Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

user experience

I signed up for Day One of Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week 2005, spurred on mainly by the promise of lots of talk about new trends in web development (“Web 2.0”) and a case study of Flickr. In the end, the case study was only a small part of a day filled with speakers evangelizing about the future of the Web. I’m not entirely sure what I took away from the event in a concrete sense, but it’s always a bit edifying just to hear people talking about these things.

My favorite parts of the day’s sessions actually involved pulling up Web sites (or at least screenshots of them) and talking, usually in a broad sense, about how they work. My big take-away this time was upcoming.org, demoed by Jeffrey Veen. I’d given the collaborative event listing site only a cursory glance a couple months ago, but after Veen’s brief walk-through, I’m really impressed by it and think it could be a good inspiration fodder.

By the end of the day, I was thoroughly burned out on the new buzzword du jour, “Web 2.0,” which (in my rough definition) refers to the notion that the next phase of the Web will be dominated by Web services that munge different sources of data for new and exciting uses, with a healthy appetite for data generated by the users themselves. (So, Encarta vs. Wikipedia, and so on.) I feel like we’re in a really exciting period of experimentation with Web development, but, that said, there are important issues — like accessibility, search engine optimization, usage metrics — that need to be worked out before a lot of these new apps (particularly the ones that rely heavily on AJAX) are ready for prime time in front of a wide, diverse audience.

(Random aside: Are cutting edge apps, with rapid development/deployment cycles and a “perpetually in beta” mindset, incompatible with apps intended for a mainsteam audience, which tends to expect consistency and support for a wide variety of issues? Eric Costello of Flickr mentioned some of the new demands the site’s staff have come under to support a user base that’s increasingly shifting from early adopters to more mainstream users — users who need more documentation and, expecting consistency, are a little less open to a freewheeling development cycle that might bring regular changes to the site interface.)

One of the big themes of the day was how AJAX-based Web applications are requiring significant changes in the way sites are designed, with a shift from information architecture to interaction design. (The latter has been a longstanding concern for immersive Flash sites, where elements of the movie can change without refreshing the entire page. AJAX, as applied, can be used kinda like Flash, but without the need to load a plugin.)

Also with all the techno-evangelism in the room, it was refreshing to hear the occasional word of caution. “Web 2.0 is the future” … but while AJAX is cool, use it where it makes sense to solve an actual problem, not just because you can. (Sounds like the same admonitions I hear — and sometimes give — for various uses of Flash, and it’s no less wise a piece of advice here.)