# 404fest 2010 - Impressions

The title tag fired Twitter all this weekend and will continue to do this for a few more days. On October 9-10, Samara hosted a festival of web-artists - Festival 404. Under the cut, my impressions of the festival in general and of reports in particular.

Having the experience of attending such events, I did not come to the beginning of registration, but came almost to the end of it. Nevertheless, I and the other participants had to wait another half hour until everything started. It was this delay that led to the fact that many reports were crumpled, shifted or deprived of questions from the audience hall.


But the show started and it began with the opening words of Dima Fitiskin ( @dfitiskin ) and Denis Kortunov ( @kortunov ). They told about the history of this event, about its symbol and a little about everything at once. And immediately after they went reports.

The first day

Began the first day of a wonderful guy from Microsoft - Bill Buxton , head of research.

In my opinion, it was the best report throughout the conference, because it was as lively, cheerful, interesting, informative and informative as possible. Bill delivered his report in English, but the entire audience was with him in the same breath and understood everything on the fly. Bill talked about many things, and these are the key points that I pulled out:

• It is necessary to use as much experience as possible to transfer it to the interfaces being created;
• The future will not be in 100 years, it will come next year, so you need to think a few steps ahead;
• Everything around us is capable and already becoming interactive, it's time to use it;
• Prototyping should be always and everywhere, and as early as possible, because only it can show how convenient the creation is.

The hour passed unnoticed and I wanted more and more. Unfortunately, Bill left fairly quickly, so I will now read his site and articles.

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Then I went to the Organization section of the work to listen to Nikita Sherman ( @ sherman77 ). From the whole flow of water, we managed to isolate the following thoughts:

• If you want to do your business, find what has already been done and is working.
• When you find something that already works, make it better.
• Have a plan "B"

Everything else was spinning around this and I heard nothing more interesting.

Then I ran to Damir Khalilov ( @damirkhalilov ) to listen to the completion of his report on social media marketing. He answered questions about the promotion of VKontakte, about the development of social media and everything in this vein. It is a pity that I did not hear the entire report. Fortunately, a video will be posted on the festival website.

After that, I hung out for some time in different sections, trying to find something interesting for myself. The first was Daniel Kolesnikov from Yandex. Daniel made a wonderful report on how to properly build the process of training employees within the company. And he touched not only the development of juniors, but also the development of those people who are already pro in their class. Daniel presented the whole process as a quest from a typical computer game. As in any quest in the training and any task, there is a task, a list of necessary skills, any artifacts, a game master and other attributes. Thus, correctly composing these quests, you can achieve a fairly rapid professional growth of an employee.
As for the pros, then it is possible for them to receive a “second profession,” as Daniel put it, they have the option of becoming an “elf druid of the 80th level”. He gave an example from his experience in Yandex. Many of their high-level developers receive additional motivation for further growth when the path of the “evangelist” opens up to them, both inside the firm and outside it.


Thanking Daniel for the excellent report, I moved to the next room, where Ilya Petrov ( @ilyapetrov ) spoke with the report “The Power of the Whole”. Another interesting and informative report. Ilya told that everything should be done to the end - if you are doing advertising, do not forget to analyze it. If you are selling something, then make sure that sales go always. I liked the presentation and style of presentation.

After that, Ilya again spent some time wandering between sections waiting for a report from another Ilya, Ilya Birman ( @ilyabirman ). With him, we later chatted in the afterparty, but more on that later. So, Ilya told about the fact that the interfaces are evil. Moreover, sheer and absolute. What a perfect phone interface is none, because you don’t want to look in the list of names, you need a name, press buttons and so on, but you just want to call once. Then there was a “throw-in” that the captcha should be thrown out, but the web technologists simply do not understand anything and solve its problems with it.

Having stayed in this room, I listened to the report of Andrey Shapiro ( @xraizor ). Andrew spoke about the 10 stumbling blocks of the user in traveling through a complex interface. He showed us how not to do, how to do it and how to do it. Unfortunately I did not make recordings, so I am waiting for the video. But the report was wonderful.

Andrei Sikorsky completed the evening of reports, talking about how you can mathematically calculate exactly how successful a particular design is. Some things were certainly controversial, but overall the idea is very interesting, I especially liked the idea with 118 sensation cards.

This ended the first day and the afterparty began!

Afterparty

That year I did not go to the PA, which I later regretted. Therefore, this year I boldly spent 1,500 rubles and did not regret it at all. The event has already been held according to the tradition in Birhaus on the embankment. People gathered very, very much, so that beer and talk flowed like a river. I met and talked to @ilyabirman , @infotanka , @olmokhov , @yakamsev, and many, many others. Communication in such an atmosphere is often much more useful than the conference itself, because people are more open, positive, friendly and you can easily move from one interlocutor to another. So envy those who missed.

Second day

The second day began with the Usability section, where Alexey Ivanov spoke about designing with a service for small screens. Not a bad practical guide, but in the end it all came down to advertising the application from the poster.

At the same section there was a very very cool report from Alexey Kopylov ( @copylove ) and Dmitry Zhukov ( @joukov ), who told and showed excellent and disgusting iPad interfaces. The main idea is to be logical, so that people don’t have to invent any special movements when working with your application. I especially liked that the guys showed all the interfaces right there, broadcasting them via a webcam from the iPad.

From Apple, I went to Mictosoft, namely, I came to the report of Gaidar Magdanurov , who was amusing the audience and forcing the moderator to push in. The report of Gaidar ultimately boiled down to advertising small-scale products, but since I now work a lot with SharePoint, I’ll probably try some of these products.

And, finally, the second day star Sergey “Zaika” Chikuyonok , who told about everything that was on the Internet, how he struggles with this in his aymobilko project and shared a couple of memories from his previous work with Theme Lebedev. So, aymobilko is really cool, I really liked the instant payment system there.
Sergey also talked a lot about optimization, about the fact that it is important, but you should not overdo it. Even if, from the point of view of the designer, the interface has become steep, but incomprehensible for a simple user, then such an interface should be thrown out. Another report that I want to review again very carefully.

Nikolai Rufeev ( @nickurs ) took the baton with the brightest report in terms of effects - Nikolay told about augmented reality. This technology has existed for about 20 years, but only recently it began to pay more and more attention. There is actually nothing to tell, you need to watch videos on the Internet, of which there are already a great many.

So I have spent so much these two days and I can only say one thing: I want more!


Photos can be found in Flickr on the tag 404fest. Photo sources for the article: 1 , 2 and 3 , 4

UPD: by reference link to other reports.