Humans are emotional, irrational, and unpredictable creatures. That can be a scary thought when you are tasked with making things that communicate with humans. Experience Design aims to understand humans to enable us to design for humans.

In this inspirational session, Aral Balkan will take you on a tour of the world around us through the eyes of an experience designer and inspire you to create experiences that go beyond usable to empower, amuse, and delight.

As we collectively cast into uncharted waters, mapping new territories and resurveying old ones, our blind assumptions are the only things that constrain us.

We must be fearless and adventurous in our vision, and take full advantage of powerful new vessels for our imaginations.

Let's explore some possibilities that front-end developers like us can learn from to successfully navigate the future of the web.

The practices of Responsive (and Adaptive) Web Design, Mobile-First, and Emotional Design have sparked an industry-wide shift towards designing beautiful, easy-to-use and delightful user interfaces that respond and adapt across devices and platforms. But there is an additional element that we should weave into our thinking and practices: Story.

How can we construct and convey a compelling story throughout all types of media and devices that lets us engage and enchant end-users, further inspiring loyalty? Enter Responsive Storytelling.

Let's take a look at what Responsive Storytelling is and how we can infuse this thinking into our sites, apps, and other communications to take our brands and products from good to great

Design is not just for designers or aesthetics & beauty nerds. Design is for everybody. Design is everywhere. It is a communication layer; an adapter from information to perception that, though cosidered to be more of an art by some, in a lot of cases is based on scientific researches, theorems, rules. Psychology, Algebra, Geometry and their derivatives. All of these form design principles and design tools, that conduct perception of a user.

Front-end developer is a craftsman who takes the material and turns it into a product. To utilize the material wisely and effectively one should understanding material's properties and limitations. It is even more important in the times of responsive web when getting ready design for any possible screen width is close to impossible and it becomes developer's responsibility to make design-related decisions.

The talk will cover basics that every front-end developer needs to understand when working with a design. How to "read" design and how to make that information help you build consistent, attractive and solid products.

The Application Cache is one of the cool bits of HTML5, allowing sites to work without a network connection brings us much closer to native app-like behaviour. However, from HTML5 roundup articles and talks you may be left with the impression that it's a magic-bullet fix, unfortunately it isn't, the Application Cache is a douchebag.

I don't mean 'incompetent' or 'difficult', definitely 'douchebag'. The Application Cache has skills we need, but if you asked him to paint your bathroom he'd somehow manage to flood your kitchen and break your TV in the process, and he wouldn't care.

We'll look at how to use the features of Application Cache without the horrible side effects, comparing techniques you'd use for a simple clientside app and a large content-driven site. We'll explore the many gotchas left out of most AppCache articles and how you can build your site to survive them.

Traditionally, given a design, we code it up linking CSS to the major sections of the page like header, article, and sidebar. But as sites and applications grow, this approach isn't granular enough.

State-based Design looks at how to think of things modularly and how to represent those modules in various states.

How do we become better interface developers? How do we find better problems to solve?
The most interesting work lies outside of your comfort zone. So how can you get there? This is a sort of crash course in stepping out of your comfort zone, trying new things, learning to learn and creating your own luck.

How should we do research & development? To be innovative, we must create a culture that tolerates failure. But who wants to fail? And certainly not admit to it. I want to share with you some of my failures. We're taught to do things the right way. But to discover something that other people haven't, one needs to do things the wrong way.

Viewports are pretty easy on desktop: they're the browser window. Thus, an element with width: 10% will span 10% of the browser window, while width: 100px just means a width of 100px.

On mobile, things are quite different. There are two viewports and three kinds of pixels, and they interact in all kinds of weird ways—ways that depend on the browser.

In this technical presentation PPK will explain why a pixel is not a pixel, what the difference between the two viewports is, and which bits web developers should care about.

Caution: Heads may explode!

Mobile debugging is a bitch. Let's talk about that, and then fix it.

Usability testing is the best way--by far--to ensure that what you’re putting out there (whether it's a web site, a mobile app, a shopping cart, or anything else) is as good as it needs to be. But too many people still think that usability testing is complicated, costly, and time consuming.

These are all true if you have to hire someone to do it for you. But Steve Krug will show you that you can--and should--be doing it yourself, and that DIY testing is simple, inexpensive, fast, and most of all, effective.

Steve's keynote will include a live usability test of a mobile app!