Speaking tomorrow at the Rich Web Experience in Orlando, Fl. I fly out tonight at midnight. Arrive at 10am, speak at 4pm. I promise to get some sleep on the plane so that I will be fresh for the talk! Fly out on Thurs evening. So if you see me there and I look a little spaced out -- you know why :-)
Talking on Designing for Interesting Moments. Hope to see you there.
NOTE: This blog has been moved to http://www.looksgoodworkswell.com
Thoughts on experience design & engineering
Showing posts with label presentations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presentations. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Designing for Interesting Moments Talk
I gave a talk on Designing for Interesting Moments for the IxDA at the Google campus also at Microsoft for the UX team as well as at the Ruby Meetup Group at CMU and finally this week at The Ajax Experience in Boston.
If you want to hear it in person I will be giving it at the Rich Web Experience in Florida the first week of December.
Here is the longer version of the talk.
If you want to hear it in person I will be giving it at the Rich Web Experience in Florida the first week of December.
Here is the longer version of the talk.
Designing for Interesting Moments
View more documents from Bill Scott.
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Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Netflix Culture
Meant to post this yesterday when we added Reed Hasting's (CEO of Netflix) slide deck on Netflix Culture to our jobs site. It is 128 slides long, but well worth the read. I can honestly say that I haven't worked anywhere else in my career (25+ years) that thinks as deeply about their culture. Also credit Patty McCord. As Chief Talent Officer (yes we have a "C" level talent officer) she zealously guards the cultural environment.
Just one of my favorite thoughts is about talent density: "As rules increase, talent decreases." So we keep our rules to a minimum. And hire "fully formed adults" that don't need the extra bureaucracy.
Don't forget we are hiring :-)
Here it is from slideshare:
Just one of my favorite thoughts is about talent density: "As rules increase, talent decreases." So we keep our rules to a minimum. And hire "fully formed adults" that don't need the extra bureaucracy.
Don't forget we are hiring :-)
Here it is from slideshare:
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Interview: What Developers Wish Designers Understood
Lou Rosenfeld interviewed me on the topic "Bringing Design to Life: What Every Designer Should Know About Interface Engineering". This is a really interesting subject and gets to the heart of how to get engineering and design teams to work together better.
The interview gives you some of the points I will cover in my upcoming webinar on the same topic (Feb. 26th, 10AM PST/1PM EST).
Also there is a short video presentation (about 7 minutes) that provides a sneak peek into the webinar presentation.
Use code RMWBNR for a 20% discount off your ticket purchase.
The interview gives you some of the points I will cover in my upcoming webinar on the same topic (Feb. 26th, 10AM PST/1PM EST).
Also there is a short video presentation (about 7 minutes) that provides a sneak peek into the webinar presentation.
Use code RMWBNR for a 20% discount off your ticket purchase.
Labels:
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design,
development,
interview,
presentations,
talk,
webinar
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Upcoming Talk: Bringing Design to Life (Rosenfeld Future Practices Webinar) - Feb 26th
For the last 25 years I have been solidly focused in the world of user interface creation. At times I have been solely focused on design and at other times on interface engineering. At other times I have held both responsibilities at once (e.g., leading a UX team while leading two interface engineering teams). Having spanned both design & engineering, I deeply understand the challenges is translating ideas into products. For this talk I decided to focus specifically on how web designers can work in the most efficient manner with their engineering counterparts. It is the "stuff" that most engineers wish their design colleagues knew.
This 60-minute webinar is initially available as a live class, and then is made available in a DRM-free recorded, edited format. By avoiding the travel required in attending a physical seminar or conference, you save money and reduce your impact on the environment. You are free to watch the webinar with colleagues in a conference room, making for an even better value. The cost is only $129.
Join me on Feb. 26th (18:00 GMT / 1pm EST / 10am PST) for Bringing Design to Life: What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering.
(Previous webinars include Luke Wroblewski on Modern Web Form Design and Indi Young on Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy. Also check their schedule for a complete lineup of monthly webinars.)
Also, if your are interested in purchasing materials from Rosenfeld Media, please use my discount code when you visit the site (good for a 15% discount): SCOTTWBNR.
Photo credit: Auroville: Under Construction from premasagar's flickr stream, Creative Commons License.
Labels:
conferences,
design,
development,
lessons,
presentations,
productivity,
schedule,
userexperience
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Yahoo! Front End Developer's Summit 2008 - Talk
I had the wonderful privilege of giving a keynote today at Yahoo!'s Frontend Summit. Douglas Crockford gives the one for tomorrow.
I took a stroll down memory lane talking about everything from slide rules to Wang Desktop Programmable Calculators to programming on the Macintosh 128k. In many ways this played off an earlier blog "All I reall need to know I learned from a Mac 128k".
Here are the slides:
A video will be available at the YUI Theatre later this month. I will post a link here when that happens.
