Tags: presentations

I’ve been to a lot of events and I’ve seen a lot of talks. I find that, even after all this time, I always get something out of every presentation I see. Kudos to anyone who’s got the guts to get up on stage and share their thoughts.

But there are some talks that are genuinely special. When they come along, it’s a real privilege to be in the room. Wilson’s talk, When We Build was one of those moments. There are some others that weren’t recorded, but will always stay with me.

Earlier this year, I had the great honour of opening the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I definitely felt a lot of pressure, and I did my utmost to set the scene for the day. The final talk of the day was delivered by my good friend Ethan. He took it to another level.

Like I said at the time:

Look, I could gush over how good Ethan’s talk was, or try to summarise it, but there’s really no point. I’ll just say that I felt the same sense of being present at something genuinely important that I felt when I was in the room for his original responsive web design talk at An Event Apart back in 2010. When the video is released, you really must watch it.

Well, the video has been released and you really must watch it. Don’t multitask. Don’t fast forward. Set aside some time and space, and then take it all in.

The subject matter, the narrative structure, the delivery, and the message come together in a unique way.

If, having watched the presentation, you want to dive deeper into any of Ethan’s references, check out the reading list that accompanies the talk.

I mentioned that I felt under pressure to deliver a good opener for New Adventures. I know that Ethan was really feeling the pressure too. He needn’t have worried. He delivered one of the best conference talks I’ve ever seen.

Thank you, Ethan.

An Event Apart Seattle was most excellent. This year, the AEA team are trying something different and making each event three days long. That’s a lot of mindblowing content!

What always fascinates me at events like these is the way that some themes seem to emerge, without any prior collusion between the speakers. This time, I felt that there was a strong thread of giving control directly to users:

Sarah and Margot both touched on this when talking about authenticity in brand messaging.

Margot described this in terms of vulnerability for the brand, but the kind of vulnerability that leads to trust.

Sarah talked about it in terms of respect—respecting the privacy of users, and respecting the way that they want to use your services. Call it compassion, call it empathy, or call it just good business sense, but providing these kind of controls in an interface is an excellent long-term strategy.

In Val’s animation talk, she did a deep dive into prefers-reduced-motion, a media query that deliberately hands control back to the user.

Even in a CSS-heavy talk like Jen’s, she took the time to explain why starting with meaningful markup is so important—it’s because you can’t control how the user will access your content. They may use tools like reader modes, or Pocket, or have web pages read aloud to them. The user has the final say, and rightly so.

In his CSS talk, Eric reminded us that a style sheet is a list of strong suggestions, not instructions.

Beth’s talk was probably the most explicit on the theme of returning control to users. She drew on examples from beyond the world of the web—from architecture, urban planning, and more—to show that the most successful systems are not imposed from the top down, but involve everyone, especially those most marginalised.

And even in my own talk on service workers, I raved about the design pattern of allowing users to save pages offline to read later. Instead of trying to guess what the user wants, give them the means to take control.

I was really encouraged to see this theme emerge. Mind you, when I look at the reality of most web products, it’s easy to get discouraged. Far from providing their users with controls over their own content, Instagram won’t even let their customers have a chronological feed. And Matt recently wrote about how both Twitter and Quora are heading further and further away from giving control to their users in his piece called Optimizing for outrage.

Still, I came away from An Event Apart Seattle with a renewed determination to do my part in giving people more control over the products and services we design and develop.

I spent the first two days of the conference trying to liveblog as much as I could. I find it really focuses my attention, although it’s also quite knackering. I didn’t do too badly; I managed to write cover eleven of the talks (out of the conference’s total of seventeen):

1. Slow Design for an Anxious World by Jeffrey Zeldman
2. Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World by Margot Bloomstein
3. Designing for Personalities by Sarah Parmenter
4. Generation Style by Eric Meyer
5. Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS by Rachel Andrew
6. Designing Intrinsic Layouts by Jen Simmons
7. How to Think Like a Front-End Developer by Chris Coyier
8. From Ideation to Iteration: Design Thinking for Work and for Life by Una Kravets
9. Move Fast and Don’t Break Things by Scott Jehl
10. Mobile Planet by Luke Wroblewski
11. Unsolved Problems by Beth Dean

Right before heading to Geneva to spend the week hacking at CERN, I was in Seattle with a sizable Clearleft contingent to attend Interaction 19, the annual conference put on by the Interaction Design Association.

Ben has rounded up the highlights from my fellow Clearlefties. There are some good talks listed there: John Maeda, Nelly Ben Hayoun, and Jon Bell were thoroughly enjoyable. Some other talks were just okay, and there was one talk, by IXDA president Alok Nandi, that was almost impressive in how rambling and incoherent it was. It was like being in a scene from Silicon Valley. I remember clapping at the end; not out of appreciation, but out of relief.

