9:00 AM - Opening keynote by Indi Young, a founding partner of Adaptive Path, talking about some ideas from her upcoming book Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior in a presentation called Innovation is Overrated. A good chunk of the presentation (and apparently because it’s a big part of her book) was dissecting these “mental models” that she’s created during her time as a consultant. These mental models are really, really neat because they bridge the gap between the kind of raw, dispersed data you get from a focus group or survey by helping you to organize things into logical groups based on users’ “mental states” and then pairing each of those states with some kind of action or strategy that can be taken to address any opportunities. If that’s just way too vague a description, a super simple example might be looking at the behaviours involved in going to a movie. The entire model would describe the process from start to finish but at some point while making the decision you would consider where the movie is playing (how far away the theatre is, if there’s parking, and maybe if are there restaurants close by). The logical response for somebody making a website for a theatre chain would be to provide maps of the local area with details about parking and food. That’s an ultra simple example that would represent just a tiny part of a complete mental model. Really interesting stuff to consider when organizing content for a site in a manner that is clear and intuitive. I’m sure Indi’s book will be a really useful reference. Ok, next session I’ll keep the blurb shorter… I promise.

10:45 AM - Cameron Adams presenting “The Future of Web-based Interfaces”. Admittedly a bit of a grandiose title, but it was a good presentation. The bulk of it being about the advent of all these different web-based devices that users are going to use to experience the web and how the interfaces should be adapting to each device and user as much as possible. That’s Cameron’s take on it, and it’s hard to argue with his point of view. Two approaches were examined: user-driven and developer-driven. User-driven interfaces take advantage of things like widgets, customizable content, and stylable pages. Yes, a lot of these techniques are already being used on many sites but as Cameron pointed out the execution usually falls short of providing a really seamless user experience. No doubt that this will improve with time. The second approach, developer-driven interfaces, employ “back-end” technology to provide users with a layout that is optimized for their device (by detecting screen resolution, for example) and one that has the capability to “learn” from a user’s behaviour to tailor the layout and content to their personal needs. Again, there are examples of this already in the wild but they’re half-implementations and mediocre at best. Next ones will be much briefer…

11:45 AM - “Information Visualization as a Medium” by Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen. Totally inspiring session where Eric showed off several projects he’s done built to present data in creative and innovative ways. If you don’t know who Stamen is, they’re the folks behind all of the visualization projects on Digg Labs. In addition to that work, Eric also demoed a few of the more noteworthy projects they’d worked on.

1:45 PM - Conference co-founders John Allsopp and Dave Shea tag-teamed a presentation looking at the proliferation of the web and how it will impact the work we as web designers and developers do. Today the average user can get onto the web from many devices other than a traditional computer and as a result they’re accessing it in totally different contexts with much different expectations.  All of these require some attention to be paid to what the user expects to get out of their online experience — technology, while enabling these new experiences, also presents challenges to those of us who create the content as new limitations force us to re-think familiar practices: unsophisticated typography and very few system fonts, low screen resolution, and different user inputs that aren’t a mouse.  While a lot of the onus is on the browser makers to develop some standards across devices, it’s also up to designers and developers to be mindful of our audience and consider tools like device-specific stylesheets to handle layouts that might not work well on non-desktop devices.

2:45 PM - Digg creative director and silverorange partner Daniel Burka walks the audience through some of the finer points of the evolution of Digg’s design over the last 3 years.  Daniel did a great job of breaking down the little decisions that went into Digg’s original UI and how he’s improved since then with help from loads of feedback from the site’s loyal users.  He also gave us a quick tour of the Pownce UI, sharing how it initially started out (with a name of Sencha) and was ultimately improved over a few iterations before it was launched.  Really neat and helpful as a designer to see solutions to problems dissected in such detail.
4:15 PM - Matt Webb from Schulze & Webb gave the closing keynote… kind of a high-level commentary on the shortcomings of the web and how it could be improved in a very general sense.  Matt was a good speaker with pretty creative slides but admittedly my brain was rather full of stuff at this point and I didn’t really soak in much of what he had to say.

All in all a good conference… nice to meet some new people and learn a few new tricks.