AEA Boston: Day One in Review
26 Mar 2007 
in mid-afternoon 
Matt Winckler
Here’s a quick rundown of the presentations at AEA Boston for Monday. The goal is to provide a few-sentence summary of each talk, followed by my quick rating on a scale of 1 to 10, followed again by my brief explanation of the rating.
- Eric Meyer: “Secrets of the CSS Jedi”
- CSS doesn’t care how you think an element should be used. Think outside the box. Use elements in unusual ways to keep the site accessible. 8/10: Most of what he said I’d already read elsewhere, but it was still inspiring to hear. He made an awe-inspiring bar graph out of a simple table, using nothing but CSS.
- Jeffrey Zeldman: “Writing the User Interface”
- All copy is a brand opportunity. Every word on the site makes an impression about your brand. Copy is cheap and easy to fix. 10/10: Every part of the writer in me loved this presentation. He provided good, mostly-straightforward guidelines.
- Jason Santa Maria: “How to Redesign Your Way Out of a Paper Bag.”
- Surround yourself with a creative environment. Sweat the details. Work iteratively. The details of presentation matters - use the right kind of quotes. (No dumb quotes! No primes!). 6/10: It was tougher to follow this presentation and come up with some overarching point. He did, however, bring my attention to a very important Flickr group.
- Steve Krug: “The Web Usability Diet.”
- Don’t make me think. Clarity trumps everything. Clarity is not easy. Conduct bare-bones user tests, iteratively. User testing is easy and it always works. There is no excuse not to do it. 10/10: This was easily the best presentation of the day. It was directly applicable, it was encouraging, and Steve is an excellent and entertaining presenter.
- Andrew Kirkpatrick: “Beyond Basic Access”
- Accessibility is not simple. Accessibility requires that we better understand user needs and get a more sophisticated view of the web. Single developers probably cannot keep up - use a toolkit such as Yahoo! UI or Dojo. 4/10: Andrew failed to make accessibility interesting. (In fairness, that’s not an easy job.) Additionally, he works for Adobe, who sponsored the conference - and his talk stood out so much from the others that it felt like an obligatory move to pacify the sponsor rather than a relevant talk, despite the fact that he never pitched Adobe products. The audience was perceptibly bored.
- Dan Cederholm: “Interface Design Juggling”
- Colors. Typography. Favicons. Microformats. Designing interfaces is like juggling. There’s no reason not to use microformats. The best demo site ever. 9/10: He could have gotten up in front of the audience, uttered the word “ToupeePal”, and sat back down, and it still would have been a good presentation. As it is, I am now enlightened about microformats, colors, and typography, all of which are good things.
After the conference was an “opening night party” sponsored by MediaTemple, held at 33 Restaurant. I went. I asked if they had anything dark in the way of beer. The bartender gave me a Samuel Adams Boston Lager. *sigh* This, so far, has been quite typical. “Dark beer” to Bostonians seems to mean “Guinness” and Sam Adams lager. It’s more than a little depressing, when you think about it. I had dinner at Chili’s, and for lack of dark beer, I had a raspberry frozen margarita. I didn’t even finish it.
And now I’m headed back to my room. I’ve been writing these last notes in the public areas on the fourth floor, since to get Internet access in my room would mean spending $10 per day, whereas here, the wifi is free. Besides, who wants Internet when there’s a Law & Order marathon on TV?
[...] Pelennor Fields Day One [...]