If truth be told, Interaction 19 had about a day’s worth of really great content …spread out over three days. To be fair, that’s par for the course. When we went to Interaction 17 in New York, the hit/miss ratio was about the same:

There were some really good talks at the event, but alas, the muti-track format made it difficult to see all of them. Continuous partial FOMO was the order of the day.

And as I said at the time:

To be honest, the conference was only part of the motivation for the trip. Spending a week in New York with a gaggle of Clearlefties was its own reward.

So I’m willing to cut Interaction 19 a lot of slack. Even if quite a few of the talks were just so-so, getting to hang with Clearlefties in Seattle during snowmageddon was a lot of fun (and you’ll be pleased to hear that we didn’t even resort to cannibalism to survive).

But while the content of the conference was fair to middling, the organisation of it was a shambles:

Imagine the Fyre Festival but in downtown Seattle in winter. Welcome to @ixdconf. #ixd19

They sold more tickets than there were seats. I ended up watching the first morning’s keynotes being streamed to a screen in a conference room in a different building.

Now, I’ve been at events with keynotes that have overflow rooms—South by Southwest does this. But that’s at a different scale. This is a conference with a known number of attendees, each one of them spending over a thousand dollars to attend. I’m pretty sure that a first-come, first-served policy isn’t the best way of treating those attendees.

Anyway, here’s what I submitted for that round-up of the best talks, but which, for reasons of prudence, was omitted from the final post:

I really enjoyed the keynote by Liz Jackson on inclusive design. I would’ve enjoyed it even more if I could’ve seen it in person. Instead I watched it live-streamed to a meeting room two buildings over because the conference sold more tickets than they had seats for. This was after queueing in the cold for registration. So I feel like I learned a lot from Interaction 19 …about how not to organise a conference.

Still, as Ben notes:

We all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, despite best efforts by the West Coast snow to disrupt the entire city.

I’m going to be back in Seattle in just under two weeks for An Event Apart. Now that’s a conference! It runs like a well-oiled machine, and every talk in its single track has been curated for excellence …with one exception.

I tried do some live-blogging at An Event Apart Seattle. I surprised myself by managing to do all six talks on the first day. I even managed one or two after that, but that was the limit of my stamina. Torre, on the other hand, managed to live-blog every single talk—amazing!

Some of the talks don’t necessarily lend themselves to note-taking—ya kinda had to be there. But some of the the live-blogging I did ended up being surprisingly coherent.

Anyway, I figured it would be good to recap all the ones I managed to do here in one handy list.

1. Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient by Jeffrey Zeldman. I think I managed to document the essence of what Jeffrey was getting at: for many sites, engagement isn’t the right metric to measure—the idea of a Content Performance Quotient is one alternative.
2. Digital Marketing Strategies for the Busy “Web Master” by Sarah Parmenter. The structure of Sarah’s talk lent itself well to live-blogging, but I strongly disagreed with one or two of her suggestions (like encouraging people to install the disgusting abomination that is Facebook Pixel).
3. Scenario-Driven Design Systems by Yesenia Perez-Cruz. This one was hard to live-blog because it was so packed with so many priceless knowledge bombs—an absolutely brilliant presentation, right up my alley!
4. Graduating to Grid by Rachel Andrew. The afternoon sessions, with their emphasis on CSS, were definitely tricky to capture. I didn’t even try to catch most of the code, but I think I managed to get down most of Rachel’s points about learning new CSS.
5. Fit For Purpose: Making Sense of the New CSS by Eric Meyer. There was a fair bit of code in this one, and lots of gasp-inducing demos too, so my account probably doesn’t do it justice.
6. Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed by Jen Simmons. There was no way I could document the demos, but I think I managed to convey the excitement in Jen’s talk.
7. Navigating Team Friction by Lara Hogan. I only managed to do two talks on the second day, but I think they came out the best. Lara’s talk was packed full with great advice, but it was so clearly structured that I think I managed to get most of the main points down.
8. Designing Progressive Web Apps by Jason Grigsby. I had a vested interest in the topic of Jason’s talk so I was scribing like crazy. Apart from a few missing diagrams, I think my notes managed to convey most of Jason’s message.

Of course the one talk I definitely couldn’t live-blog was my own. I’ve documented lists of links relating to the subject matter of my talk, but if you weren’t at An Event Apart Seattle, then the only other chance to see the talk is at An Event Apart Boston in June. That’s the only other time I’m giving it.

I thoroughly enjoyed giving the talk in Seattle, particularly when I treated the audience to a scoop: I announced my new book, Going Offline, during the talk (I had been scheming with Katel at A Book Apart and we co-ordinated the timing to a tee).

An Event Apart Seattle just wrapped. It was a three-day special edition and it was really rather good. Lots of the speakers (myself included) were unveiling brand new talks, so there was a real frisson of excitement.