I took a stroll down memory lane talking about everything from slide rules to Wang Desktop Programmable Calculators to programming on the Macintosh 128k. In many ways this played off an earlier blog "All I reall need to know I learned from a Mac 128k".
Here are the slides:
A video will be available at the YUI Theatre later this month. I will post a link here when that happens.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Velocity Conference: Improving Netflix Performance Presentation
My quick talk on Improving Netflix Performance Experience from June 23 at the Velocity Conference is available here:
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netflix,
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yslow
Thursday, October 04, 2007
My MIMA Talk
For the folks at MIMA (or others interested), the latest version of my talk Designing for the Rich Web Experience is available for download.
Thanks for all the wonderful comments and discussion afterwards.
I also gave this talk at Yahoo last week. Look for it on the YUI Theatre in a few weeks.
Thanks for all the wonderful comments and discussion afterwards.
I also gave this talk at Yahoo last week. Look for it on the YUI Theatre in a few weeks.
Labels:
accessibility,
ajax,
conferences,
mima,
patterns,
presentations
Anti-Patterns: Talk
Recently, I have been giving a new talk on Anti-Patterns.

Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this talk, I am exploring the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. There are a bunch of counter-examples from consumer facing web sites (both inside & outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise web applications.
The anti-patterns explored are:
Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this talk, I am exploring the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. There are a bunch of counter-examples from consumer facing web sites (both inside & outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise web applications.
The anti-patterns explored are:
- meandering way
- borg idiom
- tiny targets
- hover and cover
- pogo stick navigation
- novel notions
- metaphor mismatch
- double duty
- linkitus
- windows aplenty
- animation gone wild
- misguided misdirections
- missed moments
- one at a time
- non-symmetrical actions
- Ajax Experience, San Francisco, CA
- Yahoo! Design Expo, Sunnyvale, CA
- Rich Web Experience, San Jose CA
- Ajax World, Santa Clara, CA
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Friday, April 13, 2007
Upcoming Talks - Mid Year 2007
Mix'07 in Vegas
Looking forward to Vegas! I was fortunate to be invited by the friendly folks from Microsoft to give a talk about rich web design at Mix' 07. Should be a great event. My good friend Luke Wroblewski will be there speaking as well. Hope to see some of you there on April 30. Looks like it is already a sold out event :-)
The Ajax Experience & The Rich Web Experience
Last year I thoroughly enjoyed my "experience" at the Ajax Experience. Both the San Francisco & Boston events were put on by the folks at ajaxian as well as the folks from nofluffjuststuff. It made for some great speakers and attendees.
It appears that the nofluffjuststuff folks are putting on a new event, The Rich Web Experience which will be from July 30 - August 1 in San Jose, CA. Just the week before The Ajax Experience will debut at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, CA and is sponsored by the ajaxian dudes. Since I have great respect for both groups I will be speaking at both events.
Look for two new talks that I am in the midst of developing.
Anti-Patterns - Designing for a Poor Web Experience.
Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this new talk, I will explore the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. I'll also be using counter-examples from consumer facing web sites (both inside & outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise web applications to illustrate the right way to design.
Prototyping the Rich Web Experience - Experiments in creating an Ajax framework for prototyping
How do you communicate the design for a rich web experience? Since there is no one tool, designers have used the tools at hand: Photoshop, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Fireworks, ImageReady, Visio, OmniGraffle, and so on. However, prototyping provides the best way to fully understand & test the nuance of detailed interactions. The problem is that it is difficult to find someone who is both good at design & prototyping. In this talk, I will first survey the tools & techniques for communicating rich design and then propose a simplified Ajax library that makes most behaviors and interactions declarative via CSS styles or by simple declarative style programming. I will then walk through how to quickly prototype the most common patterns with the library. The prototyping library will be available for download at the time of the conference session.
Hope to see you at one of these events.
Looking forward to Vegas! I was fortunate to be invited by the friendly folks from Microsoft to give a talk about rich web design at Mix' 07. Should be a great event. My good friend Luke Wroblewski will be there speaking as well. Hope to see some of you there on April 30. Looks like it is already a sold out event :-)
The Ajax Experience & The Rich Web Experience
Last year I thoroughly enjoyed my "experience" at the Ajax Experience. Both the San Francisco & Boston events were put on by the folks at ajaxian as well as the folks from nofluffjuststuff. It made for some great speakers and attendees.
It appears that the nofluffjuststuff folks are putting on a new event, The Rich Web Experience which will be from July 30 - August 1 in San Jose, CA. Just the week before The Ajax Experience will debut at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, CA and is sponsored by the ajaxian dudes. Since I have great respect for both groups I will be speaking at both events.
Look for two new talks that I am in the midst of developing.
Anti-Patterns - Designing for a Poor Web Experience.
Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this new talk, I will explore the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. I'll also be using counter-examples from consumer facing web sites (both inside & outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise web applications to illustrate the right way to design.
