years, most Web developers are going to find themselves doing something related to internationalization. As we say in the working group, we really are putting the world in the World Wide Web.

Iceland has a unique language, so you’re already working in an internationalization sense. This is the first time I’ve ever spoken to a group that has, across the board, experience with developing in a second language. How many are working in a third language? (A few hands go up.)

Benefits:

• Purchasing power: Users are three times more likely to buy a product when addressed in their own language.
• Customer service: Costs drop when presented in the native language. One company created a Korean-language Web site just from looking at referrers, increasing revenue by 8%.
• Better user experience.

Nomenclature:

• Internationalization means design or development that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language. Provides technologies, too, as for bidirectional text, language identification, vertical text, non-Latin “typography.” Date and time formats, calendars, number formats, names. (She was looking for the term “salutation,” viz. mister, missus.) Separates local content from main content.
• Localization means adaptation to meet the language, culture, and other needs of a locale (she said “specific target market”). Often thought of as a mere synonym for translation.

General best practices for Web standards are appropriate for internationalization.

• Structure: encoding; lang and xml:lang, ability to manage multilingual and monolingual documents. (Also mentioned DOCTYPE, head, body, all of which can be left out at least some of the time.)
• Semantics: If you use presentational I element for emphasis, it won’t work in Japanese, which emphasizes words with dots above characters. [She yelled over to me and asked if I knew what they were called. I glanced and hollered “Furigana!”; they’re actually bohten.] Use structural em markup.

Text fragmentation and reuse. Screen usage: Direction, expansion and collapse (larger or smaller text blocks), emphasis.

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Takes the stage at 2006.04.27 13:07. “Afternoon. Everybody’s still awake after lunch?”

This is more of a two-way-conversation type of session, nothing too technical. This is a presentation I did a couple of months ago with my good friend Andy Budd, who is also a designer, at South by Southwest. Unfortunately, Andy couldn’t be here because he got hit by a meteorite on the way to Iceland.

The interesting thing about superheroes is that everybody wants to be one. When I was growing up I never thought I’d be a Web designer. How many here would rather be a superhero than a Web designer? Can I see a show of hands? (Most.) Excellent. In our survey, 85% of people replied that they would prefer to be a superhero. 14% preferred to be a Web designer. And the 1% was Dave Shea, who was both.

Today, because things are moving so quickly means that to be a Web designer means to be a superhero.

Every superhero has an origin. Shaun Inman worked at a copy shop. Molly Holzschlag worked as an exotic dancer. Eric Meyer worked at McDonald’s.

Gone are the days when there was a jack-of-all-trades Web designer who had to know everything [contradicting the theme of this presentation?]. People are specialists these days. Superheroes need superteams: Adaptive Path, Clear Left, Happy Cog.

Heroes tend to be selfless. They do what they do out of the greater good, not for their own benefit. Web-design superheroes also share their knowledge and experience among their peers and communities – blogs, forums, working collectively (as with the 40-odd people on WaSP). Within organizations there are internal evangelists. It can be hard if you’re one or two people passionate about standards or accessibility to change people’s minds inside an organization. They’re doing the Web proud at the moment. We’re seeing a lot of wonderful stuff coming out from people who are just getting their stuff done day after day.

Superheroes are motivated. Each hero tends to have a specific passion or motivation – usability, accessibility, Web standards. I think in order to be a Web design superhero today there has to be passion. You have to be truly motivated and truly passionate about what it is that you’re developing.

Superheroes often lead a double life. My good friend Brothercake, or even the Man in Blue, Cameron Adams, who’s a very talented scripter from Australia. But if you meet Clark Kent in the street, his costume is so convincing, you never might know that he’s Superman. The interesting thing is that they’re just regular guys; they’re just people like us who are doing what they do – well – every day.

They’re also motif-ated. Everybody has their own costume and their own recognizable logo. What’s interesting is how well-known some of these (Web) brands can be. (Only a few in the audience could recognize many standardista logos.)

Everybody needs a super Web site. (Shows Zeldman, Dave Shea, Zen Garden, Bowman, Andy Budd.)