It was interesting to see repeating, overlapping themes. From a purely technical perspective, three technologies that were front and centre were:

• CSS grid,
• variable fonts, and
• service workers.

From listening to other attendees, the overwhelming message received was “These technologies are here—they’ve arrived.” Now, depending on your mindset, that understanding can be expressed as “Oh shit! These technologies are here!” or “Yay! Finally! These technologies are here!”

My reaction is very firmly the latter. That in itself is an interesting data-point, because (as discussed in my talk) my reaction towards new technological advances isn’t always one of excitement—quite often it’s one of apprehension, even fear.

I’ve been trying to self-analyse to figure out which kinds of technologies trigger which kind of reaction. I don’t have any firm answers yet, but it’s interesting to note that the three technologies mentioned above (CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers) are all additions to the core languages of the web—the materials we use to build the web. Frameworks, libraries, build tools, and other such technologies are more like tools than materials. I tend to get less excited about advances in those areas. Sometimes advances in those areas not only fail to trigger excitement, they make me feel overwhelmed and worried about falling behind.

Since figuring out this split between materials and tools, it has helped me come to terms with my gut emotional reaction to the latest technological advances on the web. I think it’s okay that I don’t get excited about everything. And given the choice, I think maybe it’s healthier to be more excited about advances in the materials—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs—than advances in tooling …although, it is, of course, perfectly possible to get equally excited about both (that’s just not something I seem to be able to do).

Another split I’ve noticed is between technologies that directly benefit users, and technologies that directly benefit developers. I think there was a bit of a meta-thread running through the talks at An Event Apart about CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers: all of those advances allow us developers to accomplish more with less. They’re good for performance, in other words. I get much more nervous about CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries that allow us to accomplish more, but require the user to download the framework or library first. It feels different when something is baked into browsers—support for CSS features, or JavaScript APIs. Then it feels like much more of a win-win situation for users and developers. If anything, the onus is on developers to take the time and do the work and get to grips with these browser-native technologies. I’m okay with that.

Anyway, all of this helps me understand my feelings at the end of An Event Apart Seattle. I’m fired up and eager to make something with CSS grid, variable fonts, and—of course—service workers.

Rachel and Drew are starting a new service called Notist. It’s going to be a place where conference speakers can collate their materials. They’ve also got a blog.

The latest blog post, by Rachel, is called Do I need to write a brand new talk every time?

New presenters often feel that they need to write a brand-new talk for each conference they are invited to. Unless your job is giving presentations, or you are being paid very well for each talk you give, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep this up if you do more than a couple of talks per year.

It’s true. When I first started giving talks, I felt really guilty at the thought of “recycling” a talk I had already given. “Those people have paid money to be here—they deserve a brand new talk”, I thought. But then someone pointed out to me, “Y’know, it’s actually really arrogant to think that anyone would’ve seen any previous talk of yours.” Good point.

I explain it to people like a band touring an album. Lots of work goes into the album, and the tour puts those ideas on display. To expect a band to write a brand new album’s worth of music in between Pittsburgh and Chicago is absurd.

— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) October 30, 2017

Giving the same talk more than once also allows me to put in the extra effort into the talk prep. If I’m going through the hair-tearing-out hell of trying to wrestle a talk into shape, I’m inevitably going to ask, “Why am I putting myself through this‽” If the answer to that question is “So you can give this talk just once”, I’d probably give up in frustration. But if I know that I’ll have an opportunity to present it more than once, improving it each time, then that gives me the encouragement to keep going.

I do occasionally give a one-off specially-commissioned talk, but those are the exceptions. My talk on the A element at CSS Day’s HTML Special was one of those. Same with my dConstruct talk back in 2008. I just gave a new talk on indie web building blocks at Mozilla’s View Source event, but I’d quite like to give that one again (if you’re running an event, get in touch if that sounds like something you’d like).

My most recent talk isEvaluating Technology. I first gave it at An Event Apart in San Francisco exactly a year ago. I’ll present it for the final time at An Event Apart in Denver in a few weeks. Then it will be retired; taken out to the woodshed; pivoted to video.

I’m already starting to think about my next talk. The process of writing a talk is something else that Rachel has written about. She’s far more together than me. My process involves lots more procrastination, worry, panic, and pacing. Some of the half-baked ideas will probably leak out as blog posts here. It’s a tortuous process, but in the end, I find the satisfaction of delivering the final talk to be very rewarding.

Here’s the thing, though: until I deliver the talk for the first time in front of an audience—no matter how much I might have practiced it—I have literally no idea if it’s any good. I honestly can’t tell whether what I’ve got is gold dust or dog shit (and during the talk prep, my opinion of it can vacillate within the space of five minutes). And so, even though I’ve been giving talks for many years now, if it’s brand new material, I get very nervous.

That’s one more reason to give the same talk more than once instead of creating a fresh hell each time.