Recently I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Future of Web Apps conference in London. With my main area of work being Web Design as opposed to Web Development I was quite concerned that a lot of the lectures would be a little too "techy" for me, but this was not the case at all. In fact the majority of the lectures were of a lot of interest to me and my areas of interest. the only overall complaint I would have is the fact that a lot of the lectures centred around startup apps, but being fair I suspect that the majority of the people there would of been for that specific reason.

From reviewing the online programme before attending the lecture i noticed that one of the speakers was a guy called Daniel Burka, who i have followed with interest for a while on his blog DeltaTangoZebra. The listed lecture was called "Design For Web Apps vs Design For The Web" which to me was the most interesting and exciting listed lecture.

For people that don’t know Daniel Burka is the creative director at Digg and is one of the co-founders of Pownce. He is also one of the founder of the Canadian web development company SilverOrange where he has worked on various projects including the branding and user interface for Mozilla.

When Daniel appeared on the stage following his introduction from the chair Simon Wilson, the following title illuminated the presentation screen "Interpreting Feedback", which obviously wasn’t what i expected from reading the conference programme. A little hesitate and to a certain level of disappointment by the prospect of this lecture i listened with an air of caution. To my surprise this turned out to be the most interesting and probably useful lecture to feature during the 2 day conference.

I have a embedded the original lecture below, which does include sound for you to watch/listen to but be warned it is about 30 minutes long but is definitely worth watching. To summarise, i have listed some of the key points which i took away from the lecture:

• Feedback is generally seen as either "good" or "bad" it is more than that.
• Changing anything means that patterns get disrupted whether that be for a customer or internally, hence implications arise.
• So the question is whether the change is really worth it and how do you go about making that decision:
  1. Rely on your previous feedback.
  2. Know your community and stay in touch with them.
  3. Think about areas which could cause friction.
  4. Focus and usability study’s allow to predict reactions.
  5. Decide on how you measure the success.
• So how do you react to the feedback which is given:
  1. Don’t have a knee jerk reaction something.
  2. Identify themes and trends that might be appearing.
  3. Engage your community talk to them about the issues which they have.
  4. Iterate, integrate, iterate
• Expect the unexpected.
• Always make time for testing and focus groups it will dividend down the line.
• Never react immediately.
• You can never please everybody so don’t even try to!

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.