Anthony Milner

Event blogging is hard yakka. I lost power at lunch and went searching, I ended up at a powerboard table with of handful of hardcore geeks. Anyway I managed to peddle hard enough for a quick post on Brian Flings Mobile 2.0 talk

Quick notes…

1. 1 billion people have mobile devices – this vastly outnumbers the PC
2. The iphone is the first mobile web 2.0 device. It supports CCS 3
3. Mobile widgets are the next big thing
4. AJAX on the mobile is the next frontier
5. Generally speaking mobile UX sucks
6. Mobile web apps are the future

Definition of web 2.0….

Web 2.0 is a way to describe an evolution

How to solve a problem…

Start with a goal and then reverse engineer it

Summation    

We’re at the precipice of the next generation of the web – Mobile 2.0 = The Web

Cameron Adams, The Man in Blue, spoke about creating a range of interfaces either based on user customisation or website analysis. Designer’s make the choice of simplicity (Google) versus bombardment (Yahoo) – Its very hard to make a design that suits everyone, you can usability test it but at the end you’re not going to make everyone happy.

Enter dynamic interfaces – allow us to create a range of interfaces to suit the differing needs which translates to a better UX. We have tried this in the past (circa 2002) but now have the technology – CSS, JS, browser and system capability and performance are here.

Two approaches are…

1. Customisation

Increasingly important with the rise of social networks. People are more aware of design and how their personality is conveyed on the web

Examples….
Twitter supports background images, styles and colours
My space goes further and lets you put in anything you want however the customisation is quite hard and is beyond most people
Flickr invest a lot of time in UX and are constantly evolving their site. They recently introduced a change page layout option to choose from 6 potential layouts. By changing the layout it affects the way people interact with your page.
Netvibes or iGoogle widget based layout to display and position
Searchmash is a Google’s next gen search tool. Which display faceted search options as expand/collapse widgets
Alpha is Yahoo’s next gen dynamic search interface offering which allows drag and drop page layout.

Beyond HTML -> SVG. Canvas originally developed by Apple (being used on the iPhone and Yahoo pipes), for dynamic vector based rendering.

If offering customisation you must make it easy to use. Myspace has no constraints, we should impose some constraints.

To achieve all this dynamic goodness we must separate data, style and behaviour

2. Analysis

The website does the customisation for you and the interface automatically adapts.
Examples…
Ben Sherman print friendly page
Diff layout for diff resolutions as seen on the dependant layout and white pages
Tangler – if you know a user has downloaded something the site could remember that and remove the option from the pagehowever don’t shock users and just remove it, use an ajax lightbox to ask the user if they want it removed.
BBC progressivley cusomises the middle panel using server side analysis based on user behaviour

Other interesting points…

A CSS file can now be supplied to the iPhone using media=”handheld”
CSS 3 provides for dynamic page resolution query and adjustment and it currently works in opera.
Google Web Development Toolkit – good for rapid prototyping
Design for browser width not screen resolution
We did this in 2002, why is this different? – Today its more about content personalisation as opposed to presentation
Are we giving users to much rope to hang themselves? – Keep them in the bounds of good taste but still give them the opportunity to personalise aspects.

After months of brainstorming, soul searching, creating and refining we have launched our beloved new logo.

Its got colour, its got transparency, its got a dose of web 2.0. It will predominantly be displayed with its strapline “Enterprise Content Management”

 So what is that colourful symbol thingy in the logo?

The motif is 6 overlapping transparent blocks each with its own colour. Each block represents a system, component or module which is integrated to provide a complete end solution. Its also quite artisitc and conveys a sense of our creative design capability. Deep and meaningful interpretations aside it can also be said that this is simply a clean and fresh look. The logo was designed by our Creative Director, Penny Bristow. She is one creative lady and we’re fortunate to have such talent on board.

When I squint at the blocks I see a flower – I guess that’s OK because essentially the blossoming of a flower is akin to the blossoming of thoughtful and intelligent software.

What do you see? Leave a comment…

A small team at Microsoft’s developer division in Redmond have recently developed a Silverlight app for creating mashups. Its called Popfly and lets us visually build social networked, mashed up websites i.e no programming skills. Its free and comes with 25mb of storage. The Popfly team at Microsoft call this “democratised development” – making development approachable to an entire class of people that want to “create” without necessarily having to write code. At the moment all this coolness is invitation only so stay tuned for a Popfly app.

Footnote: How do we* manage to keep coming up with such cool product names – Silverlight, Popfly, Picasa, Skype? Surely we’re due to run out of all options and permutations quite soon :-)

*as in the human race 

I discovered the Google Maps API recently and its a real winner. In minutes I had inserted a basic Google Map onto Elcom’s contact us page using the Google Maps API how to instructions.

Interactive maps definately have wow factor. The sales guys immediately added it to their bag of tricks. Without exception every customer that has seen it in action says “can we have that too?”.

Microsoft also have a map API called the Virtual Earth Control. I came across a site called Spyk that uses it with great effect to search for listed properties. The interface is fun, intuitive and the app is extremely useful if you are searching for a home in a defined geographical zone. Its definately in my top 5 sites for 2006.