After getting home from Web Directions North, I came down with a head cold and was thrust into a flurry of work, hence the lateness and reduced relevancy of this post. Nonetheless…

The second day of the conference started with Innovation Is Underrated from one of the founding parters at Adaptive Path, Indi Young. She was a good speaker, slow and steady. The bulk of the session was devoted to mental mapping and how this approach to invention can be used to think up new product ideas and features. The key to developing good products and services is to research customer behavior, identify their goals and problems, and provide solutions that directly address their real human needs. Model your customers and extract innovation from those models. Spend time with the details. Young has a new book available that goes into depth on mental modeling: Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior.

Next, I chose Boris Mann's The 3 Stages of Content Management, but before long I was wishing I'd gone to Cameron Adams' talk The Future of Web Interfaces. Mann (VP of Product Development at Raincity Studios) spoke well, but his slides were mostly silly and kind of juvenile (everything "sux"). They merely repeated was he was saying instead of driving a point. Furthermore, I had trouble defining what this talk was trying to zero in on. (Maybe he felt the same, as there are three different published titles for this talk: The 3 Stages of Content Management, The 3 Stages of CMS, and The 3 Stages of Dynamic Systems. I can see each of these being different talks.) Perhaps best practices best sums it up?

• Beyond the blog: integrating wikis, calendars, forums
• Use version control systems
• Integrate a SPF policy
• Invest in process
• Make user-generated content better (via CSS, live preview, image scaling, stripping tags and cleaning HTML)

Maybe my expectations were off. As a Drupaler, I was hoping for more about Drupal specifically (and he started the talk by saying that Drupal was not what he would be talking about.) I didn't end up getting much from this presentation, but that's just me. Check out the slides for yourself.

The third talk I attended was Information Visualization As a Medium, given by Eric Rodenbeck, founder of stamen design. This talk provided an overview of his recent work involving data visualization and mapping technologies. Don't think information architecture though, think cabspotting.org. While I can't come up with too many ideas about how to integrate this kind of work into my own business, it certainly applies to the baseball statistics art project I have in mind!

After the excellent lunch, I attended the talk, Serious Business: Putting Social Media to Work, presented by Anil Dash of Six Apart. Dash is an influential social web technologist and I was excited about what I would be learning about in this talk. Unfortunately, I found him to be a dry speaker, thought his slides were boring, and didn't think that he offered anything that wasn't already more brilliantly covered by Brian Oberkirch the day before.

Next, I went to The How's and Why's of UI Case Studies, a talk given by Daniel Burka from silverorange, Digg and Pownce. While Burka mumbled a bit, I found him to be an engaging speaker who seemed quite intelligent and passionate about his work. I didn't take too many notes and instead focused on the UI problems/solutions he walked us through. Check out the slides.

The closing keynote was given by Matt Webb. Perhaps because I had to keep an eye on the time to split to catch a bus I wasn't focused enough. I found his presentation Movement to be a bit obscure and hard to tie into my day-to-day work. A little too high level for the end of the day for me.

Web Directions North: The Verdict 

Overall, this was an excellent conference. The venue was ideal. The wireless was good. The food was great. (Finally, a conference organizing staff that doesn't believe that all us designer/developer types survive on just pizza, coffee and sugar!)

The schwag bag was good too: a reusable shopping bag (made in China, oh well) that included a copy of Dan Cederholm's 2004 book Web Standards Solutions, useful can koozies from Opera, Microsoft waterbottles and the obligatory stickers. I would like to know where the marketing departments at Adobe and nGen Works came up with their lame promo ideas though. Adobe gave us these teeny tiny colored pencil sets. What am I going to do with that? The case isn't reusable, and the pencils are too small to safely trust a young child with. I guess Adobe was targeting the 8-12 year old set? nGen Works called us "hosers" on their postcard and included mini-buttons with faces of people on them–their employees? I have no idea. I would love to see companies give us cool schwag that actually serves a purpose. Isn't that the point of promotional products: usable products that put brands in front of eyeballs?

My favorite talks, in no particular order were:

• Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography 
• Plays Well With Others
• Bedroom to Boardroom
• How's and Why's of UI Case Studies

A round of applause for the organizers of this excellent conference!