Event: UIUC Annual Webmaster Forum

by April 8, 2009

UIUC 2009On Wednesday, April 22, 2009 I'll be giving a keynote presentation on Designing for Today’s Web and breakout session on Modern Web Form Design at the 2009 10th Annual Webmaster Forum at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.


This theme of this year's Webmaster Forum is Growing Your Web and features a plethora of practical breakout sessions, the annual Cool Website Awards, and the proverbial free lunch.

Keynote Presentation

What does the growth of search, social applications, rich interactions, and participatory culture really mean for the design of Web applications? What behaviors do team building online experiences need to address that they didn't before? Luke Wroblewski addresses these questions and more with an overview of important online trends and their impact on the design of Web services and products.

In this talk, Luke will dissect several important trends on the Web and their impact on the design of Web-based services and products. In particular: the trend from locomotion to manipulation and conversation (how to deal with crowded shelf space and purely digital services); the trend from sites to content experiences (how do we design when search, content aggregators, and display surfaces rule the Web); the trend from page-level interactions to micro-interactions (how can we explain available actions and their state); the move from only webmasters making content to everyone making content (what does this do to creative control). Addressing these trends is at the core of designing for today’s Web.

Breakout Session

The Web has been transformed by the recent proliferation of rich interactions and social applications. But the workhorses of the online world, Web forms, have been slow to evolve with these changes. As brokers of crucial online interactions like e-commerce checkout and registration, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. As a result, Web form design matters. But web forms aren't keeping up.

Building on topics in his top-selling book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, Luke Wroblewski will walk you through the latest applications of rich Web form interactions (made possible by dynamic technologies like Ajax) including: flexible inputs, dynamic help systems, inline validation, selection dependent inputs, and more. He'll also outline how gradual engagement approaches to form design can create compelling new user experiences for a wide variety of Web applications and services. Learn how these modern approaches to Web form design can enhance your Web apps.

Hope to see some of you there.