Web Design Day follow up

This weekend I gave my first presentation. It was in front of 100 awesome people at the Pittsburgh Web Design Day. I learned a lot from the other presenters. Both their delivery and content was superior to mine. I have a long way to go, but I’m very excited to finally have my foot in the door, as it were.

My talk went well enough. I can’t complain. I should have been far more prepared. Rehearsal is important, that is an understatement. My slides are on Slide Share, and my talk is on Speaker Rate. So if you saw this talk, please, please give me some feedback! I want to know how you liked it and how to improve it.

What The Wireframe?

This is my presentation, which is being featured on the Slide Share home page. Neat!

Attendees were awesome

I learned a ton from the attendees too. They were smart and friendly, and made me feel right at home! I was asked a very perplexing question by a nice guy named Joe. He asked me, and I’m paraphrasing, “What do we do if our designers don’t use paper wireframes?” He’s in a tough spot. He’s a front-end developer, and he works with designers who pass their PSD wireframes over a wall for him to slice up and put in to code. The designers are set on their designs, which is okay for the most part, but the problem becomes: what if the concept that the wireframe proposes is wrong? How can they work together to create a better product, instead of being at odds with each other? It’s a very curious situation, and I’ll be chewing on it for a while.

One thing we thought of, was that he could go to the designer and propose they work together in making some collaborative wireframes. A white board session might be ideal, but I suggested that Joe should wireframe the interface on paper, and show the PSD maker. I hope it works out for you Joe! If you’re reading this, shoot me an email, I’d love to follow up with you.

Thank you!

If you were there, thank you so much. Without you this event wouldn’t have been as great. I’m thrilled to have been invited to Web Design Day, and huge thank you goes out to Jason Head, who organized it. That was a lot of work, and totally worth it. On the scale of awesome events, this one is at the top. It was great to meet so many enthusiastic people. This was an event I’ll never forget!