Prototyping the Rich Web Experience - Experiments in creating an Ajax framework for prototyping
How do you communicate the design for a rich web experience? Since there is no one tool, designers have used the tools at hand: Photoshop, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Fireworks, ImageReady, Visio, OmniGraffle, and so on. However, prototyping provides the best way to fully understand & test the nuance of detailed interactions. The problem is that it is difficult to find someone who is both good at design & prototyping. In this talk, I will first survey the tools & techniques for communicating rich design and then propose a simplified Ajax library that makes most behaviors and interactions declarative via CSS styles or by simple declarative style programming. I will then walk through how to quickly prototype the most common patterns with the library. The prototyping library will be available for download at the time of the conference session.
Hope to see you at one of these events.
Labels:
ajax,
antipatterns,
conferences,
patterns,
presentations,
schedule
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Ajax 101 Presentation
Just posted my Ajax 101 talk on slideshare.
I have given this talk in a number of venues starting in January 2006 with Adaptive Path in the Designing & Building Ajax Workshops we hosted in LA, Austin and Amsterdam. I also have given this within Yahoo! for internal training as well as for VeriSign, Federal Reserve, Ultimate Software, United Online and others.
To me understanding web development starts with understanding event handling, model & data services and how to manipulate the DOM. This mental framework is used in this talk (it follows the Model-View-Controller pattern from SmallTalk-80 days).
Enjoy!
I have given this talk in a number of venues starting in January 2006 with Adaptive Path in the Designing & Building Ajax Workshops we hosted in LA, Austin and Amsterdam. I also have given this within Yahoo! for internal training as well as for VeriSign, Federal Reserve, Ultimate Software, United Online and others.
To me understanding web development starts with understanding event handling, model & data services and how to manipulate the DOM. This mental framework is used in this talk (it follows the Model-View-Controller pattern from SmallTalk-80 days).
Enjoy!
Labels:
ajax,
conferences,
development,
presentations,
tutorial
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Slideshare
My friends Rashmi Sihni & Jonathan Boutelle recently released a really cool product, slideshare.
Simple idea. Think youtube for presentations. Upload a PPT or PDF, it converts it to individual slides that can be bookmarked, linked to from a blog, tagged, commented on, etc. Cracks open presentations so they can be searched and really makes it easy to find.
You can see one of my talks here:
Hopefully they will support keynote in the future as well as some ways to handle animations/transitions. But even without this it's a great place to find recent talks.
Simple idea. Think youtube for presentations. Upload a PPT or PDF, it converts it to individual slides that can be bookmarked, linked to from a blog, tagged, commented on, etc. Cracks open presentations so they can be searched and really makes it easy to find.
You can see one of my talks here:
Hopefully they will support keynote in the future as well as some ways to handle animations/transitions. But even without this it's a great place to find recent talks.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Easy 7 Conference - Bangalore
Having a wonderful time in Bangalore. Due to the excellent Yahoo! Bangalore staff, my friend Sameera Gopalakrishna Rao who is here on holiday and the excellent Easy 7 Conference I had the opportunity to speak at yesterday.
Easy7 is a SIGCHI-SI conference held annually in Bangalore, India.
Being somewhat ignorant of the design community in India, I was not sure what the makeup or size of the audience would be. I was pleased to find out we had a sell-out crowd (I think it was around 150 attendees) and they turned away 50+ others due to venue size. And talk about an incredible venue! The Leela Palace Hotel looks literally like a palace with 9 acres of lush gardens. And beautiful weather to match.
What I really enjoyed was the audience participation. After each talk we gave space for Q&A and the questions were passionate and insightful. The in-between hallway conversations were interesting too as India rapidly moves into not just being a place for offshoring but a place for innovation (this has been going on for a while; It is just more real to me now).
Jeremy Ashley, VP of Application User Experience, spoke on Debunking the ‘Ultimate Design Myth’. It was a really great talk that removed the idea that the best design comes from a design diva locked in a room for 24 hours. The truth is good design is hard work that takes moments of inspiration followed by lots of hard work. Surya Vanka, Manager User Experience Excellence at Microsoft showed his iterative product lifecycle chart as a the ooh-aah-wow! model. After research with users there comes that moment of ooh! of understanding the user's plight. Followed by moments of deeper understanding as the product is refined & tested. If done right it ends up as a 'wow!' for the user.
Sarah Bloomer gave two talks. The first was a really great look at the process of designing interfaces. I really enjoyed the talk as I have the tendency to be more ad-hoc and found it to be a good refresher as well as a challenge not to forget some fundamental techniques. Her last talk was on a survey of what tools & methods were commonly used by designers. A few surprises card sorts & patterns ranked lowest. Wireframes of course topped the list. The most valuable tool? Talking to & observing live customers. No surprise, but quite often skipped. Sarah is a gifted communicator. I don't believe she has written any books, but certainly if she chose to it would be a great asset to the design community.
