Rob Grady

SXSW 2008 started out great with AJAX and Flash Mistakes: Lessons Learned Building SlideShare presented by Jonathan Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare. Boutelle’s style and presentation were a welcome start to a day of panels and presentations that can always be a challenge.

Presentation Key Takeaways:

Modal Dialogs are seductive

1. Provides a way to get around links and the challenge of process flows
2. Developing process flows is hard
3. Pop-ups have been a shortcut to avoid tough process flows
4. Ajax has also become a similar crutch
5. Ajax Design Patterns is a good reference to learn Ajax UI patterns
6. Lightboxes are the equivalent of Pop-Ups 2.0 and are ‘ghetto’
7. You should only use modal dialogs when you want to completely capture a user’s attention

Ajax looks like a performance enhancer

1. Ajax can cause performance problems
2. Always consider performance vs. scalability
3. Not a good solution for performance enhancements

When considering pre-fetching, examine whether it is better to be DHTML or Ajax

1. Examine the percentage of the time the pre-fetched content is actually opened
2. Is there a significant cost associated with retrieving the extra data
3. Examine the current page response time without the hidden panel loaded

Metrics get fooled by Ajax

1. Google analytics is good for the web 1.0 world
2. For slideshare Google analytics inaccurately reported the bounce rate by 400% higher than it actually was
3. While the new Google analytics (currently in Beta) will provide ‘event’ reporting, it is expected to be limited to 100 events per session which is too small

Related content is an opportunity for optimization

1. Many ‘related content’ algorithm’s will pull from tags and it doesn’t necessarily show content that people want
2. Slideshare, targeting more page views, changed the algorithm and increased related content views from 4% to 7%.

Uploading Fishhook Method

1. Slideshare uses a ‘fishhook’ method for uploading
2. When the user selects the file(s) the system immediately begins to upload the files without needing to press the submit button
3. This leverages “invisible Flash” paradigm to do the work behind the scenes
4. Provides user’s with the needed feedback

External Widgets

1. External widgets (add this, gigya) are a great way to get up and running
2. The third parties manage the changing APIs instead of you
3. Users need a direct path to data

SEO and Traffic Nightmares

1. Flash and JavaScript are not SEO friendly
2. Post-fetch data is not seen by google
3. Bake any code or content into a page when loaded if you need google to see it
4. Make sure you get credit traffic as initially S3 was getting credited with some of slideshare’s traffic

Other Points

1. Don’t just save data, provide users with feedback that something has been done
2. Animation: Dial it back
3. If Fonts are important, Flash is still lighter and better since JPEGs are still to heavy
4. Flash Full-Screening is OK as long as it is user opt-in
5. For apps such as the multimedia editing tool, full screen is appropriate
6. Using invisible flash can be great and there is a dojo javascript library to connect to flash local objects

It was a great presentation and you can see the presentation online here