The last day of CanUX was by far my favorite day. We had presentations from Gene Smith, Derek Featherstone and David Armano; all of which were very interesting.

First Presentation: Gene Smith

Gene Smith is a principal with nForm, one of Canada’s leading user experience consulting firms. He also writes about information architecture, interaction design, community, the web and other such topics.

Gene’s presentation was titled: Tagging. He also recently just finished a book called Tagging avaiable on December 27.

Gene had an interesting approach to his presentation. He started off with some history about how ancient civilizations communicated, up to the invention of the tab that we now have on most of our folders. It was a great intro, because it really set the stage for the rest of what he had to say.

Gene stated the problem, that we’re constantly taking in information, but for most of us it’s hard to keep track of it all (I’m definitely in that demographic). Then he asked the question: “why tags?”

He went on to explain the history of meta data, and how similar it is to tagging. He explained the different applications that tags have, ie. geo-tagging, machine tags, rss feeds and even ’social hum’ (my favorite word of the conference).

He then explained how tagging itself has evolved, from a form of meta data, to a way to search, as well as sticky tags (automated tagging system based on criteria).

I actually learned a lot from his presentation, even if a lot of it was history. I think it gave me a much broader picture of tagging, and it also confirmed to me that tags are here to stay. I think that tagging is still in the infancy stage, and there is much improvement that has yet to be discovered.

Second Presentation: Derek Featherstone

Derek Featherstone’s talk was my favorite of the whole weekend. It was actually quite a surprise for me, because I was not really looking forward to it at all.

Derek owns a Accessibility UX company called Further Ahead.

Derek’s presentation was titled: Accessible UX Design.

He showed us how speech synthesis reads code, and how important things like alt text in images really are. He played us a clip of a speech synthesis reader, reading a page off of amazon. It was absolutely horrid!

His biggest point of his whole presentation was about clean code. If your code is clean, you’re already 80% of the way there. another main point was the importance of the order of your code. The speech synthesis readers read your code in the order that it appears in your code (not on your page).

He touched on what kinds of disabilities require different techniques, and about how knowing your audience is key.

The thing that I found the most interesting, was the use of javascript, and how it can be extremely detrimental if not used correctly. For instance, if you have some ajax-y goodness on your page that only appears when a user clicks a certain spot, that piece of ajax has to be the next thing that a user can TAB to. I don’t think I had ever really thought of that before. I did go back and look at some of my code, and I was doing it right anyway. Nonetheless, it’s something to be aware of!

He also touched on things like:

• Be aware of visual language
  • if your visual design creates a hierarchy, then you must duplicate that inside your code
• Context is extremely important
  • Context is usually shown through visual design; your code must also show it
• TAB order should be described in your wireframes

Overall, what I got out of Derek’s talk was that clean code matters - not only so that you look good when someone views your source code, but also for accessibility.

Third Presentation: David Armano

David is VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass.

The Fuzzy Tail was about being adaptable in the workplace, and in your procedures. He talked about processes (past and present) that worked and didn’t work.

He emphasized putting aside your expertise, and try to learn all over again. He likened it to his relationship with his children. When he’s around them he starts to question the world, just like them. As a result, he’s seen creative changes in himself.

David had the quote of the conference: “People will use the tools that you build the way they want, not the way you intended it.”

Overall I thought David’s presentation was quite interesting. Maybe not extremely useful in real life, but quite interesting.