A common refrain from both management and clients alike today is, "We need an app..." Unfortunately, over the long-term, mobile solutions for you or your clients' organizations will need to be more diversified than a single app. From optimizing current web content to developing unique experiences mobile will touch, and possibly transform, your entire enterprise. Not only will your interactions with your customers be affected by the rapid adoption of smartphones but also your workforce and business processes. Combining lessons learned at a large, land-grant university as well as the latest statistics on mobile we'll review why you need a cross-audience, cross-content, and cross-platform mobile strategy, what one is all about, and how it'll help you prioritize your mobile solutions.

The range of devices accessing the web is increasing. We are faced with a choice in how we deal with this diversity. We can either fracture the web by designing a multitude of device-specific silos, or we can embrace the flexibility of the web and create experiences that can adapt to any device or browser.

Any day now, there will be no going back. By 2013 mobile Internet use is expected to exceed that from the desktop and eventually, ‘mobile’ will be just one of those words like digital and interactive. We still use them…but we’re not quite sure why.

Between now and then, we have lots to figure out. While I’m as giddy as the next person that I can finally use media queries, I’m not so sure there’s value in jettisoning all the concepts and techniques we used in pre-iPhone. The way I see it, anything is fair game if it helps far more than it hurts—and you understand why you’re using it.

This presentation will be part case study, part lessons learned, and part future thinking. What problems are being addressed through responsive design, and where is it falling down? What tools and techniques can we use to fill the gaps, and are these tools sustainable? How should we adapt our planning, design and production workflows? I also can’t help but think there are things lurking we’ve barely talked about…so i’ll try to dig a few of those up as well.

Billions of connected devices with fast and modern web browsers and possibilities are appearing on the market. And users wants fast, reliable and easy to use mobile apps. In this session, we are going to talk about mobile browsers, where we are and where are we going to in the next year. Browser types, the power (and challenges) of WebKit on mobile browsers, the rebirth of Internet Explorer on the mobile space and the appearance of HTML5. We will see what we can really use today, what are the problems, compatibility and we'll discuss what are we covering when talking about HTML5.

We'll see what are the new things that we need to understand behind the HTML5-umbrella, including Data-URI, viewport definition, pixel ratio and new APIs that we can use today on the mobile web, including accelerometer, geolocation, device network, native apps communication, debugging tools and what to expect in the near future on device APIs, including current discussed standards and hybrid-based solutions, such as PhoneGap or WAC widgets.

Fingers and thumbs turn design conventions on their head. Touchscreen interfaces create ergonomic, contextual, and even emotional demands that are unfamiliar to desktop designers. Find out why our beloved desktop windows, buttons, and widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. Along the way, discover why buttons are a hack, how to develop your gesture vocabulary, and why toys and toddlers provide eye-opening lessons in this new style of design.

Are your users happy with the speed of the mobile web experience you're giving them? It's true—mobile connections are slower. But that's a crutch. You can't change the speed of carrier networks, but you can change the way you build your mobile website. Identifying the bottlenecks and deploying the right solutions can make your mobile website twice as fast.

Join Steve Souders as he presents the latest developments for analyzing mobile performance and creating a faster mobile experience.

Mobile apps are on a clear trajectory for failure. It's just not possible to have an app for every device in my house, every product I own and every store I enter. Much like Yahoos original hierarchy gave way to Google's search, applications have to give away to a "just in time" approach to applications. This talk will explain how applications must give way to a more universal approach to application distribution, one based on the mobile web and cloud services. The problem of course, is that the mobile web has both hands tied behind its back. Any mobile app today is locked away behind a browser ghetto: in effect, a sub OS inside a larger mobile OS. This isn't just an arbitrary technology debate, a just-in-time approach to application functionality can unleash entirely new sets of application, ones which are impossible with native apps. This talk will layout how this problem can be fixed, and what changes need to take place, outside of just HTML5, for it to happen.

Everyone is screaming "We need to be on mobile!" What does that even mean? Where do you start? One of the biggest challenges of the mobile web is getting clients, coworkers and stakeholders on board and actually execute a project the right way. The hurdles are many: lack of understanding of the medium, small budgets, outdated processes and many more. Every organization is different so changing existing behaviors and processes takes a lot of effort, patience and time.

This presentation will show you how to execute a mobile web project successfully with a cross-disciplinary team. We'll provide a set of helpful tools and practices to get you started and help educate your coworkers and clients at the same time.

Face it, making mobile sites is fun! What developer wouldn’t like a second chance? A chance to cast off the shackles of the desktop web, tackle old business problems from a fresh perspective and experiment with new technologies on cutting edge browsers. This time, we’re going to get it right!

Traditionally, making a mobile site means creating a separate mobile codebase. How do you backport mobile success to your desktop experience? And how should you maintain feature consistency between your two sites moving forward?

HTML5 technologies offer the potential to reuse existing code across different platforms.

Learn how to create a fantastic mobile experiences without doubling your development effort.

No matter how many departments your organization has, to your customers, it’s all the same business. They expect a cohesive experience across all touch-points with your company, regardless of whether it’s related to advertising, customer service, social presence, or the actual product or service you provide. The satisfaction of your customers, and thereby the success of your organization, depends in no small part on your ability to create a cohesive and consistently high-quality cross-channel experience.

Some examples of disjointed cross-channel experiences are:

• The customer has to inform the customer service representative of what the website says about their own return policy.
• The specifications of a product online does not match the actual product a customer goes to pick up in the retail store.
• The experience of the mobile application is far superior to the experience of the standard web application or software application.
• The customer has to make three different phone calls to get their account changed because the information is stored in three separate business units.

