Great first day of the Web Conference at Penn State 2013.
After b-fast at the Penn Stater, we moved to the day 1 keynote by
Cindy Li from Flickr on Inclusive Design. Cindy started by mentioning that her mother has macular degeneration. This brought a personal element to her talk. She went on to talk about sites that needed work and how they could be improved. During this part of the talk she highlighted tools that helped in testing sites, like
Xscope,
Nocturne,
Braille Institute, and
Color Contrast Analyzer to name a few.
One of the most memorable parts of her talk were a few exercises where she asked us to close our eyes and hear how a screen reader worked on a few sites. Then we were asked to watch the experience. It was amazing how poorly the sites had been set for accessibility. Just a reminder of how so many individuals are affected by items that many take for granted.
She also highlighted a few sights that were well done. She mentioned that we should make our designs welcoming. Users remember when it makes them uncomfortable.
Went to several sessions in the AM and PM that I really enjoyed.
- Electoral map that allowed students to go back to 1960
- Election games – 11 games & a way for teachers to create their own games. Impact Games made the interface while the 11 games were created by those at Rand McNally
- Community – which needed special consideration because of the audience, high school students. Classes had the opportunity to wall of their classes from the public.
Kris made some important points about game creation and gamification and differentiating between the two. He also mentioned how competition increases engagement at least in the short term.
Kris went on to talk about things that went wrong:
- Short development time (only 3 months)
- Abbreviated marketing research
On the positive side:
- The game was a solid platform on several devices that included the transition from flash to html5
- Tools in the game were easy to use with little need for support
- 2400 classrooms created – 20,000 to 25,000 Individual users, a lot of positive feedback
Another session that I liked was about our users. The speakers highlighted Millennials. I felt like much of what they highlighted could be good for all users. We spend so much time thinking about making everything so useful for a large group when we need to think about personalizing the experience. We really need to do little with our systems. We need to think about how our systems are accessed and integrate with one another.
The last session that I’ll comment on was about leveraging social media for maximizing student engagement by
Andrew Smyk. Andrew handled technical difficulties very well. He made some solid points about being strategic with the use of mobile. He also mentioned that accessibility of content via mobile is much more important than the attractiveness of materials and content.
Nice conversation at lunch with people from outside and inside Penn State. Great day and looking forward to more tomorrow.