A very important part of being a hero is sharing all of this knowledge and sharing what it is that we’re up to so that we’re not holding on to this information for profit or for any kind of selfish reason. The Web’s such a young medium that we’re effectively making it up as we go along.

What powers do you need?

1. Super speed. Keep pace with new trends, latest technologies, client expectations (“I want the job tomorrow”).

2. Super elasticity. Web designers need to stretch themselves very thin for looming deadlines. Maintain a very flexible approach to the type of work that we do and not be fixed to any one kind of methodology or way of working.

3. Telepathy. We need to be able to see into a client’s mind.

4. Mind control: To talk clients out of providing Ajax, a splash screen, support for Netscape 4, popup windows.

5. Empathy: We need to understand what we’re doing and who it is we’re designing for. (Asks for visual designers; very few hands go up.) Visual designers tend to be… not egotistical, but they know what it is they’re trying to put over. They have very strong opinions about design. We’re doing our work for an intended audience. We’re not doing it just for the money; that’s not our customer.

   With all of the Web 2.0 applications on our sites, we don’t necessarily know what’s going on our sites. If a user puts in a U.S. date format in a European application or leaves out an @ sign, we have to account for that. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to use the Web. I don’t like buying books online or booking theatre tickets; I’d really rather have somebody else to do it for me (Molly: “You do”). We really need to keep that in mind.

   How many of you work for a bank (About one-fifth.) Can I talk to you about my mortgage later on?

   I’ve had the unfortunate experience of having to sack clients from time to time. You soon develop a sense about those clients. Any hiccup or problem that might arise can really throw things off the rails.

6. Precognition: Ways in which technologies are used; new trends in design and technology.

7. X-ray vision: See the underlying document structure. We tend to look at markup from a presentational point of view. We’re trying to accomplish a particular layout or design, and I believe we have not moved very much further forward from the days of doing conventional table-based layouts. We need to be able to see through that visual presentation layer to understand the semantics of the document. Source order is very important to people who use screen readers, yet most pages are still laid out in a top-to-bottom, left-to-right order. Thinking more and more about the real pure semantic value of the content and the markup that we’re using. People need to start thinking differently about how they approach what they’re doing when they set up an HTML page.

8. Invulnerability. I know that sometimes on the Web, comments do fly on some of these sites like CSS Vault and Stylegala. It’s also important that we develop a thick skin (maybe not as thick as the Hulk’s), and that we can justify every decision that we can make. We have to move on from thinking that it’s great to have our work published on these sites to knowing we are doing the best possible work that we can.

9. Vulnerability: Superman’s was kryptonite; mine’s an addiction to nicotine. Everybody’s got something that they wish they could do a little bit better. I don’t have a brain for programming or scripting at all; I’m just not logical. But I know people and work with people who are extremely skilled in that area.

Superheroes have sidekicks.

Web superheroes are there to tell us it is possible to do very exciting and very influential stuff. I’ve been very fortunate to know and work with some amazing people – some names you will know and people who will be presenting here. (Wonder Woman: Molly; Daredevil: me; Mister Fantastic: Dave Shea.)

In order to be a Web design superhero, we should never stop learning how to do things better. By coming to events like this and by doing the things that you’re doing. I think it’s amazing that in a country like Iceland, with around 300,000 population, that we can have a group of people who can come for three days is truly heroic.

(PDF of his slides.)

1. Question from audience about source-code order. (He asked me the question and I blanked on it.) Says that source-code order is important for handhelds. Think of the no-stylesheet view, he says.

2. Question: How much time each week do you spend learning about new technologies? He reads blogs (for an unspecified amount of time per week).

3. Inaudible question from man. Will we ever have perfect parity between browsers, and is that a good idea? Answer: I’ve been very excited about what Microsoft are doing with IE7. I didn’t think we’d be at the state we are now with IE7’s standards support. It’s very encouraging… Microsoft developers have done a tremendous job. What I’m hoping is that, very soon (in a couple of years), all of the modern browsers will be supporting the same core set of standards. At that point, browser manufacturers will be competing not on their proprietary stuff, but on functionality, tools, services, bells ’n’ whistles. I hope that it’s not very long before we can stop worrying too much about rendering in different browsers. Good idea? Doesn’t really concern me, because I don’t think that there is ever going to be one browser, particularly as we move into the mobile arena.

