Jeffrey Veen ============ Designing the next generation of web apps How many seen hotwired? First commercial website i worked on in 1994. Started a company called adaptive path - there I started a product called measuremap, then it got acquired, new job is at Google. Want to talk a little about web 2.0. How many understand term web 2.0? Fuzzy term people use for marketing and funding? In San Francisco "web 2.0" is as bad as George Bush's foreign policy. So much hype, worried we're seeing the same trends as we saw in 1999/2000. Want to talk about that hype, how boom and bust cycles happen, and what we can pull out of that. The press is crazy about this - if you believe the press you need to be on top of web2.0 right now or you're company will go bust etc. Someone said "Ability to scale up to many users, better use of bandwidth, ease of use, and things like RSS feeds" Sprinkle web 2.0 fairy dust on a boring site? 17th century tulip-mania went on in the netherlands, influx of wealth, new technology, boom. Changed economics of western europe. Repeated over and over again - Steam Engine, Henry Ford etc. New innovations were flooded with new wealth, then bust. Cars - also created suburbs, what it means to be a teenager. Creates a lasting technological change. Tokyo real estate, then our industry, 1999 5 pet stores went public, now none of them do. Why there's now such a strong reaction against web 2.0. In 2000 everyone retreated and hunkered down, creative people started solving some of the problems that needed to be done, got some rest, some perspective. We're back to work. Starting to see edges coming off - 4 or 5 virtual ajax desktops, some of these ideas which aren't really ideas aren't really working. See what's good in web 2.0 and what's good in there. Can't write it all off as hype. Tim O'Reilly Meme Map - shows a lot of stuff that people assume are web2.0 - flickr, pagerank, wikis, blogs, long tail, beta. A lot of this stuff is not new at all - would have described the web this was 10 years ago. Flickr has innovated as it's fun. The elements of user experience - Jesse James Garret - Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope, Strategy. Surface - typograhy, layout, color, iconography - makes a website appear attractive, brand identity. Blogger - put a lot of effort into making it friendly and easy. Skeleton - what are the things on the page that communicate how the site works, interaction design Structure - architecture of site - how is the stuff organised Scope - what of all the things we can do can we do now - limitless stuff we could do, what are we going to do next? Strategy - what is our reason for being, and how does it apply to the web? Great book - give it to your boss. Surface ------- so easy to see when we get this wrong, "caution, this sign has sharp edges, also the bridge is out ahead" Can't tell what data on screen is. Add some labeling - can see it's average rainfall. Add typography, maybe add some color to show people what data means. Remove numbers, replace with raindrops. Is it more useful? Meteorologists would say no, but in a sidebar on expedia its probably right. Can get carried away though. How would we take the next step? One theme of web 2.0 is about putting users in control - so could do that. Doesn't diminish the role of design, makes it much more about interactivity. Use the skills that have develoeped over centuries and apply that to design. Trust your users as peers. Like this more than publisher/consumer model. Even if a website is highly usable and provides useful information in a logical arrangement this may fail to impress a user whose first impression was negative. Only showed them sites for 1/20th of a second (websites appear on screen quickly). Trust is something that happens on the surface, visual appeal, cognition and emotion - see the site and fit that into your understanding that you've built up over time. Don Norman - emotional design, juicer on his counter. B.J. Fogg - persuasive technology - how to manipulate people through interfaces. Put users in control, up to them to decide what to do, users control their data. Skeleton -------- Typically do design with a whiteboard - pretty confident with this, do wireframes, schematics. Then Jesse says there's another way to do this - Ajax - coined in the shower while thinking about a project where data was always saved. Is there a way we can use javascript to do this? He knew he needed a buzzword to convince execs to pay for additional development. None of this stuff is new - 6-7 years old, but having it together as a platform, level of sophistication in our audience. Can see things where we don't have the penalty of navigation - almost an exploration of the page that results. Kayak.com - no interstitials or search, not afraid to make errors or explore. "Roller Skates for the web" Principles: Discoverability: search ahead on kayak.com - actually useful. All about hints to people, enhance the user experience, not overwhelming. Panic shopping cart. but discoverable features may be too innovative. Catch errors before they happen help users not make mistakes. Validation of forms, almost a game, in web1.0 think how many screens. Context: Uploading files - ruby on rails helper, finally. Giving a sense of context, real time feedback. Feedback: used to the whole page going away and the new one appear. 