Web design and development by Front, a strategy, design and technology studio in Belfast, Northern Ireland

We opened the day with a workshop on Adobe’s rich internet application framework Flex. Flex is a framework that allows developers to create complex applications and run them in a web broswer as Flash objects.

The workshop was given by James Ward and Duane Nickull of Adobe who brought the group through several real-world examples of creating applications that use familiar Flash techniques in development, but which also bring very powerful server-side/data handling capabilities as well. They also demonstrated how Flash authoring techniques can be used to create desktop applications using Air - Adobe’s “integrated runtime” framework. Again, there were lots of very cool real-world projects to play with.

The highlight of the day for me was definitely the workshop with Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path on Experience Driven strategy. Adaptive Path are world leaders in applying user-centred design to business and technology problems. Todd brought the group through some clear and articulate historical context; showing how our understanding of the way people work and live has changed over the last two centuries.

The workshop basically boiled down to some very useful, practical and intuitively simple ideas on developing products and services; namely that you should *really* understand your users (who are just people - not aliens) and their motivations (fears, aspirations, lives, complexities) when you are trying to design products and services that are of use to them. This is an idea that FRONT applies when helping clients build web applications; but is a difficult process -  the clarity of the workshop really helped me understand where we can improve the way we work on projects.

So, a great opening to the week - today alone justified the long flight and was a real learning experience. I’ll be updating this blog item all week - so check back for more.