Beyond the Ideal: Designing for Crisis with Eric Meyer

It's easy to design for the idealized user, someone who's smart, calm, and informed. It's less easy, and thus more important, to design for a more realistic user: still smart, but harried and uncertain. The best designs handle both users with care. But how many designs can help a user who is completely in the dark, and barely capable of rational thought? In his talk “Designing for Crisis” at An Event Apart Boston, An Event Apart co-founder Eric Meyer will draw on his personal and professional experience to explore examples of crisis-mitigating design successes and failures. In the process, he'll illustrate ways that you can and should consider the needs of users teetering on the edge of panic—because helping those users will make your designs more relevant and useful for all your users.

A twenty-year (and counting) veteran of the web, Eric Meyer has been a burger flipper, a college webmaster, an early blogger, one of The Web Standards Project's original CSS Samurai, a member of the W3C CSS Working Group, a consultant and trainer, and a Standards Evangelist at Netscape. He wrote CSS: The Definitive Guide for O'Reilly; created the first official W3C test suite; and assisted in the creation of microformats. In 2006, he was inducted into the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS” and helping to “inform excellence and efficiency on the Web.” Eric lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you've been led to believe.

Eric is just one of twelve extraordinary presenters appearing at An Event Apart Boston 2015. See them all! Following the two-day conference of twelve great sessions comes A Day Apart: Everything You Wanted to Know About Responsive Design…And Less!, led by Brad Frost (Atomic Design). You can register just for the two-day conference, just for A Day Apart, or save $100 when you sign up for all three days. Check the schedule for details, and save an additional $100 if you register now through March 16.