Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece

Since I don’t currently have the readies to be flying to Australia for conferences (or even cycling to Brighton for conferences), I’ve been doing the next best thing by listening to podcast recordings of some of the presentations from the Web Essentials ‘05 event which happened recently in Sydney.

The fact that I’m able to do this is testimony to the co-operative spirit which I love so much about the Web. To actually go to this thing I would have had to fork out about £400 for the ticket, plus the air fare and everything else, but thanks to the generosity of spirit of organisers and speakers, I can listen to the proceedings (and even download and watch the slides) for free. All that’s missing is the free food and those little document bags that always seem to be given away at conferences. What’s more, the people I’m listening to are big cheeses in the world of web dev - Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, Jeff Veen, Doug Bowman, to name a few.

What struck me about these people was their fantastic ability to speak about their work. When I worked at the Barbican I had to sit through a lot of conferences - academic, corporate, educational, training etc. etc. and listen to a lot of people, who, though clearly having a high level of expertise in their subject, had absolutely no communication skills and would mumble their way through a pile of index cards, occasionally pointing to incomprehensible slides on the wall behind them. Quite often these would be directors or even CEOs of well-known companies, attempting to motivate their staff with lavish presentations, special guests, free booze and all the rest - but when it came down to talking about the thing they do for a living, they fell flat.

You would expect people who spent most of their lives in front of computer screens to be less than outstanding public speakers, but in fact they speak with passion, animation, humour and conviction about what they’re doing. Sometimes yes, the language gets a little dry, but we are dealing with large amounts of computer code after all, and when talking about present and future developments in the way web applications are put together, you get the sense of excitement and optimism that they all have themselves - after all they’re part of a sphere where immense change and innovation is happening right now, and to an extent it’s as much of a magical mystery tour for them as it is for their listeners.

Here’s a test for non-web designers. Go to the WE05 podcasts page, and find Jeff Veen’s presentation “Beyond Usability”. Download the mp3 and the slides (they’re big files so save them before trying to open them), and listen and watch. Leave a comment below and tell me:

• how much of it you understood;
• whether you thought it was funny (I was on the floor during the section about the HayNet site, but that may just be my susceptibility to geek humour);
• most of all, whether you were engaged by the speaker and the subject.

I picked Jeff’s talk because it has resonance both for those designing web interfaces and those who actually use them (I’m sure most of you have had infuriating “user experiences” in the past - if not, try setting up a PayPal account). It’s also light on techno-babble, as is Molly’s keynote on “The State of the Web”.

If I’ve failed to convince you, then by way of an apology for wasting your time I offer this film clip. This features well-known basket case CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer, and is a cautionary tale of what happens when you swallow too much of your own corporate bullsh*t. I promise you it’s worth seeing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 6:51 am and is filed under Web Design, General Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.