What I Learned at Web Unleashed

Lunch n' Learn Shift Health

Created by Emily Porta

Talks I Attended*:

• SVG: The DOM for Graphics
• Responsive Typography
• Buiding Mobile Web Apps that Don't Suck
• Integrating User Experience and Agile
• Other Miscellaneous Stuff I Learned

Web Unleashed

Had a great time, met new people, learned a lot of new things, new concepts to look in to

Presentation slides from the conference

SVG: The DOM for Graphics: Tasveer Singh

SVG - XML-based scalable vector graphics, easy to use, used when you want an image that scales nicely, can animate and style paths separately, that's all I knew.

Discussed ways of optimizing svgs, the various ways to implement them, and making them accessible

Unfortunately the rest: kind of gimmicky

Responsive Typography: Jason Pamental

Web typography is everything we know about type PLUS it's own special considerations (dynamic text, different viewport sizes, etc.)

Typography is important because words have meaning but letters have emotion. Can make or break brand.

Responsive Type (cont.)

There are so many things we don't know when we choose web type:

• Device size
• Device capabilities
• Depth of focus/concurrent activities
• Purpose of visit. Example: our new website's blog.

But important: a font can carry a brand, esp. in responsive design. Worth spending time on.

Responsive Type (cont.)

The "Four P's":

1. Performance: use only what you need
2. Progressive: use fallbacks for web fonts that are also actually good
3. Proportion: small canvas requires subtle proportions. Extremely detailed scale for this
4. Polish: utilize open type features, follow proportion, get rid of widows/orphans, etc.

Buiding Mobile Web Apps that Don't Suck: Frédéric Harper

Mostly pretty standard stuff (eg. use native image resolution, use the right image format and optimize images/sprites, avoid plugins, don't always need a framework or library).

Sweet Google Dev tool tho: developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Integrating User Experience and Agile: Bermon Painter

The problem: design can't be time-boxed very well, conflicts with scrum-style agile framework. Two-three week sprints might not be enough time for design work, not enough time to experiment and improve work.

Integrating UX+Agile (cont.)

Three ways we can try to solve this:

1. Staggered sprints: what they sound like
2. Integrated sprints: what we do now
3. Design + development sprints: interesting alternative

Design and Development Sprints

Developers sprint like normal, two week sprint. But add on to it a preliminary design sprint. Everyone works together on UX-related work, everyone knows goals (who clients are and what they want).

Then designers support devs during their sprint. This design time is not time-boxed. Can be long or short depending on complexity of design problem.

Design + Dev Sprints (cont.)

Interesting suggested must-haves:

1. Usability testing one day for each week of development
2. Do not add features outside of the sprint, need a strong product owner/scrum master
3. Utilize the backlog: the best way to say no to new features as you can see things get pushed back
4. Improve the retrospective: assign people to make sure things improve

Other Things I Learned

Gulp: faster with less configuration. Better: multi-browser auto-refresh (browsersync, grunt or gulp)

Firebase: backend as a service

D3.js, what goes in to it: TL;DR holy theres a lot going on in a graph but you can do anything.

THE END

Emily Porta

Shift Health, October 30 2014