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i missed the keynote due to some meetings, but had a chance to have breakfast with josh, who is the author of the PHP ajax library, HTML_AJAX.  i was glad to hear some positive experiences josh is having at the conference.

right now i’m in the ‘building better user experiences” for web applications, with rick spencer and brad abrams.  first, they came out and were very “fluid” — great energy, non-technical “here is my powerpoint bullets, don’t ask any questions” feel to it.  they immediately engaged the audience on some questions to setup their discussion.

rick is talking now — not behind the podium — i like that.

rick referred to two pices of information, usable ajax patterns by michael mahemoff and usability guidelines by thomas beakdal

lessons learned – rick talked about a few principles of interactive development — i couldn’t capture them all, but here are some notes…

1) instant feedback – providing instant feedback on what is happening even if it isn’t happening

2) predict – showing the map dragging — bringing around the surrounding images shows the predictibility of what the user will do next; other sample is email address (yahoo), another sample is flickr slideshow — getting next image as the natural selection is the next image.

3) preserve – don’t forget about what the user has done

4) share – making sure when the user finds something of value it is important to enable the ability to share. demonstrating the permalink f a map view on virtual earth (suggestion for virtual earth — create shrinkster-ish URLs for your site)

overall this wasn’t any new information that i learned personally, but they did show some more atlas behaviors that i’d like to get my hands on…everyone keeps showing them, but nowhere to download just yet. (wish they’d adopt the ‘share’ principle here ;-)).

rick and brad took the time for questions (thanks!!!!!)  rick mentioned that i threw him a fast ball when i inquired about the MILF factor.  no, not that one…the:

Mother
In
Law
Factor

and how it applies to bookmarking ajax-ish sites (where state has changed multiple times but the url hasn’t) and the back button issues.

off to see wpf/e

Tags: MIX06

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