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Higher Education Web Symposium

A conference focused on the unique challenges of web design and development in academia

July 15-16, 2008
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA

Home > Agenda

Day 0 (Monday, July 14)

Noon-4pm
Check-in and Pick-up Conference Materials
Noon-4pm
Tours of Historic Philadelphia (for out of town guests)
Email and work (for local attendees)
6:30pm-8:30pm
Welcome Reception- sponsored by Philly CHI
World Café Live : 3025 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Day 1 (Tuesday, July 15)

8am-4pm
Check-in and Pick-up Conference Materials
8am-9am
Coffee, Soda, and milling about waiting for workshops to start
9am-Noon
Full Day Workshops (part one):
Noon-1:30pm
Lunch on your own
1:30pm-4:30pm
Full Day Workshops (part two): Second half of morning session

Day 2 (Wednesday, July 16)

8am-Noon
Check-in and Pick-up Conference Materials
8am-9am
Coffee, Soda, chatting with people you met on Day 1
9am-10:15am
Keynote Address: Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
10:15am-10:30am
Break
10:30am-Noon
90 minute presentations:
Day 1 Workshops repeated as short presentations. Get a chance to see something you didn’t see on Day 1.
Noon-1:30pm
Lunch on your own
1:30pm-3pm
90 minute presentations:
3pm-3:15pm
Break
3:15pm-4:45pm
90 minute presentations:

Workshop & Presentation Details

Keynote Address: Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget: Jared Spool

We all want to make our designs be the best they could be. We'd like to eliminate all the frustration that our users experience and have them talking about how delightful the experience is. Getting everyone to agree on that is easy.

What's more difficult is getting approval to spend money or take the time necessary to make it happen. Hiring consultants, renting expensive lab equipment, and taking months to analyze results are not in the cards for most teams.

Fortunately, they aren't the only option for cooking up a great experience. There are very inexpensive and fast techniques and tricks that teams can use that will help them see great improvements to their designs.

In this presentation, Jared will share these "fast-food budget" techniques, showing you cost and time effective methods for extracting the core benefits of any user experience design process. You'll learn simple ways to gather information about your users, the tasks they are doing with your designs, and how well the designs meet their needs. In turn, you can use this information as you continue to make changes, thereby making each new release that much more delightful.

Web Form Design Best Practices: Luke Wroblewski

In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions.

In his full-day workshop, Luke Wroblewski, author of the upcoming book, Web Form Design Best Practices, will walk you through design considerations and best practices of form design culled from international site-tracking, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over eleven years of designing Web applications. He'll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not.

Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior. The workshop is structured to provide attendees with an understanding of the right "best" practices for their specific context, so they can quickly go from the quintessential design answer of "it depends" (on the business goals, user needs, and context of your forms) to actionable solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again.


CSS Tips & Techniques: Eric Meyer & Stephanie Sullivan

What's the best way to structure a list of faculty members' names and phone numbers? How should you lay out a multi-column page full of boxes? How can you improve the structure, accessibility, and layout of your forms? Is the love of classes the path to salvation or the root of all evil?

It’s simple enough to learn the nuts and bolts of XHTML and CSS. But it’s much more of a challenge knowing how to assemble a forward-looking site that incorporates all of the essential design best practices.

In this highly interactive seminar, CSS experts, Eric Meyer and Stephanie Sullivan, will take examples from current University of Pennsylvania web sites and rework the markup and CSS to illustrate core concepts and techniques in web design and development. They’ll demonstrate these techniques by editing the XHTML and CSS live during the seminar and showing you the resulting changes in a web browser. Audience participation will be greatly encouraged, and indeed required!


AJAX & Web 2.0: Steve Mulder & Ricardo LaRosa

How do your online interactions with users change in the world of Web 2.0? When and how do you design rich interfaces that satisfy user needs and create engaging online experiences?

Web 2.0, for all the marketing hype, represents a significant shift in how consumers use the Web and how organizations leverage the online channel. In this interactive seminar, Steve Mulder will give you a hands-on tour through the fundamental philosophies behind Web 2.0, revealing what Web 2.0 really is, what’s happening across the Web, what’s working, and what opportunities might be right for you.

In this seminar, you’ll learn about all of the buzzwords: ratings and reviews, tags, wikis, social networking, RSS, open APIs, widgets, Second Life, and more. Steve will focus most of the session on the new rich interface possibilities with Flash and Ajax. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll learn when rich interfaces are most effective and what challenges they can cause. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and see what Web 2.0 can mean for your organization.


Usability Testing: Observing Users, Informing Design: Dana Chisnell

How usable are your university or department websites? Can your users accomplish their goals? Are your site’s worth improving?

