Design and Effects

Learn best practices for design in your choice of several hands-on sessions – Coverage includes interaction design; using Flash with Ajax; avoiding cross-browser issues; adding custom fonts with sIFR; Canvas; merging Ajax with accessibility; Silverlight and more. You’ll also hear a first-hand account of common pitfalls to avoid when developing enterprise Ajax applications; and find out what design patterns will ensure a ruined user experience. Select a title, or choose a topic: Interaction Design | Graphics & Effects.

Interaction Design

•Anti-patterns: Designing for a Poor Web Experience with Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!

Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this new talk, Bill explores the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. Bill uses 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. You will learn:

  • • The underlying principles that frame good design
    • Common patterns that illustrate poor choices in design
    • A set of anti-patterns that can help web authors refactor to a good solution
    • A vocabulary for approaching design and how to use Ajax & Flash to design rich web experiences and more.

•Custom DOM Attributes for Fun and Profit with Pete Forde, Partner, Unspace Interactive

This session explores one of the most powerful features of XHTML: the ability to extend the nodes we use with customized, semantically meaningful attributes. Learn to go beyond seeing your markup language as static and inflexible, and relying on classes to imply application functionality. Learn to use custom DOM attributes to attach metadata to dynamically created objects in their projects.

•A Netflix Case Study - Developing a Great User Interface with Sean Kane, Director of User Interface Engineering, Netflix

Netflix has long established its place as a leader in elegant, interactive web functionality – including the invention of the now ubiquitous 5-star rating widget interaction. This presentation will detail the innovative, rich Netflix website features and how they were constructed for an optimal user experience. You’ll also hear Director of UI Engineering Sean Kane detail the development process of several rich features, from concept to user testing to website testing to launch. This case study will highlight:

  • • Design patterns that have resonated well with users;
    • Ideas and patterns that were rejected, and why;
    • Efficiency gains realized by the Netflix team after launching various rich features;
    • Performance benchmarks for Ajax-based features and more.

•Buildling Silverlight Applications with ASP.NET with Matt Gibbs, Development Manager, UI Framework and Services Team, Microsoft

This session explores the features of Silverlight available for building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight. We cover how to create UI using XAML markup and code, how to build a custom control, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and how to manipulate data with XML and LINQ.

•Learning to Love Forms with Aaron Gustafson, Founder, Easy! Designs LLC

Forms are the central component of most websites and all web applications, yet few people take the time to build them correctly. Getting it right could mean the difference between people finding your site or application useful and them leaving disappointed with the experience. In this session, design expert Aaron Gustafson explores forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You will learn:

  • • Basic form building blocks;
    • Markup for common form components;
    • Error, warning, and formatting messages;
    • Form styling and its implications;
    • Browser oddities with certain form controls;
    • Best practices for form manipulation with JavaScript and Ajax.

•Merging Ajax and Accessibility with Mark Meeker, Architect, UI Engineering team, Orbitz Worldwide

One of the greatest challenges with rich web development is ensuring your site or application accessible to everyone. Many in the development community claim that interactivity and accessibility are in direct opposition to each other. Learn how to overcome accessibility challenges in rich web application development during a session with Orbitx UI engineering team architect Mark Meeker. You’ll learn:

  • • New development approaches that can make interactivity and accessibility complementary;
  • • How to grow your team into one that creates rich interactive sites that still remain accessible.

•Prototyping the Rich Web Experience: Experiments in Creating an Ajax framework for Prototyping with Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!

How do you communicate the design for a rich web experience? Traditionally web developers and architects have depended on tools like Photoshop, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Fireworks, ImageReady, Visio, OmniGraffle, and so on. However, in rich web development prototyping provides the best way to fully understand & test the nuance of detailed interactions. The challenge is that it is difficult to find someone who is both good at design & prototyping. In this talk, Yahoo Ajax evangelist Bill Scott enables you to effectively prototype rich web applications. You’ll learn about:

  • • The tools & techniques for communicating rich design;
    • A simplified Ajax library that makes most behaviors and interactions declarative via CSS styles or by simple declarative style programming;
    • Best practices for quickly prototyping the most common patterns with the library.

The prototyping library will be available for download at the time of the conference session.

•Ruining the User Experience with Aaron Gustafson, Founder, Easy! Designs LLC

With the exploding popularity of DOM Scripting, Ajax and JavaScript in general, it's important to know what to do -- and what not to do -- when dealing with these technologies. This session walks you through several real-world examples, pointing out common mistakes that hinder usability, accessibility, and search while teaching you ways to avoid them altogether, either programmatically or simply by altering the way you think about JavaScript-based interactivity.

In this session, you will learn:

  • • How to meet your users' needs and expectations in a progressively-enhanced way;
    • Common mistakes in interaction design;
    • Progressive enhancement as a concept;
    • How to deliver a layered interface;
    • Progressive enhancement with CSS;
    • Progressive enhancement with JavaScript.

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Graphics and Effects

•Flash: Strengths vs. Weaknesses and How to Best Utilize it in Projects with Geoff Stearns, Flash Engineer, YouTube

Flash can help you extend Ajax applications beyond the limitations of what browsers can handle – but its often misused. In this talk, YouTube Flash engineer Geoff Stearns demonstrates effective use of Flash when building hybrid Flash/Ajax Web apps, and discusses best practices when using Flash in a modern Web application. Geoff will also cover techniques that can improve the usability of your Flash and Ajax projects. During this session, you will learn:

  • • Optimal use cases for Flash;
    • Common examples of overuse or abuse of Flash;
    • How to integrate Flash seamlessly with an Ajax application;
    • Strategies for making your Flash and Ajax apps and websites more usable with browser back button tools, deep linking, and search engine optimization.

•OpenLaszlo 4.0 - Java ME, Ajax and beyond with Max Carlson, co-founder, Laszlo Systems & OpenLaszlo.org

OpenLaszlo 4.0 released earlier this year with support for both Ajax and Flash as runtime platforms. Developers can now choose the best runtime technology without being tied to any single proprietary technology. Join Max Carlson, co-founder of Laszlo Systems and OpenLaszlo.org, as he reviews OpenLaszlo 4.0 and details the new Java ME and DHTML support. You’ll learn:

  • • The risks and rewards of moving to DHMTL and Ajax as a runtime;
    • What’s on the plate for future releases;
    • And much more.

•sIFR: From Designer's Dream to JavaScript Nightmare with Mark Wubben, Developer at Xopus

Rendering custom fonts and typefaces is a constant challenge for web designers and developers. sIFR is a tool designed to help alleviate issues and barriers to custom fonts through a combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash. During this session, you’ll learn:

  • • How to identify and work around common browser bugs and rendering issues;
    • Why resorting to JavaScript and Flash is necessary to render custom headlines
    • How to deploy sIFR on a website and more.

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