Workshops

Four great full day workshops to choose from

September 21 Workshops

• Esther Derby – Agile Retrospecitves
• Dan Rubin – Real World CSS3 for Designers

September 22 Workshops

• Juliette Melton – Developing effective UX research plans
• Jonathan Stark – Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Glenda Sims, Aarron Walter, Leslie Jensen-Inman – Dive into the Modern Web – a workshop for educators

Agile Retrospectives

Presenter: Esther Derby

Venue: AMA Atlanta Executive Conference Center, 1170 Peachtree Street, 3rd Floor

Date: Tuesday September 21 2010, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Pricing: $350 conference attendees / $450 standalone

Register now!

Stoking the Improvement Engine

Effective retrospectives stoke the engine of team improvement. Retrospectives are the vital feedback loop the team uses to examine methods engineering practices, teamwork, and organizational relationships. But all too often, teams fail to act on their retrospective resolves.

This full-day interactive workshop will introduce you to a flexible five-stage framework for retrospectives. Participants will do a small project (no coding involved) and experience a retrospective on the project. We’ll examine how and why the retrospective works, how it leverages the way humans naturally process information, and how to increase the chances of getting traction on retrospective actions.

If you’ve been dissatisfied with your team’s retrospectives, are ready to take your retrospectives to the next level, or are just starting to use retrospectives on your team, come to this session to learn from on the the world experts on retrospectives.

What will be covered?

At the end of this very full hands on day you will have everything you need to get the most out of every retrospective:

• a five-stage flexible framework for effective retrospectives
• an understanding of the purpose of each stage, and how they fit together
• an appreciation of the perils of leaving out one of the stages
• the ability to select a focus for a retrospective
• tools for choosing activities for a retrospective
• ideas for managing group dynamics
• a list of common traps (and how to avoid them)

Who should attend?

Anyone currently using, or wanting to get more out of, agile methodologies should attend this workshop.

• team coaches
• team leads
• scrum masters
• team members
• people interested in continuous improvement at work

About Esther Derby

Esther Derby works with individuals, teams, and organizations to improve their ability to deliver valuable software. Esther is recognized as a leader in the human-side of software development, including management, organizational change, collaboration, building teams, and retrospectives.

She’s been a programmer, systems manager, project manager, and internal consultant. She currently runs her own consulting firm, Esther Derby Associates, Inc., in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Esther has an MA in Organizational Leadership, is the author of over 100 articles and co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. At the moment, she’s working on a book about managing in team-based organizations.

She’s a founder of the AYE Conference and is serving her second term as a board member for the Agile Alliance.

Follow Esther on Twitter: @estherderby

Dive into the Modern Web – a workshop for educators

It’s an exciting time to be on the Web. Emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3 are changing what’s possible in web design, and the way the we plan projects is becoming ever more refined. In this workshop inspired by the first book from The Web Standards Project – InterACT with Web Standards – you’ll learn how to plan and build websites using contemporary best practices, and discover how to use online tools to learn more effectively on the Web. As an educator teaching web design this workshop will acquaint you with what’s possible today on the modern web, and resources to help you along the way.

Attendees will receive a copy of InterACT with Web Standards.

Who is this workshop for?

Educators teaching web design.

What will you learn?

• How to plan and architect your site
• How to use HTML5 in your sites today
• How CSS3 will make your design life easier
• How to learn more effectively on the web
• How to teach others about the modern web

About Aarron Walter

By day, Aarron Walter is the mild-mannered lead user experience designer for MailChimp, and by night he leads a team of education crusaders in The Web Standards Project who are the magic behind The WaSP InterACT curriculum.

Aarron is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond, and is a co-author and project manager of the book InterACT With Web Standards: A holistic approach to Web design.

Follow Aarron on Twitter: @aarron.

About Glenda Sims

Glenda Sims is a Senior Systems Analyst at the University of Texas at Austin. As a member of UT Team Web, Glenda helps support the central web site for the University. She serves as an Accessibility and Web Standards Evangelist and the self-appointed Web Accessibility Goddess at UT. Her specialties include information architecture, usability/accessibility testing, handheld wireless devices, technical training and project management.

Glenda is currently a co-manager of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

About Leslie Jensen-Inman

Leslie Jensen-Inman, assistant professor at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, acts on her passion to improve web education through initiatives such as Teach the Web, the Open Web Education Alliance, the WE Rock Summit and Tour, and InterACT. She is an author, speaker, and creative director who has a unique background in design and business that includes being the graphic designer for a major motion picture and owning a design, marketing, and public relations business. She has recently co-authored and creative directed the book InterACT with Web Standards: A holistic approach to Web standards.

Follow Leslie on Twitter: @jenseninman

Know Your Users: Develop effective user experience research plans

Presenter: Juliette Melton

Venue: AMA Atlanta Executive Conference Center, 1170 Peachtree Street, 3rd Floor

Date: Wednesday September 22 2010, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Pricing: $350 conference attendees / $450 standalone

Register now!

