cookies and code

To end the day, Dan Benjamin gave a keynote presentation simply entitled “Simplicity”. Dan started out talking about how the real world can effect your applications as well how the internet can effect the real world. He showed us some statistics from Twitter around the Super Bowl and then how campaign funds raised over the Internet helped to provide major increases to presidential candidates’ coffers. He went over some comparisons for growth and overall demand in the developer industry as well as conveyed an interesting statistic that Orlando is 16th in the nation for technology jobs. Dan went on to show some examples of what he considers complex user experiences versus simplistic ones. Examples were drawn from some sites he found online as well as his experience with Cork’d, citing most of his success with Cork’d due to his designer colleague and a simple user experience. A focus was placed on the ability for a developer/designer to drive design decision when the user should be the one who is really in control. Dan has a few other suggestions: don’t release a beta, apologize to users when things go wrong, and just ship the product to avoid feature creep.

Overall the keynote was a lot different than other conference keynotes I’ve seen delivered. Most people usually expect keynotes to focus on the technological topics from which the conference is based, usually with a focus on direction for those technologies. Dan took a more general approach and focussed on good design practices in a technology agnostic way. Although different, it was a good presentation and I enjoyed the talk.