Design for delight was the mantra of the moment when Aarron Walter's best-selling book Designing for Emotion was originally published, but our world has since changed. Though delight remains an important part of designing great customer experiences, today our emotions seem more complex. The companies and platforms we interact with frequently abuse our privacy, breach our trust, and fail to consider diversity in their plans. It's time to raise the bar by designing for a wider range emotions.

Learn how designers and the companies they serve are developing a more sophisticated approach to emotional design by designing for trust, telling compelling stories, and designing experiences that help a wider audience feel included. And see how emotional design can align to business goals so the way we talk to our colleagues about it is as sophisticated as our process.

CSS Layout is all about boxes. We know that some boxes are blocks, and others are inline, and we can change the display type of elements by changing the value of the display property. That property holds the key to much more than this, however. It is the foundation on which all layout is built; the core of the inbuilt CSS layout system. Learning Grid Layout, or Flexbox, without understanding Display, leaves you with a wobbly foundation and more questions than answers.

The real question isn't "Should I use Grid or Flexbox?" but instead, "How do I want these boxes to behave?" Understanding the interaction between layout methods will enable you to easily create fallbacks for older browsers, and knowing how the various formatting contexts behave unlocks margin collapsing and the behavior of items inside grid or flex layout. By the end of the hour, you'll understand how the display property underpins the layout system we have today, the things coming in the future, and be able to make more informed decisions when deciding how to build any part of your design, big or small.

Designers and developers often have poor relationships, due to bad process. Their interactions are apathetic at best and antagonistic at worst. Designers iterate over rounds of unrealistic comps, leaving a brutally short runway for developers to actually build the product. Developers recoil from the design process, and expect designers to hand them “requirements” that they treat as gospel.

In this session, designer Dan Mall and developer Brad Frost will duke it out on stage once and for all. Is there a better process that prioritizes collaboration and conversation? Should developers be involved in the design process? Can design systems really create a shared language between designers and developers? Can deliverables and "handoff" be reimagined? Can we finally say goodbye to a traditional waterfall process? You’ve gotta attend to find out!

Poor site performance is not just an annoyance. For the average user, it's often a fundamental accessibility issue... a barrier to using and accessing the web. With network speed and stability improving each day, we might think this problem is fixing itself. But recent trends show that performance has actually been getting worse, and that our own practices are often to blame.

Thankfully, we have great tools today to analyze our site performance, and with careful use of standard web features and patterns, we can regain the resilience and speed our users desire–without the complicated workarounds of the past. In this session, Scott will argue that performance is an accessibility problem, and show how we can prioritize it to improve access for everyone.

As front-end developers, we are tasked with building the front end of a Web site or application — in other words, we are building the user's end of an interface. This is why it is crucial that we ensure that the front-end foundations that we build are as inclusive of and accessible to as many users as possible. To do that, we must build with accessibility in mind from the get-go. This, in turn, means that the way we approach writing HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript might need to change as we take into consideration many factors that affect how (in)accessible our UIs are.

This talk is a practical one, chock-full of tips for creating more accessible front-end foundations. If writing HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript is part of your job, then this talk is for you.

In this session — a series of macro case studies from real client projects — Sara shares some frustrations, many lessons learned, and a lot of practical tips and tricks for building accessible front-end foundations that you can take and apply in your own projects right away.

Inclusive design is a valuable process that we can use in our journey to make things more accessible for people with disabilities. This applies to all aspects of design — whether you’re designing your latest app or web site, a physical space, or even a meeting. There are some simple steps to take: first, we need to identify barriers to participation so that we can determine who has been excluded, and how they’ve been excluded in the past and present. Second, once we’ve identified those barriers, we can systematically improve our work by creating solutions that get past those barriers. And third, we can continue to learn from people with different disabilities what their needs are, and how we could continue to improve. Ultimately that all leads to creating an inclusive product that meets people’s accessibility needs AND we use an inclusive process to do it.

In this session, Derek will share stories of success and failure as he worked with teams over the last year to engage with people with disabilities as co-designers, as well as the simple recipe for successfully creating a more inclusive design process.

Ethics is front of mind these days, especially in the tech industry. The industry ethos of “move fast and break things” has resulted in real harm to real people—ranging from the erosion of privacy to the deterioration of democracy itself. We need an ethics for our industry, of that there is little doubt. But how do we make it happen? How do we incorporate ethics into our design and development work?

In this talk, Morten lays down a path toward an explicit ethics for web workers, by anchoring the work we do in the capabilities we manipulate in the people we design for, and providing an ethical foundation to stand on when making the decisions that build the future for our users.

We’re still finalizing the details on this one — stay tuned!

If we can better meet the individual needs of our users we enable an exceptional superpower to take root; enabling us to create super fans of our sites, lowering customer acquisition costs and raising brand awareness. All in ways that have previously been under-utilised in the skill set of the modern web designer.

Let’s think about the outlier data, the anomaly use cases and the really tricky “personas” that are rarely more than an afterthought in our current design processes. As scary as it seems, it’s time we put a little more control into our users hands, rather than limiting the web to a one-size-fits-most school of thought.

Known for her practical sessions at An Event Apart, Sarah will show you real-life case studies as to how she’s achieved great successes with this model of thinking for her clients and well-known brands. As well as practical tips, tricks, and quick-wins that you can take back to the office and take full credit for implementing.

A decade into building responsive experiences, you could say we’ve hit our stride when it comes to understanding how to handle variable viewports. Most wireframing, designing, and prototyping tools handle—or at least consider—that screen sizes vary. But adapting our layouts and interfaces to a variety of screen widths is only the beginning; we also need to consider things like network conditions, hardware capabilities (and limitations), interaction methods, and, ultimately, the variability of human existence that requires us to evaluate the accessibility of our products very seriously. Responsive design is only the tip of the iceberg.

Given that we can't miraculously add more hours to the day nor is it likely we're going to be able to hire scads more people to aid us in this work, how do we even begin to address this reality? In this session Aaron Gustafson will introduce a straightforward way to begin accounting for the varied experiences your users will have: Interface Experience Maps. These simple documents are straightforward to create, easy to iterate, and can quickly become a rallying point for nearly every team that works on your product. Most of all, they'll help you wrap your head around all of the different ways your interfaces need to adapt.

Digital is the fastest growing user of energy and emitter of CO₂. In 2019 alone, 50 million tons of e-waste was produced. If one year’s e-waste—just one year’s—was brought together in a single place, it would cover an area the size of Manhattan. More data was produced in the last two years than all the data produced in the entire history of humanity up until then. 90% of that data is not accessed again three months after it is created. In other words, 90% of what we do in digital is crap. What a waste!

In this wide-ranging talk, Gerry McGovern will give you a waste-reduction plan and an energy-optimization plan for digital. It can be summarized as: less but better. How to minimize your personal, and your organization’s digital footprint. How to clean up the content and the code. How to identify what is not being used and remove it. How to maintain and continuously improve rather than launch and leave. How to plan your digital projects with the environment in mind so that you don’t add to the digital bloat and waste in the first place. How to tap into digital’s potential to support a cleaner and energy-efficient environment.