Client Side Story: Enhancing Experiences with Ajax, RIAs, and Browser-side Intelligence

When: 
Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 7:00pm
Lecturer(s): 
Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering

Joint meeting of Boston/Central New England Chapter of IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

Browser-side development capabilities, such as Javascript, Ajax, and Rich-Internet Applications (RIAs), (along with the latest additions: Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight,) present developers with tremendous power. We can create more fluid interactions, moving away from the dreaded page refresh, giving users an experience more like the desktop applications they are used to.

As more sites move to using these capabilities, developers are exploring the canvas -- seeing what works and what doesn't. Through this exploration, we've discovered patterns and principals to help guide us to make better designs going forward.

In this presentation, Jared will talk about the different approaches developers have taken with these new capabilities. He'll discuss:

  • What smart clients bring us, such as enhanced progressive disclosure, visualization, and efficiency capabilities?

  • What we can learn from game design for creating immersive experiences?

  • What are the common traps developers fall into when they start playing with these technologies?

He'll show examples from Flickr, Google, Yahoo!, Netflix, Lands End, Gap, and LA Times, deconstructing their use of these new development capabilities to help us understand how we can apply them to our own designs.

Thanks to our sponsor Intuit QuickBase for providing free pizza and refreshments prior to Jared's talk. Come early, 6:30-7 pm, for best availibility.

Lecturer Biography: 

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.