4. Question from man about Jason Fried and diving into development without massive planning.

5. Question: What software does he use for his slides? Keynote 3 (which he “craftily hid”), still the trial version.

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Kelly Goto put on a headset mike and began speaking at 2006.04.27 11:21.

Was teaching here in Iceland before. I like the term “2.0”; it’s a resurfacing of everything that we are doing.

I don’t like to use the term “user” too much. “Customer,” “audience,” “site visitor” instead. Karen Donoghue’s Built for Use translates usability into business language. “Successful user experiences deliver a firm’s value proposition – the brand promise – to customers.”

Getting back to daily lives: One of the things we work on at Gotomedia is how people go through their daily lives. Coffee machines: We’re a design firm, so we got this very æsthetic, beautiful, old-fashioned retro model, but we couldn’t figure out how to use it. But it was so beautiful it generated enough interest to figure it out. And of course Americans don’t read instruction books.

Just travelling around, you learn different interfaces. I’m Japanese, fourth-generation; the only thing I know is nihongo-o wakarimasen, which might be incorrect. (Shows a toilet seat in Japan, inevitably.) You really have to trust that the interfaces you’re working with are going to work. That’s what it’s about in the end: Trustworthiness.

Is everything that we’re creating useful?

If your store is very streamlined and efficient and product-oriented, then your site should mimic that. If your store is very flashy and emotion-driven, then your site should reflect that.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of her clients (“shhh!”), used its logo a dozen different ways, which undercuts the trust necessary for an agency that insures Americans’ bank deposits.

UCD: User-centred-design approach. The customer has to remain central to every decision you make in your organization. Brand; information design; testing. They looked at the customers of a client (also FDIC), at small and large banks and with compliance officers. Looked at people’s bookmarks. Can have two computers and three browsers open, looking at things for 15 seconds at a time rather than going through a task to completion. Fraudulent cheques are faxed to bank branches, which also get a text-only E-mail that isn’t linked to the image.

Lifestyle user experience: Perception; interaction; integration. Found three pages (in an article) just on ethnography, a word she doesn’t like to use since it’s so academic.

I’m from Seattle, so I feel I have the right to stick up for Microsoft, but they can be a very scary Big Brother influence on our country. Microsoft has changed from a top-heavy company to one with small development groups and blogging. The developers she met from “scary Microsoft” were some of the happiest developers she’d met.

How does a culture extend itself into the workforce? If you were to classify Iceland, what would you call them? Workaholics. In Denmark, they’re sort of taught not to exceed expectations or be better than everybody else. It’s a kind of open culture; they’re very humbled by the school system and their parents. But because you guys are smaller than other countries, you can integrate faster. If you try something new, you embrace it. People in America don’t change unless they absolutely have to. That’s why you guys are an innovation culture.

Focus groups tell you how people think, how people really live.

[Your scribe, who, unlike Kelly, is not a usabilitista and has, by popular agreement, little to no business sense, lost the plot around 11:40.]

Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)

Takes the stage at 2006.04.27 09:55.

Thank you all so very much. It is great honour and pleasure to be here in Iceland, what looks to be an amazingly beautiful and interesting country, and very welcoming. A very important time, I think, as the Web becomes more and more important in our day-to-day lives.

Give you a roadmap about the various things that are being spoken about. What does it mean to the working person? We’ll talk more about the philosophy, about what they mean to us as people working in the world. But before I get into any of that, I’m going to be a little bit aggressive, if you will, to ask for some volunteers in the audience to speak up about what you’ve been doing, what your job role is, what your challenges are, and why you are here. Hopefully you will volunteer – otherwise I will pick you out of the crowd and make you say it.

Picks on Einar. Is with E-business development at Glitnir. Started in New York, there for a year and a half.

Molly to Einar: This conference is part of your education, right? You were meant to put together a project-management event. It’s very rare and very progressive to think that a great Web conference is coming out of a school-based project.

How about a woman? [continue with: Molly Holzschlag: ‘State of the Web 2006’ →]