Back to Surya. Surya is an incredible speaker. He gave two short talks. The first talk was on Design Led Product Innovation. Examples he cited in Microsoft Vista were the Ribbon Bar (which does a great job of employing Focus + Context), the magic corner for 2007 provides all file related commands as well as recent files (the difference is in the display treatment of the rounded corner button and the actual menu window that is not bound by traditional menu sizing), and the send a smiley which allows real time digg-like voting for whether you are having a good user experience at the moment or not.
Some of the points he made:
His second talk was on being a Change Agent (his unofficial title). This was
If you get a chance to hear Surya in the future I would highly recommend making the effort. I really liked the emphasis on understanding the culture and working within it, finding its values and using it to make the right changes.
My talk was on Designing for Ajax. I continue to give this talk in its various forms (I think I have given that talk 30 times since last January.) I am happy to report that it was very well received. I think most people appreciate the plethora of examples that illustrate the design principles. Sort of like a visual encyclopedia of current interaction patterns.
You can find my talks at billwscott.com
You can also see flickr photos of the easy7 conference.
Easy7 is a SIGCHI-SI conference held annually in Bangalore, India.
Being somewhat ignorant of the design community in India, I was not sure what the makeup or size of the audience would be. I was pleased to find out we had a sell-out crowd (I think it was around 150 attendees) and they turned away 50+ others due to venue size. And talk about an incredible venue! The Leela Palace Hotel looks literally like a palace with 9 acres of lush gardens. And beautiful weather to match.
What I really enjoyed was the audience participation. After each talk we gave space for Q&A and the questions were passionate and insightful. The in-between hallway conversations were interesting too as India rapidly moves into not just being a place for offshoring but a place for innovation (this has been going on for a while; It is just more real to me now).
Jeremy Ashley, VP of Application User Experience, spoke on Debunking the ‘Ultimate Design Myth’. It was a really great talk that removed the idea that the best design comes from a design diva locked in a room for 24 hours. The truth is good design is hard work that takes moments of inspiration followed by lots of hard work. Surya Vanka, Manager User Experience Excellence at Microsoft showed his iterative product lifecycle chart as a the ooh-aah-wow! model. After research with users there comes that moment of ooh! of understanding the user's plight. Followed by moments of deeper understanding as the product is refined & tested. If done right it ends up as a 'wow!' for the user.
Sarah Bloomer gave two talks. The first was a really great look at the process of designing interfaces. I really enjoyed the talk as I have the tendency to be more ad-hoc and found it to be a good refresher as well as a challenge not to forget some fundamental techniques. Her last talk was on a survey of what tools & methods were commonly used by designers. A few surprises card sorts & patterns ranked lowest. Wireframes of course topped the list. The most valuable tool? Talking to & observing live customers. No surprise, but quite often skipped. Sarah is a gifted communicator. I don't believe she has written any books, but certainly if she chose to it would be a great asset to the design community.
Back to Surya. Surya is an incredible speaker. He gave two short talks. The first talk was on Design Led Product Innovation. Examples he cited in Microsoft Vista were the Ribbon Bar (which does a great job of employing Focus + Context), the magic corner for 2007 provides all file related commands as well as recent files (the difference is in the display treatment of the rounded corner button and the actual menu window that is not bound by traditional menu sizing), and the send a smiley which allows real time digg-like voting for whether you are having a good user experience at the moment or not.
Some of the points he made:
- Virtuous Feedback Loops. Example: Send a Smiley.
- Deep Evidence. Using innovative technical solutions to gathering meaningful metrics.
- Simplicity is Hard But Worth Striving For
- Instead of FindAndUse it's now UseAndFind. This is the basis for the Office Ribbon Bar. With the incredible growth of features (which contrary to popular belief are needed to satisfy the wide audience) the Ribbon Bar took the approach to let the user USE the product and FIND out along the journey the commands as they need them. The old way focuses on the tools. The other on the flow.
- Constraints are Opportunities
- Details Matter
- Lead with Design/Validate with Data. I like this one in particular. This combines the interaction design approach of Alan Cooper with the detailed testing rigor of Jared Spool.
- Keep the Engine Under the Hood
- Don't Sacrifice Clarity for Depth
His second talk was on being a Change Agent (his unofficial title). This was
If you get a chance to hear Surya in the future I would highly recommend making the effort. I really liked the emphasis on understanding the culture and working within it, finding its values and using it to make the right changes.
My talk was on Designing for Ajax. I continue to give this talk in its various forms (I think I have given that talk 30 times since last January.) I am happy to report that it was very well received. I think most people appreciate the plethora of examples that illustrate the design principles. Sort of like a visual encyclopedia of current interaction patterns.
You can find my talks at billwscott.com
You can also see flickr photos of the easy7 conference.
