Web Design for Shiny Devs

🗾 Overview

Website design and development is one of the most critical factors contributing to whether the user has a good or poor experience while browsing your site, directly influencing the overall impression of your brand. Besides, bad design decisions can significantly impact app performances. By exposing you to common governing rules of design, this course will walk you through the entire design process, from ideation to execution. These rules will help you to become a better collaborator to design teams, and enable you to create beautiful front-end experiences for Shiny.

Is This Workshop for Me?

Minimum expectations: You’re an R developer with basic Shiny knowledge

This workshop will be appropriate for attendees who answer yes to these questions:

Do you want to gain confidence in app design?

Do you want to quickly test new business ideas?

Do you want your website to reach more clients?

🧪 Preparation

During this workshop, we’ll use Posit Cloud for the main activity. We kindly ask you to complete the following tasks prior to the workshop so you can get started.

1. Create an account on Posit Cloud (if you don’t have one).
2. Open the following Posit Cloud space. Open the shinyMons2 project and click on Start to create your own copy of the project. If you’re automatically asked to restore packages, answer yes. Otherwise run renv::restore() in the R console. Note: our activity project leverages {renv} for better reproducibility. It roughly takes 20-30 minutes to restore all the packages from the renv.lock file on Posit Cloud (less locally if binaries are installed).

💻 Local setup (backup)

However, it is more than recommended to have a backup on your personal laptop and that you have relevant software installed and configured prior to the workshop start.

1. Local setup: please be ready with recent versions of both R and RStudio. See: https://happygitwithr.com/install-r-rstudio.html#install-r-rstudio
2. Local setup: it is essential that you setup Git/GitHub in advance: https://happygitwithr.com/workshops.html#pre-workshop-set-up
3. Optional: Install VS Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/), with R language support (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=REditorSupport.r).
4. Either with RStudio IDE or VSCode, clone the exercise from here and restore the {renv} packages (automatically or doing renv::restore() in the R console).

❓❓❓ Any questions?

If you have questions in advance of the workshop, please answer to this thread: https://community.rstudio.com/t/web-design-for-shiny-developers-workshop-posit-conf-2023/172257.

📻 How we will communicate during the workshop

During the workshop, we will be using Discord as our main communication method. To make the process go smoothly:

1. Please sign up for an account if you don’t already have one.
2. Make sure your display name is the one you used to register for the conference.
3. In your “About Me”, put the name of your workshop(s).

➕ Further instructions

Closer to the start of the conference, we will invite you to the posit::conf Discord server, share the repository containing the slides and any further instructions to be ready.

Looking forward to meeting you!