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

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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

Aseem Agarwal

@agaase19

Scaling down for Mobile - Insight into design patterns for content based sites.

Submitted Jan 12, 2015

The phrase “scaling down” in the title tries to convey more than its literal meaning. It is the scaling down of the whole thought process to take a mobile first approach towards developing websites where content is the key focus.
In this talk we will discuss patterns and design considerations that one should take care of, when working on websites which have the business of showcasing content. Over time web designers have come up with innovative solutions for many problems related to visualisation of content on mobile. We will discuss those patterns analysing them in terms of basics of design to find out what works best in what context.

Outline

Why study patterns?. A statement from the book “Sketching User Experiences” by Bill Buxton says - “Time spent developing a technique provides the foundation for the creation of the art.”. In this case techniques are the many strategies designers and developers have already worked on while designing for the mobile ecosystem. Understanding what they have done will give us an insight of what works and what doesn’t so that we can ourself create a unique solution.

Specifically in this discussion we are looking at patterns where the challenge is to visualise content. There’s a common pattern with any system that has the basic job of visualising a lot of content and it hasn’t changed much with time. Three type of models are chosen and any interface has the challenge to visualise all these three.

  1. Representing the list of items.
  2. A categorization of the items where we have different groups of articles.
  3. The actual item itselft which is the eventual purpose.

A simple example of this pattern being used, is in publications which has a list of articles categorised on different themes. It needs to showcase the list of articles, the different themes (tech, science, sports etc) on which articles are grouped and the article itself.

Each model above is unique and present its own challenges especially for mobile. We’ll first discuss the significance itself of each model and then lot of real life examples that have tried to solve them.
For instance, categorization which also serves as navigation for the app, has lot of patterns.

  • The left nav flyout menu.
  • Top navigation or do nothing.
  • Full screen menu
  • Carousel+.

It is also important to measure and analyse each pattern on the yardsticks of good design. That will help us understand what problems is each pattern solving and as such their true purpose. Some of the points include but not limited to

  • The importance of whitespace and boundaries in design.
  • User attention span.
  • Utilising touch gestures effectively.
  • The case of design discovery.

Every designer is working in a unique context and set of constraints in which they are trying to represent their content model. Learning about these patterns will help him/her objectively analyse what all things he should take care of design wise, so that he can give the best fit solution.

Speaker bio

Iam a front end developer, designer at Genwi. At genwi we are developing hybrid apps (IOS, Android, HTML5) targeted towards content marketing world where design (written in HTML,CSS,JS) is decoupled from the actual code to run the apps. Visualising content is key focus in our apps and we take care of client requirements which are challenging both in terms of design and functionality.
Iam an avid blogger as well, reading and writing about technology, good design and any insights or experiences that I gain.

  • aseemagarwal.in/?k1=portfolio
  • github.com/agaase
  • medium.com/@designalysed

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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