Labels:
ajax,
conferences,
design,
patterns,
presentations,
schedule,
usability,
user_experience
Friday, October 06, 2006
Lisbon, Paris, AjaxWorld, Code Camp, UI11, WebGuild & Ajax Experience
The last few months have been pretty crazy. In one 8 day stretch I put in 17,000 miles in the air!
I had a wonderful time in Paris presenting a couple of sessions on design & developing for Ajax to the People in Action folks. It is interesting to see the excitement about "what is possible" being a world-wide phenomonon.
The same week Luke Wroblewski, Kevin Cheng, Peter Merholz and myself (we have dubbed ourselves the "Bay4") had a great time in Portugal in the wonderful city of Lisboa (Lisbon as we say) giving 4 back to back talks to the first annual SHIFT conference. Our wonderful hosts Bruno Figueiredo and Pedro Custódio gave us tours of the city. Most interesting (besides being in Portugal) was having discussions with people from all over Europe about what all these changes in the web world means to them.
In Portugal there are wonderfully bright folks who are starting to really get the whole concept of innovation. For so long (at least this is what I heard from multiple Portugese sources) there is a strong cultural influence that shuns failure. Of course the freedom to fail is a key ingredient to innovation and something that we generally cherish in the U.S. (probably to a fault).
I had a wonderful chat with an engineering manager, Bruno Pedro at Sapo (sapo.pt, largest site in Portugal) who echoed these sentiments. He shared his enthusiasm about the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as the Yahoo! UI library. Very encouraging to hear of the nice impact these tools are having around the world. He promises to share some of the exciting developments they will be making on this site.
You can check out photos from the various folks that attended as well as blog posts at Luke's blog, Luke's photos, Kevin's photos, Peter's photos and mine.
Closer to home I will be at the Silicon Valley Code Camp tomorrow (10/7/2006). There are 700 attendees and a bunch of us speaking. Its going to be at Foot Hills College this weekend in Los Altos, CA. Doug Crockford, Kent Brewster and myself will be giving talks from Yahoo!
This past week I spoke at the Ajax World Conference here in Santa Clara. Enjoyed giving my talk and had some great conversations afterward. But the highlight was getting to hear my fellow cube-mate, Doug Crockford, give his abbreviated Advanced JavaScript talk. Its definitely great material.
Next week I will be presenting an all day workshop with David (Heller) Malouf on Designing Rich Internet Applications at the UI11 Conference. Looking forward to the session (well over 100 signed up!) as well as the rest of Jared's exciting conference.
Then the next week I will be on a panel at the First Annual Web Guild Conference on "The New Web". I am an advisor for the Web Guild which usually meets over at the Googleplex. This looks to be a really great conference. Its very affordable and has an incredible lineup of great speakers like: Jared Spool (ui engineering), Ram Shiram (Founding Member Google), Marissa Mayer (Google VP), Kelly Goto (gotomedia) just to name a few. Still time to sign up!!
The next week Nate Koechley, Doug Crockford and I will be at the Ajax Experience. This was the best Ajax event I have attended (last event was in May) and I really look forward to hearing what the top quality speakers there have to say as well as connect with others in the field. That will be in Boston, hope you can join us there.
I had a wonderful time in Paris presenting a couple of sessions on design & developing for Ajax to the People in Action folks. It is interesting to see the excitement about "what is possible" being a world-wide phenomonon.
The same week Luke Wroblewski, Kevin Cheng, Peter Merholz and myself (we have dubbed ourselves the "Bay4") had a great time in Portugal in the wonderful city of Lisboa (Lisbon as we say) giving 4 back to back talks to the first annual SHIFT conference. Our wonderful hosts Bruno Figueiredo and Pedro Custódio gave us tours of the city. Most interesting (besides being in Portugal) was having discussions with people from all over Europe about what all these changes in the web world means to them.
In Portugal there are wonderfully bright folks who are starting to really get the whole concept of innovation. For so long (at least this is what I heard from multiple Portugese sources) there is a strong cultural influence that shuns failure. Of course the freedom to fail is a key ingredient to innovation and something that we generally cherish in the U.S. (probably to a fault).
I had a wonderful chat with an engineering manager, Bruno Pedro at Sapo (sapo.pt, largest site in Portugal) who echoed these sentiments. He shared his enthusiasm about the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as the Yahoo! UI library. Very encouraging to hear of the nice impact these tools are having around the world. He promises to share some of the exciting developments they will be making on this site.
You can check out photos from the various folks that attended as well as blog posts at Luke's blog, Luke's photos, Kevin's photos, Peter's photos and mine.
Closer to home I will be at the Silicon Valley Code Camp tomorrow (10/7/2006). There are 700 attendees and a bunch of us speaking. Its going to be at Foot Hills College this weekend in Los Altos, CA. Doug Crockford, Kent Brewster and myself will be giving talks from Yahoo!
