“Choosing your technology stack is one of many decisions you’ll have to make when creating a company from scratch. Along with this, you’ll need to figure out who you should found a company with, who you should take money from, what the company culture should be, management processes, and who to hire when. Joe will be covering basic technology stack choices (cloud v. hosted, frameworks, etc.) as well as other critical decisions one faces when starting a startup.”

Templates are the best kind of tool: simple to write and implement, but powerful enough to make your architecture slicker and your code leaner. Getting markup out of your Javascript is a huge deal, but templates can help with more than that. They can manage repeated code snippets, allow you to deftly switch states in single page applications, and help keep your code DRY when supporting users with and without Javascript enabled. Using and extending them creatively can make any architecture a little awesomer.

Presentation on rethinking the way we’ve been designing websites for mobile devices – for Over The Air 2010 in London by Bryan Rieger of Yiibu.

Introduction to socialgraphics and the Engagement Pyramid, a way to understand your customers in addition to traditional demographics, psychographics, etc. Research forms the foundation for your social strategy. Presented by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group, on January 20, 2010. Recording is also available at blog.altimetergroup.com.

Version 2

Giles Colborne’s presentation discusses strategies for simplifying designs. It identifies two new rules for simplicity.

It also looks at why simplicity has become so important in interaction design, whether simplicity and usability are the same thing and exposes some myths about simplicity.

It’s a version of a highly-rated talk from the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference in Portland in June 2009.

I’ve added some ’Post-It’ notes so it all makes sense!

UPDATED 18 June 2009: Fixed some of the builds and fonts to improve the appearance.

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it’s filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect. Some design changes in the last few years have not been the success that the team had hoped for. Amazon’s exceptional qualities and imperfections are critical knowledge for any designer that wants to dig deep into what makes the site tick.

In this entertaining presentation, Jared will share some of UIE’s latest research into the hidden treasures of (the) Amazon.

You’ll learn:
+ The simple Yes/No question that increased revenues by more than $1 billion
+ The elegant subtlety of Amazon’s security system
+ Why Amazon’s business model is more than meets the eye (and why designers need to care)
+ The wins and losses that Amazon has had with social media functionality

Here’s the presentation I gave at Pittsburgh Web Design Day (http://www.webdesignday.com) based on my article on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/)

The presentation for my session at IA Summit 2009

In this presentation, I share my own experiences learning about generative design and how to do it. This presentation includes lots of practical tips and tricks.

Presentation (now includes audio) on the future of social networks, with the core idea that "Social networks will be like air". Details user experiences that will incorporate user identity, contacts, and activities, as well as new business models.

People are often dumb, so how can crowds be wise? James Surowiecki laid the groundwork in his book, "The Wisdom of Crowds." In this solo presentation, Derek Powazek will apply those ideas to the web, concentrating on how to design websites that empower people to work together to create something truly awesome.

Sunday 15 March at 11:30am.

Interaction 09 presentation. The title was Object-oriented design: A technique for designing and documenting complex business rules and rich interactions. A write up of this technique can be found at oad.humansize.com

Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups. From Steve Blank’s Customer Development course at Berkeley. Learn more and hear the audio at http://bit.ly/3qsvJ.