On his first day in office, President Obama directed the United States’ first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, to develop a more open and transparent government. Chopra was tasked with the massive challenge of ushering in a new era of collaboration with the private sector, one which focused on creating the jobs and industries of the future.

In this plenary talk, Aneesh will detail how open government and open access to information can improve our system of higher education and our democracy while fueling innovation for the future.

Who knew links could be so interesting? Links are the fabric of a web site, holding all the pages together. They are the molecular bonds of a great web experience.

When we design links poorly, it’s painful for our users. When we design them well, it focuses the user completing their objective in a delightful manner. Getting the link design right is critical to a great web site.

Yet, we never talk about what makes great links great and what makes poor links poor. Until now.

Join Jared M. Spool as he shares his research with a ton of funny, interesting, and thoughtful examples and rules that reveal the secret lives that our sites’ links are living. You’ll learn the good and the bad from university web sites, news providers, e-commerce sites, and many more.

“What do you do?” has become the standard opening line for getting to know someone. But if you were asked, “Why do you do what you do?” how would you answer? We are too narrowly focused on developing solutions for problems that we don’t understand, don’t care about, or worst of all, don’t actually exist. Life is too short to waste our time expertly creating something that matters to no one. Learn to find your “why.”

Discover interviewing techniques that build greater empathy with your users. Learn how to synthesize techniques to uncover underlying inefficiencies in your designs and expose user frustrations. What you learn from your users will be a source of continuous inspiration and help shape a long-term vision for your projects.

In this half day workshop, you’ll join Derek Featherstone as he helps you explore the true meaning of accessibility for the modern web. We’ll look at how the long-established principles of progressive enhancement help ensure a baseline level of functionality in your sites and applications and how you can make them shine to create truly useful experiences. Add to that a mix of modern technology such as CSS3, HTML5, ARIA and JavaScript for websites that work for everyone, including people with disabilities.

You’ll learn:

• How to analyze your designs and code to identify accessibility gaps
• How to build sites and applications that communicate their message and functionality effectively to people using them
• New methods for implementing best practice accessibility for forms
• The impact of the design choices we make on people using assistive technology including screen readers, magnifiers, voice recognition software, braille displays and custom displays more.

This workshop is filled with practical advice and guidance on what you need to do right now to make your applications more accessible for now and the future.

You’re a designer/developer, not a wordsmith. But on a small team with limited resources you’re probably the one writing much of the content your users interact with every day. Let Stephanie Hay show you the four characteristics of compelling content that will inspire your users to take action. She’ll arm you with practical techniques you can use to write more effective, engaging copy that makes people do something—like sign up, donate, or just come back for more.

There is nothing hotter in the world of web development than creating mobile websites and applications and without a doubt one of the hottest libraries available to help you produce professional looking mobile sites is jQuery Mobile.

This hour long session will go from 0 to 60 to get you up to speed on how to use jQuery Mobile to create a website without writing a single line of JavaScript. Then we’ll take a breath and dive in just a little deeper so that you will understand how to build richer interactions that will allow your mobile applications to store and retrieve data from a web server as well as store data locally on the mobile device.

Along the way we’ll toss in healthy chunks of HTML5 to take advantage of many of the features that mobile browsers use today. Add in some cool desktop simulators (with their pitfalls and pluses) and you’ll be building mobile websites in no time.

Want a more in-depth look at jQuery? Then consider Jay Blanchard’s half-day workshop: Souping Up Your Sites With jQuery.

Are you ready to open the hood and start wrenching away as you learn to turbo-charge your websites and applications? Get down the track fast using one of the most popular JavaScript libraries available today – jQuery.

We’ll go beyond the basics and learn how to combine the CSS selectors you’ve always known (and some you didn’t) and loved with jQuery’s methods and functions to add horsepower to your website projects. Replace images when a mouse hovers over them? No sweat. Load new content into a page with just a click? It’s a breeze. Creating an animated Twitter feed? Piece of cake! We’ll even discuss how to do all of this without even having to touch your existing markup.