This past week I spoke at the Ajax World Conference here in Santa Clara. Enjoyed giving my talk and had some great conversations afterward. But the highlight was getting to hear my fellow cube-mate, Doug Crockford, give his abbreviated Advanced JavaScript talk. Its definitely great material.
Next week I will be presenting an all day workshop with David (Heller) Malouf on Designing Rich Internet Applications at the UI11 Conference. Looking forward to the session (well over 100 signed up!) as well as the rest of Jared's exciting conference.
Then the next week I will be on a panel at the First Annual Web Guild Conference on "The New Web". I am an advisor for the Web Guild which usually meets over at the Googleplex. This looks to be a really great conference. Its very affordable and has an incredible lineup of great speakers like: Jared Spool (ui engineering), Ram Shiram (Founding Member Google), Marissa Mayer (Google VP), Kelly Goto (gotomedia) just to name a few. Still time to sign up!!
The next week Nate Koechley, Doug Crockford and I will be at the Ajax Experience. This was the best Ajax event I have attended (last event was in May) and I really look forward to hearing what the top quality speakers there have to say as well as connect with others in the field. That will be in Boston, hope you can join us there.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Latest Talks, Upcoming Events
Had a wonderful opportunity speaking at BayCHI last night. Excellent turnout. The presentation material can be found here.
The highlight for me was hearing Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress talk about lessons he has learned in building a startup. Matt is only 22, but has the wisdom of a sage, is bright and incredible funny. Could have listened to him for hours. Also love to hear his "mom" stories :-)
I have a pretty full schedule over the next three months. Here is where I will be speaking:
Please vote for our panel!! You can select up to 10 panels from the Panel Picker at the SXSW site.
The highlight for me was hearing Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress talk about lessons he has learned in building a startup. Matt is only 22, but has the wisdom of a sage, is bright and incredible funny. Could have listened to him for hours. Also love to hear his "mom" stories :-)
I have a pretty full schedule over the next three months. Here is where I will be speaking:
- 08.15 - MetaDesign. San Francisco (private)
- 08.24 - O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit. Sebastapol, CA (private)
- 08.25-08.27 - O'Reilly Foo Camp. Sebastapol, CA (private)
- 09.18 - Travelocity. Southlake, TX (private)
- 09.19 - Federal Reserve Software Convention. Dallas, TX (private)
- 09.25 - Rich Internet Conference. Paris, France
- 09.28-29 - SHIFT Conference. Lisbon, Portugal
- 10.02-10.04 - Ajax World Conference. Santa Clara, CA
- 10.09-10.12 - UI11 Conference (Jared Spool). Cambridge, MA
- 10.19 - Web Guild Conference. Mountain View, CA @ Google
- 10.23-10.25 - The Ajax Experience. Boston, MA
Please vote for our panel!! You can select up to 10 panels from the Panel Picker at the SXSW site.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Ajax Experience Slides & Ajax Links
At the Adaptive Path Designing & Building with Ajax workshop (Austin, TX) I mentioned that I would post a set of good Ajax technical links. You can find these links (in their unadorned state) on my portfolio site.
I also spoke on Friday afternoon at the Ajax Experience in San Francisco. You can find the same basic talk I gave there in a previous blog article.
Michael Mahemoff has also posted his notes on Ajaxian of my talk.
The Ajax Experience was an excellent conference. The depth of materials, the quality of speakers, the excellent venue, and the awesome nofluffjuststuff and Ajaxian guys really made this the best conference I have been to this year.
Technorati Tags: ajax, design, patterns, design patterns, ria, user+experience, interaction design, ypatterns, ajaxexperience, billscott
I also spoke on Friday afternoon at the Ajax Experience in San Francisco. You can find the same basic talk I gave there in a previous blog article.
Michael Mahemoff has also posted his notes on Ajaxian of my talk.
The Ajax Experience was an excellent conference. The depth of materials, the quality of speakers, the excellent venue, and the awesome nofluffjuststuff and Ajaxian guys really made this the best conference I have been to this year.
Technorati Tags: ajax, design, patterns, design patterns, ria, user+experience, interaction design, ypatterns, ajaxexperience, billscott
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user_experience
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Designing for Ajax - Presentation
Update (07/24/06): You can now find my presentations at http://billwscott.com/share/presentations/
Recently I have been giving a talk on Designing for Ajax. I have given the talk or variations of the talk at:
In the course of giving the talk I have now simplified it to 7 interactive design principles:
You can download a medium sized Quicktime version of the presentation here.
You should download it to your desktop as I don't want my host to have to suffer with streaming it. Also, the interactive (click to move through presentation) works better when downloaded.
The PDF version is also available here.
