Meta Refresh 2015

The web in your pocket

##Meta Refresh 2015 edition: The web in your pocket

##Theme
We’re already in a world where smartphones outnumber all the desktops and laptops put together. A sizeable portion of your existing user base could be accessing your website only through a handheld device. It is quite likely that future web users will never experience a site on a large screen.

Undeniably mobiles, be it phones or tablets, have become a critical channel for user acquisition and customer engagement. In fact, one can argue that mobiles are already the primary touch-point for reaching and experiencing the web in many cases.

For many web designers and developers, however, the constraints of a mobile device continue to be a beast — small screen, low resources, fickle networks and the (often false) assumption that the user is always on the move with limited time at hand.

Responsive design hasn’t been enough. Mobile-first was just a start. It takes a lot more to tame the beast and to create a great browsing experience for a mobile user.

Meta Refresh 2015 will focus on enhancing web experience on mobile devices.

We’re looking forward to proposals about:

  • Evolution of web design in your organisation: what is the context of your business and customers? Why and how did you evolve your UX strategy and practice for mobile devices?
  • In your experience and practice, how does the context of mobile user influence the design of your websites? How does the behavior of users accessing web through a mobile differ?
  • How do you take complex web applications beyond the desktop? Speak to us from your experience.
  • What are the common misconceptions / incorrect assumptions about the mobile context? How did you figure these in your practice?
  • How do you design content for mobile websites? What kind of detailing is involved here?

And oh, if you disagree with the theme, we’d like to hear about that as well.

We are accepting proposals under the following sections:

  • Design process outlining concrete steps.
  • Mobile website strategy.
  • Content design.
  • Design patterns.
  • User research and insights.
  • Performance and front-end tools – crisp talks only.
  • Maintainability challenges.

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.

Format

The 2015 edition is a two-day single-track conference – 16 and 17 April. We invite proposals for:

  • Full-length 40 minute talks
  • A crisp 15-minute presentation
  • Sponsored sessions, 40 minute duration

Criteria to submit conference proposals

You must be a practising web developer or designer, 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.
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.

##Workshop proposals
If you are interested in teaching, sharing knowledge with the community and/or conducting professional trainings on CSS, front-end engineering and design, submit a proposal under workshop section. Specify past experience in teaching and conducting workshops. Even better if you share links to videos of workshops where you were an instructor.
We’ll host workshops starting October 2014 until April 2015.

###Buy tickets here: https://in.explara.com/e/meta-refresh

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
Param Aggarwal

Param Aggarwal

@paramaggarwal

Netscape for Mobile

Submitted Jan 20, 2015

Designing and serving content for multiple mobile and web platforms is hard. Come hear about some of the problems we faced, as Myntra migrated from serving fashion content on one platform to five platforms. How step by step, layouts and templates were pulled out from the app and into the server, to be freely changed without an app update.

Outline

Long ago, a website had to be tweaked to work correctly in individual browsers and operating systems. Buttons, sliders and drop-down menus appeared differently on different operating systems. The web was the glue that defined their configuration, and the browser rendered these individual interface components for you. Soon CSS followed and you were able to specify styling attributes for these components.

With the mobile age, we are back to square one. Everyone uses the ‘web’, not via the browser but via apps in the form of ‘HTTP’. Unfortunately, compiled apps have to be updated everytime something changes. iOS, Android, Windows Phone SDKs bring their own implementations of these interface elements and it is time for us to bring the remote configurability of the browser to these native elements.

Here are the things we already know:

  1. Mobile usage is shadowing desktop usage.
  2. We now need to develop for 5 platforms: Desktop web, Mobile web, Android app, iOS app, Windows Phone app.
  3. Mobile apps cannot be easily updated like websites.
  4. Doing hybrid apps is like mixing tea and coffee into one drink, so you don’t have to ask anyone what they would like to have.

Here are the things we want:

  1. Build apps whose content can be magically reconfigured from the server.
  2. Define the content and layout for the apps once and have it work on all the different platforms.
  3. An easy interface to be able to define such content and layout.
  4. The ability to travel faster than light.

We have attempted solutions to the first three things, and would like to share them with you. (Meanwhile feel free to attempt the fourth.) It’s like Photoshop for building app content in the age of mobile platforms. Upvote the proposal and come hear the full story.

Requirements

Understanding of the web and native apps in general.

Speaker bio

Working as a frontend engineer at Myntra since 2013, till unsolved problems in frontend layout tools for iOS and Android forced us to dabble in engineering some backend systems.

Comments

{{ gettext('Login to leave a comment') }}

{{ gettext('Post a comment…') }}
{{ gettext('New comment') }}
{{ formTitle }}

{{ errorMsg }}

{{ gettext('No comments posted yet') }}

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