AlexAitken.net

It’s a fun thing to be at the fore­front of a lan­guage/tech­no­logy re­volu­tion. I’m al­ways a little amazed at how the JavaS­cript I began cod­ing ten years ago has turned in to one of the corner­stones of my ca­reer. MBAs and years on con­sensus build­ing are one thing, but it’s this lan­guage that truly brings my design work to life, from its pro­to­typ­ing stages to its full pro­duc­tion de­ploy­ment. And while I’ve forged deep­er and deep­er un­der its hood, JavaS­cript has im­plic­ated it­self fur­ther and fur­ther in mod­ern de­vel­op­ment prac­tices. JSConf 2011 brought most of the thought lead­ers re­spons­ible for this im­plic­a­tion to­geth­er for two days in Port­land, OR, in­duc­ted oth­ers in to the circle, and hummed throughout with young, fresh, en­ergy and ideas de­voted to the stand­ards lan­guage mak­ing today’s web hop. Notes on the sum­mit:

For the second year run­ning I’ve spent four late sum­mer days at Ad­apt­ive Path’s UX Week in San Fran­cisco. The 2009 edi­tion saw me di­li­gently post­ing day-by-day notes and ac­counts. This year I simply re­lay quotes and sources while steer­ing clear of at­tri­bu­tion. The con­fer­ence was again killer, the per­spect­ives at the same time re­fresh­ing and af­firm­ing, the chal­lenges plenty and in­creas­ing, the in­spir­a­tion ubi­quit­ous and palp­able. Thank you Mer­holz and co. for an­oth­er un­qual­i­fied suc­cess.

Thomas Fuchs is au­thor of the script.aculo.us user in­ter­face JavaS­cript lib­rary, a mem­ber of the Pro­to­type core team and a Ruby on Rails core alum­nus. As he puts it, ‘You’re us­ing my work every day, even if you’re not aware of it!’ His wife Amy Hoy is a de­sign­er, au­thor, and JS pro­gram­mer in her own right. To­geth­er they team to of­fer a full-day’s train­ing on ad­vanced JS de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment tech­niques that they de­liv­er via chat and video­con­fer­en­cing soft­ware from Vi­enna, Aus­tria.

Ed­ward Tufte is Yale Uni­versity Pro­fess­or Emer­it­us of Polit­ic­al Sci­ence, Stat­ist­ics, and Com­puter Sci­ence. Through his work in these do­mains and the four books he has pub­lished on the dis­play and con­sump­tion of data, Tufte has come to be best–re­cog­nized as a mas­ter of in­fograph­ic and visu­al in­ter­face design. In his per­en­ni­al one-day course on Present­ing Data and In­form­a­tion, he teaches his view on ef­fect­ive visu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion through ex­amples drawn from across eras and me­dia.

In October of 2008 I attended the Ajax Experience Conference (sponsored by ajaxian.com among others) in Boston. 2009 saw a conflict between Ben and Dion and Adaptive Path’s San Francisco UX Week, which I opted for to diversify. Here, however, near its first anniversary, I share what I took from the 2008 Boston session. We’ve made progress. There’s still a way to go. And I still think UI/X is king. The excitement and challenges of a year ago:

UX Week 2009

Matias Duarte: Preparing for Revolution – Designing a Mobile Information Workspace

Matias Duarte is Vice President of Human Interface & User Experience at Palm and joined the company when, as he tells it, it was bordering on irrelevancy, bankruptcy, and ruin. To paraphrase, “The ship was sinking and even the lifeboat I chose to jump into was a rotten leaky one…” Duarte presented on how, from such a position, he was able to drive the thinking and process that led to webOS, the underlying UX foundation of the Palm Pre that Fast Company describes as the “Smartphone [that] Might Turn Palm Around.”

Who I am

I wear the UI designer’s hat but also the developer’s.
I work in a large Financial Institution where money is the business and those who handle it are called ‘officers.’
I am asked to provide estimates and updates on a weekly basis.
I am expected to design and develop to a schedule.
I am expected to work on multiple simultaneous projects.
I believe that functionality has been all but commoditized and that design and experience are today’s differentiators.
I believe in aesthetics, emotion, and pleasure of product.
I struggle to reconcile these beliefs with my organization’s focus on projects, pace, and pipeline.
I sometimes get discouraged…
But I haven’t lost the faith.