Couldn’t make it to St. Louis for the 2011 edition of the annual workshop? Double-scheduled? Don’t worry: from mobile to visual inspiration, ESPN and news apps, we have video to catch you up to speed, with a special emphasis on the very full sessions on mobile/tablet and Web design.
Friday
Mobile and tablet research round-up (9 a.m.)
Speakers: Regina McCombs and Roger Fidler.
What we know about mobile users — maybe. Regina McCombs will synthesize the research on mobile from Nielsen, Pew, comScore, Google, RJI and a host of other studies to sort through what’s holding up over time and what’s contradictory. Roger Fidler will also release the latest survey results from the DPA’s iPad/Tablet Research Project. His summer survey is the first to track user behaviors and news consumption trends on the iPad as well as all other comparable media tablets worldwide.
One (+) year out, what we’ve learned (10 a.m.)
Speakers: Steve Dorsey, Chris Courtney, Ray Marcano and Steve Yelvington.
A frank and open moderated panel discussion with leaders from around the country about mobile and tablet news products and what we’ve learned so far. This will offer best practices, anecdotes, tips and tricks, successes and failures sharing what we’ve learned about reader habits, platforms, app store approval, marketing your mobile content, staffing and production strategies.
Designing personalized tablet news (11 a.m.)
Speakers: Mark Johnson, Joey Marburger and Bobby Ghoshal.
Nicolas Negroponte’s 1970s prophecy of “The Daily Me” is now here. Dozens of organizations from traditional media to start-ups are now creating unique, customized tablet news experiences that embrace the tablet as a personalized publishing platform. This session will discuss what has been learned so far, how to design and develop these experiences effectively on tablets — especially when managing infinite potential content sources — and what metrics are the best indicators to track and personalize the content. Also find out what pieces of this strategy could you apply to your organization and how can you better format your content to get shared and targeted to interested audiences.
Designing the magazine and issue-based tablet experience (1:30 p.m.)
Speakers: Claus Enevoldsen, Mike Schmidt and Robert Newman. Moderator: Will Sullivan.
Everything old is new. Rather than an endless streams of news feeds, a ‘new’ digital model is emerging on the tablet: the issue-based experience. Curated, customized, more linear and almost print-like in structure. Three industry pioneers will discuss how The Daily, Reader’s Digest, The Orange County Register and other magazines distribute and produce their issue-based digital content on the iPad. From production and multimedia content strategies to monetization and what they’re learning about their users, this is sure to be a one-of-a-kind edition at SND STL.
Touching news: The new rules of tablet media (2:30 p.m.)
Speakers: Josh Clark
Touch, tap, flick, and pinch the news. Touch interfaces, especially on tablets, hold the promise for entirely new media experiences that are both rich and intimate—but only if done right. Discover the rules of thumb for finger-friendly design. Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices, tablets, even the next version of Windows. The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the thing?
Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious and content navigation effortless. Designer Josh Clark (author of O’Reilly books “Tapworthy” and “Best iPhone Apps”) mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration, design patterns, and best practices. Along the way, you’ll discover practical techniques for nurturing great user experience within the demands of emerging business models for mobile- and tablet-delivered news.
Mobil-nority Report: The next five years (4:30 p.m.)
Presenters: Josh Clark, Regina McCombs, Roger Fidler, Steve Yelvington, Robert Newman and Tim Carmody
The Minority Report is here. Iris scanning mobile devices are used in law enforcement. Interactive touch interfaces. Customized, geo-located and personalized content and ads. If we were making Minority Report 2, what would the next 5-10 years include? The future of mobile, tablets and all media is wide open with these new disruptive platforms, business models and cultural changes. We’ll end the mobile and table track with a frank discussion about what the future is looking like, from trends to wild guesses.
Saturday
Designing a responsive news website (10 a.m.)
Speakers: Miranda Mulligan and Mat ‘Wilto’ Marquis
Three ingredients make up responsive web design: flexible grid-based layout, flexible images and media, and media queries. But these three elements are just focused on layout and layout is not design. “Design is the method of putting form and content together.” (Paul Rand) In the context of designing and prototyping BostonGlobe.com, we’ll talk about how we applied this technique to present news content, how we created the reader-experience and how a responsive framework affects:
We’ll show some of the code (what makes the grid flexible, the images responsive, media queries, etc) as well as the static prototypes. We will offer insight to the ‘design-velopment’ process of rapid prototyping in code and illustration. We’ll show the logic behind how the content reflows at different browser-width breakpoints. We’ll talk about using custom fonts and fallback plans to better tailor content to users’ varying contexts, and methods for testing a ‘device-agnostic’ layout across a relatively exhaustive list of devices.
Lessons from the centralized design centers (10 a.m.)
Speakers: Steve Dorsey, Kate Marymont, Dean Lockwood, Jorge Vidrio, Jeff Glick and LaToya Smith
This session will focus on the design center consolidation at Gannett, Tribune, Scripps and Hearst, with leaders from each organization discussing what they’ve learned, what has worked, what didn’t and what the future holds.
How to make news apps in your newsroom (1:30 p.m.)
Speakers: Brian Boyer and Scott Klein
Learn from the ground-breaking newsroom app teams at ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune in this survey course about how to get news apps in your newsroom. Learn how to gain the technology and skills needed to make for news apps and how to find allies in the newsrooms, corporate and IT to make it a success. There will be several projects dissected and a discussion of agile project management skills also.
Designers as user advocates (2:30 p.m.)
Speaker: Joy Mayer
The craft of journalism is too often driven by the journalists themselves — by their own standards of what is important and worthy. Designers have long been the people in newsrooms speaking up for the near-mythical “audience” — asking questions about how to make content accessible, whether the main points of a story are clear and how readers will be encouraged to act on the information they’re given.
The Storm: A special presentation from Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (4:45 p.m.)
Speakers: Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson
We’re thrilled to announce Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan will close out SND STL with a special presentation before the awards dinner on Saturday, October 1st. The dynamic duo are internationally known for their innovative thinking and ground-breaking work in digital journalism across many platforms. Together they created EPIC 2014, a futuristic look at culture, technology and the future, and they also blog about similar issues at the must-read, Snarkmarket. This special presentation is made possible with the sponsor support of The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.
