Anthony Milner

A recent Sitepoint newsletter by Alex Walker spoke about the “hierarchy of needs”.

According to interaction designers, experiences should fit somewhere into a “hierachy of UX needs” — from functional at their most rudimentary, through to meaningful at their best

Its a really great way to articulate the users interaction with great design. Many apps are functional, realible and even usable but its the convenience, pleasure and meaningfulness that has the most potential to turn regular users into passionate ones.

Presenter: Leslie Nassar (Mobile Geek)

Very expensive to serve mobile content in Aust.

1990 – Making calls

2000 – Making calls and sms

Now – Making calls, sms and apps

Nex gen of mobiles are all touchscreens with gestures

Current breed on mobiles are too slow for web browsing with the exception of the iphone

Nokia N96 is looking good and will have Silverlight for mobile

Best practices

• go for portrait – most devices are going portrait for default design
• test on real devices – do not rely on emulators
• Focus testing on the top 50% of phones
• no frames or pop-ups – ever
• watch out for latency

Presenters:

Lachlan Hardy, Atlassian Design Engineer

Damien Edwards, Senior Consultant, Readify

Interoperability - Write pages once and have them work cross browser (the big 4 i.e IE, FF, Opera, Safari)

Content Layer – Content tags encased in structural tags

Presentation Layer – Typography, dimensions, positioning, background images and colours, border, outlines and bullets

Acid 2 litmus test – works in IE8 [Interesting: it does not work in Firefox 2 - I must say I assumed it did - hmm wondering about FF3 beta]

Whose heard of CSS Zen Garden? [Only 3 people put hands up. Sheesh]

Support for generated content in IE8 – allows us to add “sugar” to the page – [show me an example please]

Support for attribute selectors – I didn’t get this. [again no rendered examples]

Behaviour – Javascript – i.e manipulation of the document object model 1.0 level 2

target= is deprecated in xhtml 1.1 – why? – because it’s considered behaviour and therefore should be handled with JS

Only manipulate the DOM via the correct handlers otherwise browser will not behave nicely

Compatibility - Don’t break the web

DOCTYPE switch was first introduced in IE5 for Mac

Version targeting – IE8 uses a completely new rendering engine and it sits side by side with the old one.

There is no IE8 quirks mode

Things that used to work in IE7 and below will not work in IE8

X-UA-Compatible http-equiv meta tag allows us to target a rendering mode : IE8/7/5 etc…

Innovation – New features

Webslices – define a portion of a page that is likely to change and then allow a user to subscribe to that portion. It becomes highlighted in the page and toolbar like an rss feed.

Activities – Add contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any web page. its an easy way to create a “plug-in” that exposes the services of your website. Used for lookup and send to operations. To make one you create an XML file and installed via JS.

Good examples at http://ie8.ebay.com

Other improvements in IE8

• Adaptive Zoom
• Faster JS performance
• Accessible RIA support
• Every tab runs out-of-process i.e one tab will not crash another
• address bar improvements

www.positioniseverything.neet

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(vs.85).aspx

Presenters:

Alistair Jones – Readify, UX Consultant

Adam Kowaltzke – Avanade, Creative Analyst

Alistair…

Expression Web 2 now supports…

• ASP.NET
• PHP
• xHTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• Silverlight

Quick Case Study – Quicksilver

Quicksilver wanted a live video stream for 400,000 unique viewers with an average 20,000 concurrent viewers

This was done with Expression Web 1 and Blend 1 which needed a lot of wiring to make things happen

With Expression Web and Blend 2 this has been significantly simplified with simple wizards.

With blend 2.5 beta you can now use C# or VB as opposed to JS

Adam…

[Preso not working]

A couple of years ago Steve Ballmer ran around a stage screaming developer, developer, developer. At Mix08 he changed this to Web Developer, Web Developer, Web Developer – Adam really wants him to be shouting designer, designer, designer.

