I recently attended the An Event Apart SF. It was eye opening and mind blowing. The web industry has some extremely smart people in it. The majority of the speakers focused on pushing mobile first but without forgetting the content. I must admit while Nicole Sullivan while talking about how our best practices are killing us. I felt extremely guilty that some of my “best” CSS is wrong in her books. Guilt wasn’t the only feeling I had during the week, I saw felt a sense of awe.

Luke Wroblewski pointed out some amazing points about dealing with mobile first. Not just in the way of responsive design but for mobile apps as well. Two huge take aways from this was that navigation in mobile design works best in the bottom portion of the screen and that you should include delete buttons or the “back buttons of doom” in the upper corners. This allows users to make less mistakes while mobile browsing.  Also get users to the content. Don’t force them to search for link scent they want, drilling down to the content that might not be what they are looking for. Jared Spool points out that we all navigate through “scent”. We follow the scent of a link to find content like when a fox chases a rabbit. Sometimes we lose that scent because the designers haven’t created the links using trigger words and leave users guessing.

Jeremy Keith pointed out that working with patterns can help us write cleaner and clearer code but can also help users navigate our web apps in a smarter way. However, we have to be responsible with our designs and implementation as Elliot Jay Stocks. Just because we can do cool stuff with CSS3 and animations, use cool web fonts and gradients we shouldn’t let that get in the way of content and strategy.

Overall the central theme of the conference was around content. This isn’t a new topic but it is one that continually gets overlooked or pushed off to the side because of client demands or designers who are more motivated by having funky animations and flashy colors. I always try to push a strong content strategy to help create stronger user experiences and more emotional connections to the brand, but this is tough based on other teammates perspectives and goals for a project. For 2012, I think we should all strive to put our own personal ambitions around a project aside so that we can work on creating a better web for users.

Finally, I want to throw out that these speakers and the attendees that I met during this conference are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I feel so honored to have met, befriended and conversed with all of you. You are amazing group and love that I get to me apart of this group of individuals who are helping to shape the way we use the web.