You can dramatically improve your websites when you pay attention to how they are being used. Understanding user behavior can be challenging, but there lots of ways to get started. User testing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, and shouldn’t only happen at the end of the product development cycle. The best and most useful research is distributed throughout the product lifecycle and is done in a way that clicks with how your organization works.

At this workshop, Juliette Melton will show you how to build an effective user experience research program from scratch and how to keep it going over time.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for those who want to understand how to learn about user experiences, including project/product managers, designers, and usability professionals.

What will you learn?

• A structured approach to building a user testing program
• Web analytics basics
• Writing effective surveys
• How to include coworkers in your research
• How to perform task analysis
• When to use remote research tools
• Tips for recruiting testing participants
• Best practices for sharing research findings

About Juliette Melton

Juliette Melton is a user experience researcher and design strategist based in San Francisco. Her background in web development and product management gives her a practical perspective on how to conduct effective user experience research. She advocates building products that delight users while supporting organizational realities.

Juliette holds a master’s in education from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She runs Deluxify, a boutique UX consultancy, writes about her various projects at juliemelton.com, and makes lots of terrariums.

Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j

Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Presenter: Jonathan Stark

Venue: AMA Atlanta Executive Conference Center, 1170 Peachtree Street, 3rd Floor

Date: Wednesday September 22 2010, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Pricing: $350 conference attendees / $450 standalone

Register now!

Thanks to mobile phones, we have moved from virtually no one having access to information, to virtually everyone having access to all the vast resources of the web. This is arguably the most important achievement of our generation. Despite its overarching importance, the mobile web is in its infancy. Physical, technical, financial, and political forces have created platform fragmentation like never before, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Organizations that need to engage large groups are faced with a seemingly impossible challenge – “How do we implement our mobile vision in a way that is feasible, affordable, and reaches the greatest number of participants?” In many cases, the answer is web technologies. The combination of advances in HTML5 and mobile devices has created an environment where even novice developers can build mobile apps that improve – and in some cases, save – lives on a global scale.

The future of computing is mobile. The future of mobile is web. Why not get started today?

What will be covered?

• Interface guidelines for mobile devices
• Advanced styling with CSS3
• CSS3 transforms, transitions, and animations
• Building offline web apps with HTML5
• Building native web apps with PhoneGap
• Mobile app architecture options

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is designed for web designers and developers who are interested in creating mobile apps. A basic familiarity with standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would be very helpful but is not required.

About Jonathan Stark

Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web.

He is the author of O’Reilly’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and is often quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends.

Jonathan began his programming career more than 20 years ago on a Tandy TRS-80 and still thinks Zork was a sweet game.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @jonathanstark

Real World CSS3 for Designers

Presenter: Dan Rubin

Venue: AMA Atlanta Executive Conference Center, 1170 Peachtree Street, 3rd Floor

Date: Tuesday September 21 2010, 9.00am to 5.00pm

Pricing: $350 conference attendees / $450 standalone

Register now!

Designers rejoice! Web Standards are not just for people who care about accessibility and compatibility across devices and platforms anymore: they are fast becoming the core tools of some of the best sites, apps, and experiences on the web; and with the latest browsers including support for all of CSS2.1, much of CSS3 (and increasingly, HTML5), designers can now call these tools our friends.

In this full day of practical examples and exercises, Dan will show you how today’s leading sites are using advanced CSS to move some of the visual heavy-lifting to the browsers. We’ll examine live sites, then take them apart to see how their designers are using CSS to implement visual design, and how they degrade in less-than-modern browsers. We’ll also build and test an example design to see just how easy (and practical) it is to incorporate advanced CSS in your designs, so you’ll leave with the experience and confidence of having put these capabilities to use.

What will be covered?

• Advanced selectors and browser support
• Rounded corners (and how to design for when they aren’t there)
• CSS3 Gradients (and an easy way to create them)
• Text Shadow and Box Shadow (using them to your advantage)
• Bitmaps vs CSS (when to use each and how to choose)
• CSS Transitions (and their potential downsides)
• CSS Animations (and how they compare with Javascript alternatives)
• Browser-specific CSS (aka vendor extensions)
• The future of CSS (experiments and anything which lacks support)

Who is this workshop for?

Designers who are already familiar with and using web standards (basic HTML/CSS) and are ready to start including more advanced CSS in their projects.

About Dan Rubin

An accomplished designer, author and speaker, Dan Rubin has over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of user interface design and web standards, specifically focusing on the use of HTML and CSS to streamline development and improve accessibility.

His passion for all things creative and artistic isn’t a solely selfish endeavor either—you’ll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, philosophy, web standards, typography, psychology, and design in general.

In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft’s ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, friends of ED, 2003), technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006), The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007) and Sexy Web Design (SitePoint, 2009), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007), writes about web standards, design and life in general on his personal site, Superfluous Banter, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative, Webgraph and Black Seagull, consulting on design, user interaction and online publishing for Garcia Media, and speaking and teaching at events, conferences and workshops (including An Event Apart, @media, SXSW Interactive, Future of Web Design, Web Directions, and various Refresh and AIGA events) around the world.

Photo: © John Morrison / Subism Studios

Follow Dan on Twitter: @danrubin