Why are standards important

• Faster download, lighter weight pages
• Wide compatibility
• Accessible
• Support for a wide range of devices
• Print friendly
• Better SEO
• Fast and more efficient site maintenance
• A competitive edge

Before we start design

• Identify strengths and weaknesses with existing sites/apps
• Define user needs
• Build IA
• Wireframes
• Solicit design feedback

Demos

• 3 column layout using CSS
• Creation of a menu using an unordered list

{Its interesting seeing standards and css use being evangelised – most of the web community have been doing this for the last 3-5 years. At Elcom we’ve been adopting, evangelising and using advanced CSS layout and standards based design for some time now. Hat tips to Russ and the Web Standards Group, Mark Cohen, Sitepoint and John Allsop of Web Directions who have been major drivers for in this area, its great to see MS coming to the party.}

Don’t forget – The UI and UX is important – it is 10% of the effort but 90% of the impact

Tim Adilin – Design Evangelist, Microsoft

Responsible for MIX creative in the US

Tim is presenting with DeepZoom to delve into slide presentation – HOW COOL – I love this stuff!

Tim is attempting to explain the array of Expression products…

Expression Media 2

• for organising photos
• batch processing e.g batch rename, voice annotate the images
• HTML galleries
• image enhancements
• Kind of like photoshop
• very cool scatter silverlight enhanced photo gallery template
• Watermarking
• Available for the Mac
• Controls

Deep Zoom Composer

• Simply create zooms into images within images – a bit like fractals
• Simple process to create one – import > compose > export
• Tagging, sorting and media will be coming to deepzoom in future releases
• [How cool would it be to convert our image gallery to use a deepzoom UI - or a family tree that zooms in through the generations]
• Resolution DPI 96 – the reason for this as a default is because web blend works natively with 96 dpi which can be a bit tricky – more later
• Only works with expression blend 2.5 beta

Expression Design 2

[hmm also a bit photoshop like - working with Illustrator files, layers and slices]

• Vector vs Raster
• XAML
• Tools
• FileTypes
• Layers
• Slicing

Expression Web 2

[Good old frontpage, but hugely improved]

Nice wizard to build good clean CSS

• Standards
• Deep CSS support
• Great intellisense
• PSD support

*Tim asked that anyone with ideas or suggestion for the product suite contact MS product contacts in Redmond and let them know about it*

Expression Blend 2

[Twitter is huge with the presenters today but its getting some blank stares from the audience]

Presenter: Jose Fajardo- Cynergy Systems

Demo – creating a deep zoom

Its all about the UI and the UX – spend the time getting the UI and UX right – anything can be built

DeepZoom composer is a Microsoft tool for creating deepzoom images- very cool – commercial application – [hmmm thinking]

Example of mocked up SMH site with deep zoomable images – Now I get it – great for ads and creating a hugely immersive experience

[I wonder what the bandwidth debt is for deepzoomable images?]

DeepZoomable documents e.g PDF – [awesome idea - must get code sample]

[question answered] Optimised to deliver high amounts of data with narrow bandwidth

Another brilliant demo of distant teaching i.e teacher deepzooming through images  with students on other side of the world. Great for colloboration.

[IDEA - Collobarate with customer over project plan]

http://advertboy.wordpress.com

We’ve packed into the Coles auditorium at the Powerhouse museum for a day of Expression Studio and Silverlight goodness at Remix Sydney Australia. The keynote is being presented by VRML, Meracki, lolcat enthusiast Mark Pesce along with a few case studies.

Michael (Delicategenius) Kordahi and Shane Morris kicking things off.

3 observations about the event from Michael Kordahi…

1. Mostly Aussie speakers

2. Will see some big brands that have done some very cool stuff

3. Good mix of creative and technical people

(but Devs definitely outnumber UX people)

Mark Pesce

Everyone thought Internet would make us anti-social  but it has become highly social – we are hyperconnected

You tube is the third most visited site in the world

Talking about importance of Twitter and speed with which information is disseminated – e.g earthquake in China

This will spill into business – e.g Comcast monitoring twitter and blogs which translates to postivie feeback via the blogosphere

We need better tools to read the collective mind of the internet

The web is not about content its about connection and sharing e.g a combination of twitter and wikipedia could create a revolution of connectedness, sharing and innovation in an organisation.

