I was lucky enough to attend Web Direction’s first Melbourne based conference last week on Thursday and Friday, and I had a blast! I thought I’d do a quick review/rundown of my experience.
Thursday
I attended Andy Budd’s workshop on Gureilla Usability Testing. It was a very useful class, it taught us about how we should understand and accommodate our users. I loved how Andy began the class, I found it very similar with the way Donald A. Norman’s introduction was in his book “The Design of Everyday Things”. (which is a great book for web designers).
Andy brought out three wine bottle openers, and picked three people from the class to use all three on different bottles and the class observed how people will give different reactions to the same objects, which just goes to show how our users could potentially be reacting to our own websites.
Another thing I found interesting was how Andy explained how people often tell you how they wish they would act, but don’t actually act this way. (e.g Majority of people will tell you they wash their hands after using the toilet, reality is only 50% of people do, think twice about shaking someone’s hand!) This is why observing human behaviour is so much more vital, rather than asking people what they will do, watch them actually do it.
Which is exactly what the whole class was essentially about, recruiting testers to literally step through tasks we create for them to when using our websites. Quiet honestly this isn’t a method I can carry out at the moment given my position, but all the same it was a great learning experience and something I will carry with me for the future.
Friday
The official day of the conference, there were a total of 10 lectures, but one only had time to attend 6. First lecture was Andy Budd’s “Designing the experience curve”, which I found to be one of the best and most engaging talks I have ever listened to. Andy really knows how to draw in his audience, make you seriously listen and want to know more. I really loved how his slides were not filled with words, but rather imagery that related to his talk.
Basically what I took away from his talk was how websites need to be built to grab their audiences and carry out what they promise clearly and efficiently. It was pretty heavy on the psychology of our visitors, which is admittedly an aspects of web design I had not previous given much thought and very extremely interesting.
Next talk was Andrew Kesper’s “ABC’s election site – making the most of dry data”, he walked us through the website, the problems he encountered and the technology used to create it. Thanks to Andrew, I have discovered “innerHTML”, which he showed helped him build tables within his website instantly depending on the data it was fed from an XML file. Not only was it great to see such a professional site still use tables, but this could easily saving developers many hours of coding! 
Donna Spencer’s “Getting Content Right” was next, she’s a great speaker, a little too “dramatic” for my tastes, but she got her message across. Her focus as the title suggests was far more on the worded content on a site, not so much the design and development, which is my area of speciality. Still it was funny to see professional sites still express themselves in such a dry manner.
After lunch I attended Jackie Moyes’ “Converting research data into business speak”. Jackie obviously has a lot of experience in her area, and it was interesting to see how she was able to carry out her research and translate it into very easy to read tables, making it painfully clear to our clients exactly what their site needs, and what they don’t need.
Next was Jeremy Yuille’s “Web visualisation – do you see what I see?”, and what I loved about this talk was that fact that it did move away from the web a little, and very much focused on the graphical side, which is something I have lacked a lot of in my technical upbringing. I love how simple data could be much more clearly expressed through imagery, and I don’t mean just charts and graphs but imagery. It’s not something a developer like myself thinks about all the time, we’re always more focused with just typing out what we mean, but using crisp and well made imagery to explain the same concept is a great way to draw in your users, and actually keep them on your site for longer than 2 seconds.
Finally Robert Hoekman Jr’s “The essential elements of great web applications” was last, and I’m glad he was. It was a bit like saving the best till last. Robert is a famous author and I’ve already placed my order for his books on Amazon ;D He was my sort of guy, a techie like me. Not only that but he is an amazing speaker, I really hope to attend one of his talks again in the future, even if it is the same one, he is not only talented, but very engaging.
Plus, I absolutely loved his talk on WordPress and their solution to their low conversion rate, brilliant! lol
What I found interesting about Robert’s key points were that they were painfully obvious and simple. At the end of the day, our websites are all there to communicate a message, and it’s our jobs to make sure this message is completely intact when it gets to our targeted audience. Honestly I don’t want to give away his talk, but I highly suggest that if you are a dedicated web designer or developer, buy his book!
Conclusion
Had a blast! Not only did I meet lots of great people in the industry, I met plenty of people who had have started their own successful web design firms, something that is still a dream of mine. It was a huge learning experience, however being a user experience conference, it did focus on UX a lot. I’d absolutely want to attend again next year (so long as work is happy to foot the slightly below $1kAU entry fee like they so kindly did this year 
). I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for a strictly web design/developer related conference in the near future
If any of you webbies can get sponsored to go next year, GO! And hopefully I will see you there 
