Design4Drupal, Boston 2019

Keynotes

Uncertainty Principles
Topics to be discussed:
- Introduction: impostor syndrome – uncertainty at a personal level, and its parallel to uncertainty at a business level
- What do I mean by “uncertainty”?
- Getting comfortable with uncertainty
- How is our discomfort with uncertainty failing us?
- Where do we go from here? Well, resolving uncertainty is all about asking questions ...

User Unfriendly: A practical guide to losing control
The web is more than a technology, it was created with a mission statement. Design and code trends also come with attached philosophies, often unstated. As designers and developers, it’s important that we think clearly about the underlying implications of our products and our processes. We’ll explore various approaches and lessons from Miriam’s experience with creative process and audience interaction in theater, writing, art, and software. How do we balance creativity, expertise, and expectations? What does it really mean to be user friendly?

Sessions

5 awesome ways to streamline your process & create unique site designs
Building reusable components into a Drupal project saves time during design and development and makes it easier for the content team to manage the site later on. But once you’ve streamlined those processes, how do you carry that savings over to an entirely different project? By using a co-owned strategy, UX, design, and development process, We’ll show you how to come up with unique, strategic solutions throughout the project lifecycle with real-world examples.

Accessibility Newbie to Ninja - 10 Steps
In this session, we'll aim to crack the nut of how to be both efficient and creative in your Drupal projects. The session will be co-led by a UX designer and Drupal developer.

An Intro to Service Workers
Progressive Web Apps are all the rage these days and we're just beginning to see the emergence of the offline web. Key to building PWAs, service workers enable features like offline fallbacks. This session will give you enough to get started building your own service worker-enabled sites.

Architecting an Ambitious Student Experience in Drupal 8: Cornell's Opportunity Marketplace
A case study describing how Cornell University and Message Agency transformed a complex user journey into a streamlined experience for finding study abroad opportunities and managing applications across Drupal and Salesforce.

Audit Your Theme
Themes can become a beast. Over time, features get added and new patterns are introduced. Or, you inherit a project and need to size up the theming effort. This session explores tools and methodologies to keep themes manageable and introduce concepts to establish metrics within your theme.

Beg, Borrow and Steal: What can we learn about Content Admin from other CMSs?
Let's compare Drupal's admin UX to other popular CMS interfaces. What can we learn? What can we use? What can we steal?

Better than luck: Product building for idea people
Don't move straight from idea to code. Plan and test your idea before beginning your next project to ensure long-term success. In this session, learn the essential blueprint to ensure your product's success, all before writing any code.

Can't We All Just Get Along? Design & Development Collaboration
Myth-busting collaboration challenges between development and design.

Collecting and using feedback on Mass.gov
Find out how Mass.gov hears from site visitors, from how we designed a feedback interface to how we get that feedback to the people that need to see it.

Customer Journey Mapping: Building Sites That Make Perfect Sense to Users
We often *think* we are designing sites for our users, only to find that they are confused by the end product. Enter empathy-driven design. Using customer journey mapping, we'll understand our users more deeply than ever, leading to better UX and happier users. Put yourself in your users' shoes.

Dealing with Mental Illness, or How I Learned to Dislike Myself Less
In this session, I talk about how I live with mental illness and how it took me a long time to understand that I'm not damaged goods; I'm sick. More importantly, I'm not alone. I will go over some statistics, some resources, and some things that helped me get from where I was to where I am now.

Design Systems Are Coming, Is Your Team Ready?
Design Systems have been gaining ground in site development as a means to provide design consistency and reduced time/cost for the organization. While the benefits are numerous, the organization of the team to properly roadmap and execute the work must be well structured to handle the challenges.

Design Systems: A Product that Serves Products
Really exploring what a Design System is and why they're important. Dive into how Design Systems work with Drupal and create a better overall experience. This could likely fit under Visual Design or the UX track.

Design to inspire, motivate and win.
Whether you are using Drupal or not your project will be judged on one thing: Does it inspire your audience? We know that Drupal can deliver, but are we really using the the tool to deliver memorable experiences?

Designing an App with Drupal and React Native

Designing for Images in Drupal
Did you know you can use tools inside of Drupal to process and create derivatives of the original image? This session will review how we can ensure the focus of the image is maintained across different sizes and ratios, add filters and effects, complex watermarks, image layering, and more.