I will be giving this talk (or variations of the talk) in the next couple of months at:
Technorati Tags: ajax, design, patterns, design patterns, ria, user+experience, interaction design, ypatterns, yui, billscott
Recently I have been giving a talk on Designing for Ajax. I have given the talk or variations of the talk at:
- eBig/Emoryville, CA
- Yahoo! Search & Marketplace User Experience Team
- Yahoo! Front End Engineering Summit
- eTech/San Diego, CA
- Real World Ajax/NYC
- VeriSign/Mt. View
- WebGuild/Mt. View
In the course of giving the talk I have now simplified it to 7 interactive design principles:
- Keep it direct
- Provide live feedback
- Offer an invitation
- Cross borders relunctantly
- Create a light footprint
- Show Transitions
- Think in Objects
You can download a medium sized Quicktime version of the presentation here.
You should download it to your desktop as I don't want my host to have to suffer with streaming it. Also, the interactive (click to move through presentation) works better when downloaded.
The PDF version is also available here.
I will be giving this talk (or variations of the talk) in the next couple of months at:
- CSU/Hayward (not open to public)
- City College/SF (not open to public)
- Oracle Brown Bag
- Adobe/Macromedia Brown Bag
- eBay Brown Bag
- Adaptive Path/Austin
- The Ajax Experience/SF
- Adaptive Path/Amsterdam
- SIGCHI.NL/Amsterdam
- If you find other examples that illustrate the patterns I have in the presentation, feel free to
- Tag the site in either del.icio.us.com or myweb2.search.yahoo.com under the tag 'ypatternexample'. Add other tags as you see fit. Also, add a comment to tell how to see the feature or what your thoughts positive or negative are about this example
- Or send me a link, snapshot or description via email at ajaxevangelist @ yahoo dot com
- If you find good counterexamples, also tag them and not it in the comments.
Technorati Tags: ajax, design, patterns, design patterns, ria, user+experience, interaction design, ypatterns, yui, billscott
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Round Up from IA Summit 2006
Just got back from lovely Vancouver where I attended the IA Summit 06 (Mar 23-27). I really meant to blog during the event. But I always found someone interesting to talk to or somewhere lovely in Vancouver to explore. I was also on a panel discussing Challenges to Wireframing with Rich Internet Applications.
As a quick aside, I do not believe I have visited a friendlier city. Smiling, friendly, helpful and always accommodating. And what an incredibly beautiful city. The 2010 Winter Olympics will be there as well as just north in Whistler. I got a chance to drive half-way to Whistler to the lovely town of Squamish. Mountains, sea, waterfall-- splendid beauty.
Ok now back to the summit.
Big Thoughts
So not really sure I came away with a lot of new revelations. But several ideas were reinforced.
Has to go to my fellow Yahoo!s, Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao. They presented on Communicating Concepts Through Comics. Kevin is one half of the wonderful ok/cancel site (the other have is Tom Chi also at Yahoo!). It was a fun talk that showed how storyboarding with comics can communicate user scenarios in a way that engages the complete product team as well as users who participate in reading the comics and commenting on the storyline. It is a great technique for fleshing out the conceptual phase & features of a product.
Kevin and Jane also gave an all day workshop and taught people how to draw simplified comics. I dropped in at the end of the day and was really impressed with some of the comics I saw. (I will have them on flickr later tonight tagged as iasummit06
My Panel
I had a great time with Todd Warfel, Thomas Vander Wal, Nathan Curtis and Livia Labate discussing with the audience the challenges of creating rich interactions with wireframes.
Some folks requested the latest version of our interesting moments grid. You can find the inline editing and drag and drop templates at my blog article on The Interaction Matrix.
Some Books, Sites and other Things of Random Interest
They gave us big badges with lots of space to tag ourselves (or let other tag us). I chose to tag myself like this:

As a quick aside, I do not believe I have visited a friendlier city. Smiling, friendly, helpful and always accommodating. And what an incredibly beautiful city. The 2010 Winter Olympics will be there as well as just north in Whistler. I got a chance to drive half-way to Whistler to the lovely town of Squamish. Mountains, sea, waterfall-- splendid beauty.
Ok now back to the summit.
Big Thoughts
So not really sure I came away with a lot of new revelations. But several ideas were reinforced.
- Make good design viral
Not his words, but my take from Jared Spool's talk on the Role of IAs in User Experience: The best organizations propogate good design by education & adminstration rather than by review or consulting. Both consultation & review become bottlenecks. I have often been in centralized groups (as I am now at Yahoo!) and I find that sharing knowledge and creating many avenues for sharing best practices to be the secret to new and wonderful ideas forming. Here were some of his tips: - Have a clear vision of success
- Disseminate user knowledge and feedback quickly
- Use design problems as teachable moments. People that find problems get kudos.
