Not every job will require that a designer know how to code. However, there are three reasons why learning to code makes you a better designer:

1. You’ll better understand the medium you’re working in. If you know what database queries will be faster than others, you can make the right response time tradeoffs. If you know what’s easy to code and what’s difficult to code, you can get your ideas implemented faster (and more of them, since development time is a limited resource.) Understanding what your medium does well and where isn’t as effective makes for more informed design decisions.
2. Knowing how to code helps you produce better prototypes. The best way to communicate a design idea to your teammates and clients is through an interactive prototype. Producing your own quick prototypes brings your ideas to life sooner, releasing that inner brilliance you’re carrying around and helping everyone see what your designs are really about.
3. Knowing how to code helps you identify bugs and flaws in the production code. As your team’s designs start to come to life, you can play an essential role of helping the developers isolate interaction problems, which means your end product will be the best it can be.

There’s been a lot of debate as to what languages designers should learn to code in. Based on these three reasons, I think it needs to be the languages used by the rest of the team, whatever they may be.

It’s clear from our research that designers who can code bring more to the team and, in the long run, see more of their brilliant work making it through the development process, to the user.

Have you ever thought about how many buttons should be on a mouse?

Bill Verplank has. Bill was part of the Xerox PARC team who was responsible for taking the mouse and many other computing paradigms from theory to indispensable.

I had a chance to speak with Bill about his time at PARC and all of his other influential work for this week’s podcast. If you’re interested in where many of today’s computing metaphors come from, or in design and computing history in general, this is the show for you.

Today’s usability, interaction design, and experience design disciplines have their roots in human factors engineering, which many, including Bill, trace back to the 1950s, when the U.S. government was investing heavily in cockpit design of jet fighters. It was upon that foundation, Bill studied design and engineering at Stanford and did his PhD. work at MIT in man-machine systems.

From there, he spent considerable time with Xerox PARC, working on some of the first office systems, including the Xerox Star, which was a major influence for both the Macintosh user interface and Microsoft Windows. Bill continues to trace his history through some of the most influential design agencies of our time, like IDEO, and winds up with a question of design education: what happens when engineers and artists meet and try to create something usable for humans? Bill is seeing important schools, like the Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University, experimenting with programs that put engineers and artists together. We also debated the impact and interpretation of experience design and its impact on various industries.

Our conversation ended with a preview of Bill’s Spotlight Plenary presentation at our UI Conference this fall. Bill is known for his mesmerizing talks where he sketches his points along with the talk. (At the conference, we’ll have a camera set up so you can watch him sketch as he talks!)

[If you'd like to see Bill Verplank's Design Metaphors Spotlight Plenary keynote in person, please join us at the User Interface Conference, this October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

A mechanical overlay can be an audio equalizer, musical keyboard, or video game controller that provides touch inputs to a sensing pad.

An interesting occurance, Luke has a database of quotes that magically appear on his blog posts, the one that happened to display while I was reading this article was particularly fitting to its context:

‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’
—Steve Jobs, 1998

Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence of a new set of approaches such as APIs, RSS, and Folksonomies that have come to be known collectively as Web 2.0. These new approaches allow developers to easily create innovative applications at a rapid pace from common elements found lying around the Web.

The speed and ease at which these new applications were built is what is keeping us very excited about the continued success of the Web 2.0 world. With a little skill and motivation, people can create new applications in almost no time at all. As the skill requirements for building these applications decreases, it opens a whole new world of possibilities for development teams.

With new sites and services popping up, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter, it’s easy to see how we’ve entered a new era of social networking, and we’ll continue to see the Web evolve as we realize its full potential to create optimal user experiences.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an article I wrote in 2005 where I examine how design teams and individual developers alike can harness the power of APIs, RSS technologies, Folksonomies, and Social Networking to approach hard problems in new and effective ways. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Do your applications take advantage of APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[Want to learn more about Web 2.0? Check out the UIE Virtual Seminar, Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype. In this 90-minute presentation, Jared M. Spool will outline how Web 2.0 works, and discuss how APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking can help designers expand and improve the user experience.]