Designing Your Purpose
I apply my experience teaching college students about design in order to clarify and explore a variety of foundational ideas in the design world. What is design? Why does design matter? What should be designed? I attempt to answer those questions and many others in new, unexpected ways.

Drupal and SEO: Designing and Building with SEO in Mind
When designing and building Drupal sites, SEO can be easily forgotten until the addition of the Metatags module. While that module is FANTASTIC, there is more to Drupal SEO than that, and we will cover how you should be thinking about SEO from design to launch!

Dynamic CSS (live-code)
The world needs more UX designers. You don't have to be good at the visual design to be part of the process, anyone can contribute to the User Experience process. This talk shares ten top essential UX methods and processes required to launch thoughtfully designed digital experiences.

Essential Sketch skills: From branding to development
Sketch provides the flexibility and speed needed to intuitively create functional, interactive prototypes that can be sent directly to development. Consistency in branding is important, find out how Sketch offers shareable libraries that keep everyone on board with updates and branding elements.

From User Acceptance Testing to Automated Testing
Development workflows, continuous integration and automated testing are a hot topics, and should be. As teams rush to implement and improve their DevOps strategies, one thing hasn't changed, testing is an afterthought. This session will explore a proven strategy to implement Behat into workflow.

Frontend Architecture For Scalable Design Systems
How do you build and manage a design system's frontend architecture that is both scalable and maintainable?

Gatsby & Drupal Sitting in a Tree
Are you considering using Drupal with a modern Javascript frontend framework? Learn how to build a blazing fast statically-generated Gatsby site while using Drupal as a backend content source.

Getting an angry wet cat to purr: turning an unhealthy client relationship into a productive one
High demands, high anxiety clients are a reality of agency life. Together we’ll discuss common challenges and the strategies that satisfy the

Great Drupal Websites Are Made Before The First Line of Code is Written
The world's greatest Agile process can't save a project that was a bad idea from the start. In this session, we will review the principles of Human Centered Design, and how applying these principles well before you even install Drupal 8 core can dramatically improve project outcomes.

Hot JAMS(tack): Building a Music Discovery App with Drupal and React
Learn from one developer's experience building a music discovery app with Drupal 8 and React, soundtracked by the hottest jams of the year.

How Drupal as a Service Can Save Our Livelihoods and our Lives
Drupal's own power and complexity discourages new users and contributors. Proprietary platforms, increasingly squeeze out custom web development. Can Drupal as Software as a Service (SaaS) make it a designer's and themer's delight and make it fun and a strong, growing community again?

Introduction to CSS Grid
Still not comfortable using CSS grid? This session will provide a beginner's overview of how and when to use grid, including some conceptual tips and technical tricks.

Introduction to React
Heard about React and want to know more? This session is for people who have heard the buzz about React, have no idea how it works and want to find out.

It's a Match: Project Mgmt + Design Systems #SwipeRight
Nam will walk folks through what a design system is, as well as how to plan and implement one. Nam will describe a simple methodology that can be used for planning, building and maintenance in his presentation.

Layout Builder in the Real World
Is the Drupal 8's new Layout Builder UI the holy grail of editor user experience? We'll talk about the new version of Lullabot.com using Drupal 8 and layout builder that empowers our technical and non-technical editors.

Layout Builder: A paragraphs killer?
Now that Drupal 8.7 is a full release with a stable version of Layout Builder, will the paragraphs module be put to pasture? Find out from Oomph, the creators of the Oomph Paragraphs module, why our latest projects are being built with Layout Builder.

Leveraging Qualitative Research to Power Your Brand
In this session, we will explore the value of interviewing stakeholders and other users before rebranding, redesigning, or starting any major project work that involves your end users.

Making A Tour: Leveraging The Tour Module For A Better User Experience
Don't you wish there was a way you could give each and every user of your module's admin experience a quick and easy way to learn what each setting really did and why it was there? Good news Drupal 8 users, this is actually in core. The Tour Module has been in core since the release of Drupal 8

One Usability Step At a Time: Improve Your Website with a UX Audit
Start off on the right foot when planning website improvements. We'll show you how to objectively assess a UI compared to standards and best practices to uncover the most common pain points in the user journey, and how to use the results to maximize clients' design buy-in early on.

