A lot fo my work lately has been consulting and working with teams to help them to establish or improve upon their responsive strategies.
I love this sort of work and I live for helping teams and individuals tackle the thorny issues (in code or processes) that make responsive projects a challenge. For a lot of small companies, it can be a challenge to pull ogether enough budget to fly me in for a few days of private working sessions, which is why I am such a huge fan of running public workshops… especially über-affordable ones like I am leading this May.
The first will be on my home turf in Chattanooga, Tennessee on May 2nd and I will be co-leadiing the workshop with my esteemed colleague Brad Frost. It’s the first workshop from our successful Code & Creativity event series and should be a heck of a lot of fun. There are a few tickets left for $399 each on Eventbrite.
The second workshop will be in Düsseldorf, Germany on May 21st. There are a handful of tickets still available for €349 (VAT included) and a ticket also gets you into the incredible Beyond Tellerrand conference which runs on the 19th & 20th. I’ve spoken at this conference twice before and it is one of only a handful of events in the world I enthusiatically recommend attending.
Here’s a rough idea of what I’ll be covering in the two workshops:
Responsive web design has taken our industry by storm and with good reason: it helps us improve our reach with less effort. But incorporating responsive design is not the goal, meeting our user’s needs is. Responsive design is not an end in itself… it’s just the beginning.
We need to embrace the heterogenous nature of the web—myriad web-enabled devices with vastly different dimensions, screen sizes, networks, and capabilities in use by countless individuals, each with their own special needs—and craft experiences that will work anywhere at any time. We need to build robust systems that adapt in ways far beyond aesthetics.
Each workshop with a discussion of a number of considerations that we should be aware of, beyond screen size and pixel density, and provide examples of how to adapt our interfaces so they rise to meet our customers’ needs. Then he’ll turn it over to you to propose gnarly design and/or interface challenges you are struggling with. Once everyone’s challenges are collected, attendees will be given the opportunity to form small groups around each and you will spend a portion of the day working on solutions while Aaron mentors each group and pushes you to think more about accessibility, alternate interaction methods, slow networks, and other considerations.
The workshop will wrap up with brief presentations from each group followed by a an open question and answer session.
I hope you’ll join me in Chattanooga or Düsseldorf next month. Bring your questions and your challenges and let’s dig in.