Then we’ll go one step further and go hand’s on to learn how to fool-proof your AJAX so that you can grab HTML, text and JSON data for use in your websites and applications. We’ll pull back the curtain and demystify AJAX calls with jQuery and dive into how to use jQuery’s shortcut methods to get you to the finish line quicker. By the time the session is over you’ll have a number of new jQuery tools and ideas in your toolbox that you can use right away.

Bring your laptop and favorite code editor to this session, but don’t worry about being left behind. “Pre-baked” code samples will be provided in advanced so you can follow along at your own pace.

Interested in jQuery Mobile? Then check out Jay Blanchard’s hour-long session: Going Mobile with jQuery.

Design is so much more than simply “making things look pretty.” To combat that common oversimplification, designers often shroud their work in a mysterious cloud of specialized tools and jargon. This mystery gives designers of every sort (creative, UX, et al) a false perception of value, uniqueness and control. In reality, this mystery drives divisions between designers and their teams. Designers need to stop looking at their own work in terms of “trade secrets” and start opening up about their process. Through this transparency, the cloud lifts as the true value of Design becomes clear and designers are revealed to be indispensable.

In this session you will learn:

• Why Design mysteries make life as a designer harder
• How revealing your design secrets leads to more productive, highly collaborative teams
• How transparency makes you more valuable to your organization
• 5 tactics for you to immediately begin demystifying Design

Want to hear more about how to optimize the User Experience process from Jeff Gothelf? Then consider his half-day workshop on Lean UX.

The days of heavy specifications and documentation are numbered. The new currency of web and software development is shared understanding within nimble, small, dedicated teams. In this workshop, Jeff Gothelf will teach you the collaborative, cross-functional ideals behind Lean UX and demonstrate the power of highly cooperative teams.

Through several hands-on exercises that demonstrate how people work together to build a shared understanding, you will learn to:

• Reframe requirements as assumptions
• Create experiments to validate those assumptions
• Minimize the waste in your UX activities
• Collaboratively solve tough design challenges as a team

This workshop is for web designers (interaction, visual, etc) and the product managers and developers who work with them. You’ll take away practical skills to encourage greater team collaboration, rapid design tactics, shorter feedback loops and increased product validity all while increasing team productivity, efficiency and camaraderie.

Interested in optimizing your design process, but not sure you want to spend half a day on Lean UX? Then check out Jeff Gothelf’s hour-long session, Demystifying Design.

Good typography is good web design. Only having a fist-full of fonts to choose from is no longer an excuse for boring typography; webfonts allow us to choose from a vast and ever growing selection of typefaces to create designs that speak to our audiences in a definitive voice. But, just as web typography takes off,  the rise of mobile devices is changing the way we think about text on the screen. Responsive design is a popular technique, ensuring optimization of content presentation across a variety of media. In this session, Jason Cranford Teague will show you how to apply the techniques of fluid design to typography allowing you to tailor your design to the device it is being presented in.

What you will learn:

• How to use webfonts across multiple devices.
• Font rendering issues between computer screens, tablets, and smart phones.
• Scaling typography for the device.
• The pros and cons of using fonts instead of images for iconography.
• Choosing the best font combinations.

Want an in-depth exploration of responsive design? Then check out Jason Cranford Teague’s half-day workshop: Responsive First – Building Websites that Scale.

The rise of mobile devices has meant that audiences are increasingly seeing our designs on smaller and smaller screens. A multi-screen strategy is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. The most successful way to do this is using a responsive design methodology that allows you to separate content from design. But, Designers seem to be faced with a conundrum: keep designing for a dwindling audience and scale down or go “mobile first’ and scale up. I think there is a better way, but it may require rethinking the way we design.

In this three-hour workshop, Jason Cranford Teague will lead you through the ins and outs of responsive design techniques and how to use dynamic tools to quickly prototype responsive designs, leaving paper planning behind. Bring a laptop because you may get your hands a bit dirty with the code, but, don’t worry, Jason will be there to help.

• Understanding a multi-screen strategy.
• How responsive design works.
• Planning a responsive design using lean Ux.
• Developing a responsive design.
• Advanced techniques for typography and images.

Interested in responsive design techniques but not sure you want to spend half a day on it? Then you might want to check out Jason Cranford Teague’s hour-long session: Responsive Web Typography.