Pattern Lab: The Definitive How-To
Hosted by Evan Lovely, the Pattern Lab PHP maintainer, creator of the original Phase2 Pattern Lab Starter that launched in 2015, and the CTO of Basalt, a company focused on building Design Systems. Evan has architected Design Systems using Pattern Lab for Drupal sites for Pinterest, MAC Cosmetics,

Prevent visual regression with Backstop.JS
As development timelines get tighter and tighter the last thing you want to spend time doing is tracking down regression issues on your website.

Preventing Burnout
We all deal with challenging, high-stress situations. Everyone has their limits and too much stress leads to "burnout", a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. It takes a toll not only on the individual but also co-workers and teams. But there are ways to identify, treat and prevent burnout.

Putting the "C" Back in CSS: Modern Techniques for Today's Website
This session will go over why plain old CSS is still relevant in a world filled with CSS-in-JS. I'll talk about why the cascade is still beneficial, why Sass is still useful on web projects, and how to use the BEM syntax to effectively write easy to read, minimal CSS.

Responsive Design 2.0
Learn the latest methodology for creating responsive layouts, combining CSS Calc, CSS custom properties, and either Flexbox or Grid, creating layouts with less code and less repetition than previously possible.

SEO and UX Go Hand in Hand
UX and SEO are sibling user focused disciplines whose goals are to connect people with the correct content. Search engines rank content and pages for query terms they feel the user will get the most value out of. Join us to learn the SEO and User Intent basics that every design should have.

So another client ruined their website. Here's why it's your fault.
In this session, I will walk through real examples of practical ways designers can equip their clients with the skills they need to be successful site builders.

Themes: Standardize Without Compromise
Automatically selecting a theme from your last project is dangerous. Rolling your own custom theme from scratch every time is extremely inefficient. Would standardizing a theme alleviate the pain? In this session we will establish criteria to select a standard theme and create a theme plan.

Three UX Guidelines for Designing a Better Backend
Learn how to apply UX thinking to content authoring experiences and create usable systems for your clients. Attendees will walk away with three specific guidelines that they can leverage within the backend interface to optimize the authoring for their own projects.

Understanding Drupal
Learn how Drupal assembles pages by combining different concepts like nodes, content types, fields, blocks, and views.

UX Design Principles
In this session, you will discover the foundation principles for creating successful user experiences. Participants gain experience in planning and prototyping as they are taken through a typical UX workflow, from concept to prototype.

Webforms for designers
This presentation will introduce designers to the Webform module for Drupal 8.

Trainings

Component-based Development Workshop

With the component-based approach becoming the standard for Drupal 8 development we’re beginning to see some slick front-end environments show up in Drupal themes. The promise that talented front-enders with little Drupal knowledge can jump right in is now a reality and we at Mediacurrent are experiencing this firsthand already.

In this training, we will put into practice one of the latest trends in development: components. Building a website using a component-based approach can help make code more reusable, dramatically improve collaboration among teams, while improving flexibility and long-term maintenance of your project. We will work on building a living style guide which will become the single source of truth for markup, styles, and javascript behaviors.

Drupal 8 Crash Course (For Content-Editors, Marketers, And Project Managers)
Are you responsible for project management, content, or vendor selection and preparing to work with Drupal? This one-day training delivers all of the tools you need to get started. This training will answer the questions you didn’t even know to ask. Targeted to the non-developer, this training is perfect for individuals that need to get up and running in Drupal - fast!

Individuals that are brand new to Drupal will walk away with the confidence to work within the Drupal framework and community.

Getting started with React.js
React.js has become one of the top players in the JavaScript libraries world. Drupal has recently adopted the library to create admin interfaces. WordPress has rebuilt its WYSIWYG editor using React. This training aims to explain the basic concepts outside of the context of any particular CMS implementation. Throughout the training, a static site will be converted into a React application.

Intermediate To Advanced CSS For Practical Peoples
The goal of this training is to help people who have are familiar with CSS but find it frustrating, or want to learn more about how it works. We'll start by talking about how CSS was designed to work, what it wants to do, and then talk about the major parts of it.

We won't be focusing much on syntax, that can be googled, the goal is to help you understand it so it doesn't feel frustrating, random and buggy.