Applying consideration for the cross-channel experience is much easier said than done. It requires a significant level of coordination and collaboration between the stakeholders, to understand not just how to optimize their particular part of the service, but to maintain that optimal and consistent experience throughout. For example, the customer service department can do a great job of correcting a problem after the fact, but they can add greater value to the product or service as a whole by collaborating with sales and product teams to prevent the issue from arising in the first place.

In this presentation, you will gain a better understanding of the different ways your customers might interact with your business. We will show how you can map out these touchpoints and help drive the creation of a cohesive experience across the various channels. We will show you how to navigate the political waters within your business to implement a true cross-channel design, which will build great experiences for your customers, regardless of how they are engaging with your business.

Websites and apps that are usable regardless of how they're accessed has long been an expectation of web users, and would offer enormous benefits to businesses and users alike. Yet as web developers, our desire to push our medium and to design for the latest browsers and technologies can at times seem at odds with this goal. Fortunately, if we approach our projects with both of these goals -- taking advantage of the most advanced technologies, and delivering an experience that works for everyone -- as a priority from the beginning, we may not need to compromise!

In this talk, Scott will detail some of the patterns, tools and techniques that enable projects such as the forthcoming BostonGlobe.com and jQuery Mobile to truly work in any browser or device -- albeit in different ways that cater to each browser's capabilities and device's physical constraints. Audience members will learn some workflows for building rich web experiences that are "mobile-first" from a technical standpoint, and perhaps more importantly, understand how to leave no experience feeling like it was "second."

Learn how to think about and design for Web organization, actions, inputs, and layout on a small screens. Luke will share the latest design best practices to create a great mobile Web experience for your customers.

Four years ago the prospects for the global economy were generally looking up (the subprime lending crisis was still emerging), George W. Bush was still in office, and Apple Computer had just released their soon to be iconic iPhone 1.0 (sans AppStore). It might be blatantly obvious, but since then you may have noticed things have changed a little?

If you follow the mainstream tech media you might be inclined to believe that the majority of people around the world have a bleeding-edge, state-of-the-art smartphone (or supercomputer); and those that don't plan to acquire one as-soon-as-possible. After all, who wouldn't want the power of an iPhone 5GSExtreme or a Moto Android Nexus Infinity-and-Beyond in their pocket?

This presentation is for those of you who live in the real world. Those with families, mortgages and of course businesses that need to engage with all those wonderful folk (please don't call them users) who have a very capable (but not bleeding-edge) device sitting in their pocket, purse, or any other place people keep their magical devices.

No matter how much we try to put ourselves into a mobile first mentality, it is hard for us to do so fully. Our access to PCs prevents us from experiencing mobile the way many in the world do.

We're currently fighting for parity among experiences. We're arguing that the mobile version shouldn't be a dumbed down version of the desktop site.

But we've set our sights too low. In a true Mobile First world, the mobile version should be the best experience. Mobile shouldn't just match the desktop experience, it should exceed it.

In this hands-on workshop you’ll discover how to use your web development skills to build applications for mobile platforms including iPhone, Google Android, Blackberry and webOS. You will learn how to use PhoneGap, an open source mobile development framework, to create cross platform mobile applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Get the tools and experience you need to build app store ready mobile applications using just your web development steez.

In this workshop you will learn to:

• Set up your development environment
• Compile for multiple platforms
• Run code in an emulator
• Debug your HTML and JavaScript
• Access native APIs, including location, camera, accelerometer, contacts, and more via JavaScript
• Optimize your JavaScript for mobile devices
• Build a mobile application that runs offline, uses CSS transforms and leverages JS libraries like jQuery Mobile

Each day, device manufacturers ship more than a million touch-screen phones that enable new ways for people to interact with the Web. But when they get to your Web site or application-what kind of experience will people with these devices have? Will they be delighted by your mobile Web experience or frustrated?

In this workshop on Web design best practices for modern mobile devices, Luke Wroblewski will detail how to think about and design for Web organization, actions, inputs, and layout on mobile. Through presentations, collaborative sessions, and lots of examples, you?ll learn how to:

• Use "content first/navigate second" organizational structures optimized for small screens and mobile use cases.
• Design for increasingly prevalent touch interactions with appropriate targets and gestures.
• Construct forms and input fields to make input on mobile easier and more frequent.
• Manage layouts across multiple devices with ruthless editing, device classes, and responsive/flexible designs.
• And more…

Armed with these design best practices and principles, you can make sure people have a great mobile Web experience whenever they visit your site.

Armed with newfound theory, ideas, and excitement about the mobile horizon, you're now itching to write some code and build something special. This workshop will drop straight down into HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create an application you can take home with you.

We'll be using Sencha Touch, an easy way to create native-looking experiences with web technology. We'll use a variety of user interface controls, geolocation, JSON & CORS-based data feeds, a client-side MVC architecture, and Sass-based theming - to create a mobile app you can be proud of.

Handheld apps that work by touch require you to design not only how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand. This workshop explores the ergonomic challenges and interface opportunities for designing mobile touchscreen apps. Learn how fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their heads, requiring you to leave behind familiar design patterns. The workshop presents nitty-gritty “rule of thumb” design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps and websites that inform and delight.

• Discover ergonomic guidelines for comfortable tapping and what that means for the visual layout of mobile apps and websites.
• Devise visual metaphors that invite touch and create emotional attachment, while providing subtle cues for how your interface works.
• Learn why buttons are a hack. Tap into direct manipulation of content to encourage exploration in ways that traditional controls cannot.
• Design gesture interactions, and learn techniques to help people discover unfamiliar gestures on their own.
• Train in gesture jiujitsu, the dark art of using awkward gestures for "defensive design" and protecting against accidental mistaps.
• Explore the psychology behind screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls it creates for designers.
• Find out how the form and context of tablets create different interface requirements from phone handsets.