Meta Refresh 2014

On the construction of user interface on the web

Criteria for proposing sessions: You must be a practising web designer/developer, and must be able to show how your own work has advanced the state of the web in the past year. You are expected to present original work that your peers — this event’s audience — recognise as being notable enough to deserve a stage.

About Meta Refresh: Meta Refresh is a conference where Design and UI development converge. A beautiful experience on the web is a result of a deep understanding of your user and the nuances of the medium. Meta Refresh aims to be the platform where designers and UI developers exchange ideas and skills and learn from each other.

Format: This year’s edition spans four days, with two days of workshops and two days of conference. All days feature a single track.

We are accepting talks on:

  1. Front-end implementations, mainly workflow, processes, tools and automation,
  2. CSS, animation, UX, trends, and typography, and
  3. Short, crisp talks on front-end tricks.

Talks on implementation have to be about original work. While covering scalability and productivity aspects to explain implementation details, proposers must also explain who is the user and what is the context in which their product is being used. Therefore, how content and design were tailored in each specific instance.

We also invite workshop proposals on:

  1. Build systems such as Grunt
  2. CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap 3 and Foundation
  3. MVC/JS frameworks such as Angular
  4. Animations/UX

Workshops will be held on 12th and 13th February at the TERI auditorium in Domlur, Bangalore.

If you are excited about someone’s work and believe it deserves wider recognition, we recommend you contact them and ask them to submit a proposal.

Last date for submissions: 12 January 2014.
Confirmations: 15 January 2014 onwards.

There is only one speaker per session. Attendance is free for selected speakers. HasGeek will offer a grant to cover your travel to and accommodation in Bangalore from anywhere in the world for speakers delivering full sessions (30 minutes or longer). As our budget is limited, we will prefer speakers from locations closer home, but will do our best to cover for anyone exceptional. If you are able to raise support for your trip, we will count that as a speaker travel sponsorship.

Travel grants are reimbursed at the end of the conference. You are expected to make your own travel and stay arrangements. We will assist with hotel recommendations, visa letters and general advice on travel.

Commitment to open source

HasGeek believes in open source as the binding force of our community. If you are describing a codebase for developers to work with, we’d like it to be available under a permissive open source license. If your software is commercially licensed or available under a combination of commercial and restrictive open source licenses (such as the various forms of the GPL), please consider picking up a sponsorship. We recognize that there are valid reasons for commercial licensing, but ask that you support us in return for giving you an audience. Your session will be marked on the schedule as a sponsored session.

Non Accepted Proposals

If your proposal is accepted for a session > 30 minutes long, we will cover your event ticket. If your proposal is not accepted, you can buy a ticket at the same rate as was available on the day you proposed. We’ll send you a code.

Tickets: http://metarefresh.doattend.com
Website: https://metarefresh.in/2014

For queries about proposals / submissions, write to info@hasgeek.com

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Meta Refresh is an umbrella forum for conversations about different aspects of design and product including: UX and interaction design CMS, content management, publishing and content marketing Information architecture more

Chris Lüscher

@christoph_luescher

What we learnt at iA when working on large-scale design projects

Submitted Jan 9, 2014

A large corporate presence, a news site, a complex backend tool, a SAAS platform: raw concept and design work is only part of what it takes to make large scale web design or redesign projects successful.

Projects that warrant the investment of hundreds of concept and design days usually take place in complex, sometimes entrenched corporate settings in which awareness building and change management, the quality of business, market and process analysis, the correct consideration of technological feasibility and technological agendas and, last but not least, the quality and depth of user research can make or break a project - or even the project owner’s business.

In this presentation, I will describe a set of modules that help us successfully manage large scale design projects at iA.

My talk targets project managers or product owners planning and and steering large scale web design projects, be it in an agency or on the client side. People who simply want to build design awareness within their company might find one or the other nugget too.

Outline

Each iA project is tailored to the client’s specific needs. However, there is a set of recurring modules that appear throughout many projects.

Analyzing the context

Design is not about creating nice surfaces, but about understanding how things work under the hood and giving them the most useful external form
-> How we discover and analyze the context of design projects

Awareness building through user research

Arguments about design can only be fruitful when based in a solid understanding of the end user’s needs
-> How we use user research to build our client’s awareness of his client’s needs

Keeping the initial scope under control

Project overstretch is a very real danger in large scale design projects
-> How we get started when the mountain ahead seems too high to climb

Painting the future in bright colors

Overambitious projects can fail, but many more projects yield mediocre results simply because the big vision got lost somewhere along the way
-> How we try to reconcile the wish for a „perfect“ interface with the sometimes sad reality of what’s feasible in the short term

Can’t we just iterate?

-> Why we sometimes think that it’s useful to go for the big overhaul of a design and why we sometimes try to avoid it

Grinding?

So we understood the context, everybody is aware of the project and wants to go on with it, there’s this wonderful future interface prototype, an overall information architecture, a beautiful design line. Now all we need to do is draw another 150 pages in Photoshop, right? Nope.
-> How we break down seemingly overwhelming projects into manageable parts
-> How we ensure consistency over large projects
-> How we approach implementation in cooperation with large tech teams

Speaker bio

Chris Lüscher co-founded iA, a Zurich and Tokyo based design agency with a focus on complex concept and design challenges in interactive products. He is a co-founder of Cucumbertown, a San Francisco and Bangalore based food blogging platform.

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Hosted by

Meta Refresh is an umbrella forum for conversations about different aspects of design and product including: UX and interaction design CMS, content management, publishing and content marketing Information architecture more