Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
Designer Content at The Ajax Experience?
Category: The Ajax Experience
As you know, we’re hosting the next Ajax Experience conference in Boston on October 23-25 of this year. As we wade through potential speakers and talks, a recurring question we have is how much of the content should be “design” (i.e., user experience) content and how much should be “tech” content. Last year, only 6% of attendees identified themselves as “designers”, but then again, many (if not most) of us who are primarily developers find ourselves doing a lot of design work.
So, what do you think? Would you like to see a lot of design-related content at the next show, or would you prefer to keep it more developer-focused (i.e., toolkits, frameworks, etc.)? Please send your feedback to us either via ajaxians@ajaxian.com or comment on this entry.
Thanks!
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There should definitely be some usability content — the fact that only 6% were designers shows that some focus on design would be extremely useful for attendees, especially since they themselves are doing the design work.
In developing Ajax applications, it is very important to take the user experience into consideration. There is ample opportunity for people to do things poorly.
This is my official vote for more user experience/usability content. As was said above, Ajax gives developers plenty of opportunity to do things poorly, let’s get some of these problems out of the way before they get to far out of control.
Well, Ajax or non-Ajax…at least it should work as it should! Now, rating posts results in an error…both IE and FF.
…”It’s Ajax not AJAX, stupid!”…
Well, it’s not working at all…no matter how you spell it…STUPID!
Hey Ned,
I’m using FF on the Mac; works fine. What’s your platform?
Ben
As a developer, I think user experience is essential, so I’d like to see more of that at the conference.
User experience and design is as important to Ajax as the frameworks and tools. Also, if only 6% of the attendees consider them self designers, then the more they learn about design the better.
Big ups on design — definitely shoot for at least 30-40% discussion of that. For that matter, my ideal conference wouldn’t focus exclusively on the transport mechanisms (or techniques employing them) themselves, but also on general DHTML techniques that have nothing to do with Ajax per se. IMHO.
Erik: That’s one of the points we made at last year’s show — Ajax == DHTML, get over it. We had a lot of “DHTML” content.
I’d vote for 30% – even for developers who don’t focus on traditional design, we all have to do a bit of both, and it would be great to go and get schooled on the latest and greatest techniques.
Lindesy’s almost right.
32.7% is the right proportion, definitely, definitely…
I just think about the recent comments on PHPClasses and… sure, one can be a great programmer but really need a helping hand with design stuff. And a lot of programmers end doing the design anyway…
So, yes, go ahead. More designer content
[...] Should there be designer content at the Ajax Experience conference? Chime in! [...]
IMO, the separation between design and development as regards web stuff is arbitrary and artificial. Design is not something that should be slapped on late in the game, especially where there’s functionality involved — we’re not talking about magazine spreads here. It’s integral to the process.
So, I say, pump up the design.
Ben, glad to hear it. Since I wasn’t there, I couldn’t have known that. Hopefully I can go to this year’s (I live in Boston) and get an opportunity to hear some good talks. As for Ajax == DHTML, fine, whatever, seems like despite what was declared at last year’s conference, everyone loves to debate this terminology. I didn’t mean to bring up semantics but rather support that it would be good to see the design stuff, whatever you want to call it.
I think it should be 30/70 also design/dev i think most of the people involved are more interested in the technology, but i could be off.
Leggo ed imparo sul vostro luogo. grazie!