37 signals yellow fade - when you make a change something flashes - you can see something has happened, no lag so you need feedback. Thinking about interaction design, change from state based pages. Structure --------- Spent a lot of time earlier in my career working in Information Architecture. That too has been changed by interaction and participation. This is the documents folder from my mac - how I used to organise my stuff. I do a lot less of that - type a few relatively descriptive keywords into filename, and use desktop search to find them. Changing way i think about personal taxonomy and navigation. Same happening with del.icio.us - but also with social media aspect. Tag something with blog and design. "Show me blog from all users" - everything in the system with the same metadata I used, can pivot on that. Architecture is based on the experience. FLickr is a great example of that - photo from my site - scared of lizards, went to the park, saw a lizard about 3 foot long, went to take a photo, lizard sneezes. Tagged photo "lizard" - clusters, click on globe, fascinating page - none of this content or structure is provided by flickr. Algorithmic editorialising. Breaks down this traditional hierarchical structure - used to have a top down taxonomy. Scope ----- So much more focussed now - seems to be so much easier to experiment now without risk. 10 years ago you needed 10 million dollars, 2 million to sun, 2 million to oracle, 2 million to doubleclick. Software is free, hardware is commoditised, ads are pay-for-click. About old problems, building on new platforms, with a level of participation. Can look at stuff like content management - vignette - half a million dollars to implement, 60-70% of all enterprise content management projects will fail. Interesting how we could recommend small open source or free tools - so typepad for press releases. For 80% of content management problems, a blog is good enough. Starting to supplant the big enterprise packages. Look at the level of participation - putting CMS's with XML and metadata into the hands of people. Blogs pointing to free mp3 downloads. Now there's a site - hype machine - sucking all this up and turning it into structured data. Almost the Semantic Web, but bottom up. Maps used to be thought of as a search data, now it's about exploring and open apis, chicago street crime mashup. Citizen journalism at it's finest. Built this after work, would never have been able to do the deal with the satellite company. Stats packages - measuremap - idea which allows us to track stats - helps with ego. Open api for your web stats, experimenting with what's possible, did a lot of work around that. \ Way people interact with your sites are just one piece. Commoditisation with almost everything on the web is happening, people may not actually see your site, just use the data. Strategy -------- How are the audiences changing? How does that affect what we do? Came out of office, downtime san francisco covered in smoke, means countryside is on fire, look at web browser, nothing is on the chronicle website, nothing on local tv station, go to metafilter, someone has posted a comment "what's with all the smoke". East Bay Blog, comment there, sfist has the story, controlled burn up in park. Nothing to worry about. Got all my information from amateurs - amateurisation. Powerful tools in the hands of people with passion are changing the media. "A landmark moment" - 60 minute report on whether George Bush had served in military, document had been fabricated, the political blogs jumped on the story, blogs played an active role in the story. Some bloke on a typewriter blog knew the typewriter they were using back then couldn't have made this document. People lost their jobs. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies that traditional publishers are paid to overcome. No longer worth paying for. How many of you who travelled here talked to someone when booking tickets? Found tools more efficient and put them in the hands of the people. Craiglist puts people together. Wikipedia. Learning a lot about trust. Jimmy Wales knows the trends, 25000 docs on english they had their first attack, same thing happened with german version and so on. Learning how we deal with community on the web. Lot of people working on this stuff right now. Eric talking about how they changed CSS, that's what all these startups are - small group working on a passionate ideas. Surface - trust, ajax changes everything Structure - don't worry as much about top down hierarchy Lot we can learn from web 2.0 - the boom/bust will happen, some people will be rich, but a lot we can learn, and a lot we can put in the hands of people. http://www.veen.com/nextgen.pdf