ETech: Starting Things Off With A Bang

ETech began out here in San Diego with a bang. No really. Like my Powerbook hitting the curb in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt as I was stepping out of a cab. My baby survived other then a small dent and some scratches to her aluminum casing. Oh well, she's got a lot of miles on her.

Yesterday I had the privilege of sitting through Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps, a tutorial lead by Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garrett and (now) Google's Jeff Veen.

As a career coder I'm always working on my understanding of design and experience to create more useful software. The duo's presentation did not disappoint.

The broke designing a web applications into 5 elements:

• Strategy - what is this thing about? who is it for? what is it supposed to do for them?
• Scope - what is it? supposed to do?
• Structure - how do those fit together?
• Skeleton - flesh those out. how do they become real?
• Surface - how do we make these visually work effectively?

They begin with the abstract and work their way down to the more specific.

People typically have one of two views of the Web that bring preconceived notions

• The Web As Information. i.e. A newspaper.
• The Web As Application. i.e. Software.

They noted that it's both though and we need to look at it both ways and continued to drill down through these 5 elements.

One important and reoccurring theme was the issue of giving up designers in complete control. Designers should create a container for users to have an experience in. They must trust the user and see them as peers. In next generation web applications users control their data.

Garrett is known for having coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaSscript and XML) just over a year ago. He addressed this briefly noting that AJAX is about an asynchronous interaction model and browser-native technologies. "Forget the rest. This is what matters." Quoting Bruce Sterling he said AJAX is "Roller skates for the web!" It helps you glide along faster and more effortlessly then walking, but it takes some time and practice to get good at it. They can also be more dangerous. He predicted that for the next 2 years we will see a lot of bad design choices in the use of AJAX.

One of the most useful discussions for me was that of context which they described as a sense of time, place and meaning.

• Why is this happening?
• What can do here?
• What happens next?
• Where they came from.
• Where they are.

Also covered was the first impression. Earlier in the day Veen talked about a study that had performed were subjects were shown a screen shot of a Web site for 1/20 of a second and then asked whether they trusted the site or not. Results were consistent across all subjects to which they trusted and which they did not. The first impression of the surface (look and feel) is quite important. Further users will ask what is this thing? What does it mean? What should I do next? Each screen needs to address these questions for the best possible user experience.

With time running out, the duo noted that unlike the days of monolithic applications or the "sticky eyes" mantra of Web 1.0, "your site is just one piece."