The 7 Rules for Great Web Application Design

How Not To FAIL At Web Services

More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries

Microformats: A Quiet Revolution

Emerging Trends of Mobile Technology

Designing the Future of The New York Times

Version Control: No More Save As…

OpenID, OAuth, Data Portability and the Enterprise

Designing Our Way Through Web Forms

New Think for Old Publishing

What Can We Learn From Games

Evolving Digital Technologies and Profitable Green Building

Wireframes for the Wicked

Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable

Building Strong Online Communities

Tuesday Keynote Interview

• It was actually difficult to find instructions online for the migration from Drupal to Wordpress but there were plenty of posts on migrating from Wordpress to Drupal
• I had to use my Drupal RSS feed which actually worked extremely well with the exception that I lost all my comments.

While Drupal has so much functionality, the needs and time dictated a simpler solution.

In no particular order here are my notes and comments:

1. The Great Unknown – Nobody knows with a great deal of certainty whats going to happen
2. Who Knows, Who Cares – Stop worrying about every little thing you don’t know or can’t know about. Too much time is wasted trying to identify, quantify and mitigate risks with uknowns. If you need to change, then change.
3. Be successful and make money by helping other people make money. Great point. Always be adding value to your customers and you will continue to be successful.
4. Target non-consumption and non-consumers Great reference to Clayton Christensen’s business teachings about providing ‘good enough’ alternatives for consumers who are not open to current offerings because they are priced out of reach.
5. Minimize the chance for competing directly with entrenched players.
6. Question your work regularly Be reflective on the activities you’re doing and the value being added.
7. Read your product out loud. Too often we spend a ton of time trying to make broad sweeping changes when all that is necessary is to make minor textual changes. “Too much focus on pixels, not on words.” “Rewrite First, Redesign second since the design should fit the content”
8. Err on the side of simple. Many projects fail because they try to do too much. The longer it takes to develop the less likely it will launch. Force people to get into the ‘new zone’. People like to work on new things so keep them working on new projects. People lose interest and steam with extended proejcts. Resist the urge to do ‘more’ next time around.
9. Invest in what DOESN’T change now and ten years from now. Invest in key core competencies such as customer service for FedEx and shipping for Amazon. Follow the things that people want
10. Follow the chefs. When you look at the great Chefs, they succeed by giving it away. They give away the recipes and it comes back to them.
11. Interruptions kill productivity. An obvious but great reminder that when you have close colleagues that continuously talk to you, you don’t get much done. Essentially, the little interruptions break the work time down into smaller and smaller bits that make everyone less productive. Passive communication like campfire provides a more formalized way to communicate ‘as available’.
12. Roadmaps send you in the wrong direction. I disagree with the statement but agree with the premise that rolling an 18 month roadmap to customers will ultimately leave people disappointed. Quote: “It’s ok to think about the future just don’t write it down.” This is just too much of a broad statement
13. Do the right thing at the right time. Per the previous, post I agree that you need to make the right decision for the right time
14. Be clear in crisis. Be open and honest with teh public when a mistake is made. “The web doesn’t stop even though you do”
15. Make tiny decisions. “When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes.” Celebrate small launches and it is a boost for morale.
16. Make it matter. If something doesn’t matter, don’t do it.

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

Now that I’ve settled in a bit I will be posting about the activities and challenges of starting, staffing and managing an agile product team from scratch.

With that said, here is an arbitrary picture of Trunk bay in St. John that I am posting for the sake of posting.