In this workshop, Dana Chisnell, co-author of the newly revised Handbook of Usability Testing, will show you why usability testing is one of the best tools you’ve got for identifying – and avoiding -- the key problems that frustrate your users. It’s an invaluable technique for measuring how unusable something is: how many problems people have using a design, what the problems are, and why.

Through demonstrations, hands-on exercises, and discussions, you will learn how to use formal and informal usability testing to make design decisions based on data rather than opinions. By incorporating usability testing throughout an iterative design process, it’s possible to make designs that are useful, usable, and delightful. You’ll learn the entire testing process from soup to nuts. You’ll learn how to plan the test, recruit the participants, organize the testing scenarios, conduct the sessions, analyze the data, and integrate what you’ve learned back into your designs.


Adopting a Framework into your Organization: Charles Harvey & Chris Hyzer

This session highlights the lessons learned when integrating a framework into an organization’s IT structure. The presenters will discuss the trade-offs involved, the various design decisions and the impact on team-oriented development. The presenters will also provide strategies on how programmers and designers can effectively work together by using a framework.


Developing Secure Web Applications: Darian Patrick

University web applications process and store large amounts of sensitive information and act as proxies to critical internal systems. Care must be taken during development to ensure the integrity and security of those systems and information. Darian Patrick will discuss the Open Web Application Security Project's Top 10 web vulnerabilities, covering cross-site scripting (XSS), injection attacks, information leakage, and session management, among other topics. This talk will feature live demonstration of attacks and how to protect against them.


How to Engage Today’s Students: Portals, Instructional Technology & Learning Simulations: Jason Lehman, Erin Wyher & Becky Sweger

In this session, members of Wharton's Learning Lab, Student Services, and Executive Education teams will compare and contrast approaches for using web technology to engage students who have grown up online and who have changing expectations of web applications. We will also discuss the best ways to get student feedback when developing websites for the Facebook generation. Finally, there will be an open conversation about strategies that other attendees use to engage students on the web.


Adopting Content Management Systems (Panel Discussion)

This open panel discussion will address the pros and cons of Content Management Systems such as Adobe Contribute, Drupal and others. Moderated by Steve Minicola, Senior Web Editor for the Office of University Communications, the discussion will prompt participation by the attendees in effort to learn more about what each product can provide to the administrator and the end user.

Included in the discussion: advantages of a CMS over not, considerations in picking a CMS, effective training techniques, establishing methods of communication, client buy-in, and sources of frustration with each product. While these topics give a flavor of the panel, the audience will be able to ask questions and prompt discussion amongst the panelists.

Panelists include:


Publish or Perish: How Documentation Helps Usability Thrive: Jennifer Yuan

Documentation of the analysis and recommendations arising from your usability work is important in any setting, but it can be crucial in higher ed environments where “publish or perish” rules the day. Come hear about how documentation can help to clearly communicate usability findings, and receive an overview of useful tools such as concept maps, content inventories, flow diagrams, and wireframes.


Search Engine Optimization for Internal & External Engines: David Siedell

Why aren’t I ranked higher in Google? How do I get ranked higher? Before you pick up the phone and call that SEO company make sure you are doing all you can to be “spider friendly” with your site design, code and strategy.

In this session we will discuss the current best practices for structure, coding and layout of your site and pages to maximize their search potential. We will also review some tools to help you measure your effectiveness as well as how to keep aware of changes to various search algorithms.

Finally, we will talk about where the search industry is headed and how to prepare for the increased need to index nontraditional sites as well as rich media.


HOWTO: Drupal Demonstration: Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg & Jody Hamilton

Drupal is an open-source CMS / web framework which features a powerful API, thousands of modules, and a thriving and quickly growing developer community. Some of the features that make Drupal popular and widely adopted will be demonstrated, including its query-building interface ('Views'), custom content type creation ('CCK') and page layout ('Panels') modules. We will take a look at the Drupal API hook system and theme override system, and showcase a sampling of Drupal's module functionality, including its ability to integrate with other systems such as 3rd party multimedia sites, social networking sites, and web services such as Amazon as well as its ability to act as an e-commerce solution. We will also wax poetic on the future of Drupal, including its testing framework and the coming "semantic web" RDFs (i.e. super-powered feeds and cross-site querying).


Design in a Web 2.0 World: Beyond Glossy & Gradients: Patrick Haney

The term “Web 2.0” is thrown around like any popular buzzword these days, but what does it really mean? During this presentation, Patrick Haney, a user interface designer at Harvard University, will discuss the true meaning of the popular term and how the social aspect of today’s web does not directly relate to the design style of websites.

In this session, Patrick will present the concepts and philosophy behind the Web 2.0 world and show how designers can do without gradients, big buttons and glossy logos and still achieve a beautiful website using more appropriate design elements.


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