- Make collecting feedback inexpensive
- Share learning
- Make good design the path of least resistance
- Embrace Change
I didn't really hear anyone say this but there are some in the Information Architecture community that are a little fearful of the changes that are happening with the move from content being central to interaction being more central. I say to them go read Who Moves My Cheese? and go embrace change. Jared mentioned that if you are going to be an IA specialist you will need to find companies large enough to have an economy to support your specialization. [hey there are folks who only do surgery on the hand-- they are needed but are not abundant.] And let me clarify one point. The skillset of IA is just as needed now as ever. It is the specific narrow role I am speaking of. - It's About the Community, Stupid
The term mentioned by Rashmi Sinha was Social Information Architecture. This is the understanding the information must be crafted/architected in a way that can be virally manipulated by social networks. It gets to the heart of the thought the experience is not just the computer human interaction but the interaction between humans enabled by technology. This is also the thought behind David Weinberger's book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (he gave the keynote).
Has to go to my fellow Yahoo!s, Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao. They presented on Communicating Concepts Through Comics. Kevin is one half of the wonderful ok/cancel site (the other have is Tom Chi also at Yahoo!). It was a fun talk that showed how storyboarding with comics can communicate user scenarios in a way that engages the complete product team as well as users who participate in reading the comics and commenting on the storyline. It is a great technique for fleshing out the conceptual phase & features of a product.
Kevin and Jane also gave an all day workshop and taught people how to draw simplified comics. I dropped in at the end of the day and was really impressed with some of the comics I saw. (I will have them on flickr later tonight tagged as iasummit06
My Panel
I had a great time with Todd Warfel, Thomas Vander Wal, Nathan Curtis and Livia Labate discussing with the audience the challenges of creating rich interactions with wireframes.
Some folks requested the latest version of our interesting moments grid. You can find the inline editing and drag and drop templates at my blog article on The Interaction Matrix.
Some Books, Sites and other Things of Random Interest
- Book - How Customers Think
- Carson Workshops - Mentioned by Francois Jordaan
- Book - Lead Users - Understanding early adopters as users
- Interesting IA Tool - swipr - Visio toolkit for end-to-end wireframing. Looks promising.
They gave us big badges with lots of space to tag ourselves (or let other tag us). I chose to tag myself like this:
Technorati Tags: iasummit06, iasummit, vancouver, information architecture, design, user+experience, wireframing
Labels:
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Friday, March 17, 2006
Real World Ajax - NYC
Real World Ajax in NYC, Monday 3/13 was a blast. I gave a talk on Designing for Ajax. It is a look at the most common patterns used by Ajax applications and the good design principles that underpin them.
You can catch a video interview with me about what is going on with the patterns, ajax and developer services at Yahoo.
I especially enjoyed
It was good to touch base with JackBe founder, Jacob Derechin. The exciting news for them is they have added three really talented folks from Sun Microsystems (Deepak Alur, Dan Malks, John Crupi). These are the authors of the Core J2EE Patterns book. I had an great talk with them about the world of patterns. JackBe is an interesting Ajax toolkit for the enterprise. It is the only full framework I am aware of that can handle really low bandwidth/latency connections (and I am talking 9600 baud Ajax!)
So others have done a great job of summarizing. Here are a few articles on the conference:
Jeremy Geelan and Dion Hinchcliffe are great hosts. Check out their upcoming seminars in San Jose, CA in April as well as back in NYC in June.
You can catch a video interview with me about what is going on with the patterns, ajax and developer services at Yahoo.
I especially enjoyed
- Christophe Conraet from Adobe demo'ing the extra cool Adobe Ajax-Flex Bridge. I have already found an internal app within Yahoo! that this might be a good fit for. Essentially I can now mix Flex and Ajax freely on the page. I can manipulate flex (flash) components via JavaScript. And with the connectivity capabilities of flash you can do some pretty cool Comet style interactions (collaboration, white boarding, push style technology)
- David Heinnemer Hannson's Rails talk. David just keeps adding more and more cool stuff to Rails every day. His example of driving multiple rails applications via a flash bridge (again Comet-style technology) was really cool.
- Kevin Hackman of Tibco gave a very interesting tour of early Ajax apps in the enterprise (1999-2003). Its really cool to see what incredible work was happening before the "Ajax Christening."
- Scott Dietzen, CTO of Zimbra gave a great look into the world of Zimbra. I really like the Zimlets. Great way to extend their product. Scott, Ross and the others at Zimbra are a very talented team.
It was good to touch base with JackBe founder, Jacob Derechin. The exciting news for them is they have added three really talented folks from Sun Microsystems (Deepak Alur, Dan Malks, John Crupi). These are the authors of the Core J2EE Patterns book. I had an great talk with them about the world of patterns. JackBe is an interesting Ajax toolkit for the enterprise. It is the only full framework I am aware of that can handle really low bandwidth/latency connections (and I am talking 9600 baud Ajax!)
So others have done a great job of summarizing. Here are a few articles on the conference:
Jeremy Geelan and Dion Hinchcliffe are great hosts. Check out their upcoming seminars in San Jose, CA in April as well as back in NYC in June.
Labels:
design,
presentations,
schedule,
usability,
user_experience
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