Webstock day 1

Today was the first day of Webstock and it lived up to my high expectations.

Without doubt, my favourite was the “fireside chat” that TradeMe’s Sam Morgan had with Rowan Simpson. Sam is such a straight-up, endearing person that even at the end of a mind-numbing day, the audience listened raptly to every word he said. With his boy-next-door looks and sharp insights, he made everyone believe that his success was our success.

Once the video is posted on the Webstock website, I’ll provide a link to it and strongly recommend watching it.

Second best for me was Peter Morville on “Ambient Findability and the Future of Search.” I took away two key insights:

- In common language, when people now say “usability” they mean “quality.” He represented this with an interesting honeycomb that had characteristics such as credibility, accessibility, desirability, etc. around the central characteristic of valuable.

- He talked about the concept of pace layering. When applied to a website or many other examples, it provides an interesting framework of thinking of segmentation into layers, each of which changes at a different pace.

There were several other presentations that were really good:

- Nat Torkington talking about Design for the Future where he looked at major trends today with interesting insights from the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale.

- Molly Holzschlag in Why Web Standards Aren’t about HTML 5, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, W3C and IE and how compliance with a standard doesn’t equate to good quality.

- Cal Henderson from Flickr in Building Big on the Web about the tools to build large scale web applications.

- Jason Santa Maria on Good Design Ain’t Easy with very good examples of how principles and evaluation of print designs don’t translate into good web design.

The others that I attended were OK- Rachel McAlpine, Kelly Goto and Michael Lopp.

All in all, a long but productive day.