It’s up to us to empower people and make this happen.

Michael Kordahi

Silverlight 1 was purely around media

Silverlight 2 is all about development and platform functionality

Silverlight will come to mobile in partnership with Nokia

As at March 2008 – 1.5 million Silveright plugin installs per day

Silverlight 2 has been transformed into an application development platform – e.g has .NET on the client and controls

Matt Moran – Technical Director ABC Commercial

Working on ABC’s commercial video and music businesses

Demo – abcsonline site running a Silverlight content browser with ecommerce shopping cart functionality

Total shopping experience built into a media player -awesome

Mark Cohen – Fairfax Digital

FD operates biggest network of sites in Aust

FD use CSS extensively

Quick demo of web slices and activites on the drive.com.au site – nice

Angus Logan – Senior Technical Product Manager – Live

Live is a consumer offering.

Highest cost in running a website is acquisition of visitors – how do we get them there? With windows live of course.

Need to convert visitors to residents and drive deeper engagement. Need to glue users to our site.

There is a ton of Live products with over 400 million users hitting those services

There are 7 million windows live users in Australia

demo – Genexus have built a website sosonetwork.com – essentially mashups bringing live functionality such as virtual earth functionality, media, messenger etc…

Use the windows live data centre to deliver rich media on your site – allows smaller sites to leverage and provides scale

Windows live alerts – Is this Microsoft’s answer to Twitter?

Shane Morris

Differentiated User Experiences – Use your UX to stand out from the crowd and get stickiness rather than just trying to differentiate on functionality which is getting much harder

Richard Lord CMO @ Hyro

The rise of user experience

Hyro has done Big Brother digital work for last 3 years

Silverlight allows them to tailor the window and the controls

Can integrate marketing and advertising into the video window plus value added services

This stuff will change the world.

I’m looking forward to learning lots of new things at ReMix 2008 tomorrow and will be live blogging the sessions. I’m attending the following sessions…

Session 1 – New possibilities with Microsoft Silverlight 2
The recent announcement of Microsoft Silverlight 2 opens up dramatic new opportunities for creating compelling and productive user experiences on the web. In this demo-heavy session we will give you a run-down of all that is possible with the new platform.

Session 2 – Introducing Microsoft Expression Studio 2
Discover the most exciting new features in Expression Studio 2 while learning more about how to author Standards based websites, Silverlight and WPF experiences. In this session we will provide multiple tips and tricks to get the best out of Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.

Session 3 – Windows Live Platform: Take the best of Windows Live and make it yours
Are you a web developer interested in attracting 400M+ engaged users with over 30 billion relationships? Need to access over four billion photos? Ever wanted to include instant messaging experiences in your site, or easily add video streaming? How about mapping? We’ve only started. Microsoft is serious about given the web developer everything they need to be successful – rich services, compelling tools and easy to understand terms. If you’re interested in learning more, how to get started and how to grow your audience through deeper engagement, stop by, we’d love to show you.

Session 4 – Building an Immersive, Integrated Media Experience in Silverlight
This local customer implementation is a household name and has not been announced yet so, you will be amongst the first to see it!

Session 5 – Welcome to IE8 – Integrating Your Site With Internet Explorer 8
Come get an overview of the new features and capabilities of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. Learn what the new standards compliant engine in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 means to you as a web designer, and how to utilize new layout functionality to create cross-browser-compatible layout designs.

Session 6 – Using Microsoft Silverlight for Creating Rich Mobile User Experiences
Come learn how to use Microsoft Silverlight for Mobile to build rich mobile experiences including best patterns and practices, fluid and intuitive navigation, smart content organization, small form factor and cross-device support. This session also covers how to use tools like Microsoft Expression Blend to move beyond size considerations to create stunning and meaningful vector-based graphics applications.