The U.S. Census Bureau has an interesting way of handling one of these complexities associated with displaying large amounts of tabular data. At the top of many of their population characteristic data sheets, the Census Bureau site designers have installed a very nice header that tells you which data sheet you are in, the population estimate for the certain characteristic you are looking at, and the margin of error. In this case I was looking at general demographic characteristics for 2005.

As you begin to scroll down the page, the header moves along down the page with you, not only reminding you what it is you’re looking at, but also providing a mechanism to clearly read across the table without getting the different subcategory or number rows mixed up.

How do you handle the complexities associated with large amounts of tabular data? What do you think of the floating header? What do you think about the design of the rest of the tables?

We are using CastingWords.

They produce transcriptions in plain text, Rich Text Format and HTML formats. They give you access to a handy RSS feed which allows you to download your file when its ready. They also notify you via email when the files are complete.

You may find it interesting that their company is built upon Amazon.com’s technologies. The prime tool they use is the Mechanical Turk.

We use their transcription service for just about anything we have an audio file of, from podcasts to recordings we make during field research. Converting them to text makes them easily searchable, both for people on the web looking to find good content, and for ourselves to find information from a field excursion. Since we use Macs in the office, we can take great advantage of Spotlight‘s ability to catalog within text documents (.txt, .html, .rtf, .doc) to find information inside hours and hours of information almost instantly. The transcriptions themselves become both our content and metadata for the audio files.

Are you using transcriptions to try to get a handle on your audio information? Have any tips to share?

There was a discussion on the IxDA email list about the origins of Surface, and Chris Bernard, a UX Evangelist at Microsoft wrote in to shed some light on the topic.

Some people have asked on this list how Microsoft Surface was created and who worked on it, with specific inquiries into Bill Buxton. Bill has consulting on the project since about 2004 (About a year before he came into Microsoft). The principal folks in Microsoft that made the project a reality are guys named Andy Wilson and Steve Bathiche.

Bill Buxton has been one of the pioneers behind multi-touch devices, which have been advancing since the early 1980s. Jared has mentioned Bill’s influential ideas around these parts before. Bill’s website has a section dedicated to all the attention multi-touch has gotten of late. He’s been deluged with inquiries so he decided an online brain dump was in order. Buxton gives us some of the history and tenets of multi-touch thinking, like

Everything is best for something and worst for something else. The trick is knowing what is what, for what, when, for whom, where, and most importantly, why. Those who try the replace the mouse play a fool’s game. The mouse is great for many things. Just not everything. The challenge with new input is to find devices that work together, simultaneously with the mouse (such as in the other hand), or things that are strong where the mouse is weak, thereby complimenting it.

Buxton’s overview of the development of multi-touch is absolutely fascinating. Did you know there was an all-touch-screen mobile smartphone developed by IBM and BellSouth in 1993? Wow.

We’ll close out our multi-touch discussion with two videos. First, here’s Jeff Han presenting his multi-touch device at TED 2006.

And lastly, if you haven’t seen the parody of the Microsoft Surface video from Sarcastic Gamer, it’s well worth your time.

Frameworks are a hot topic on the web today, names like Ruby on Rails, Django, Cake, and Prototype.js are all over the place. For the uninitiated, Jeff gives us a nice definition of a framework in the article,

[…] a set of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices that attempt to abstract routine tasks into generic modules that can be reused. The goal here is to allow the designer or developer to focus on tasks that are unique to a given project, rather than reinventing the wheel each time around.

Jeff points out there’s no reason you can’t do this with CSS, as well. There are certainly things that you write project after project, and the use of a framework would reduce repetition and increase maintainability. It’s always nice that if someone is out sick, that another person can quickly go through their code and know where to find the part that needs a tweak. Of course, someone doesn’t need to be missing to take advantage the efficiency of a framework. Having a “self descriptive” code library provides a level of documentation to make any long term maintenance of the system far more efficient.

Are you using frameworks to speed up your work?

The answer was interesting: “Yes, your SDK will be Web 2.0 + AJAX”

The only way for third-party apps to run on the iPhone will be through the Safari engine, which is part of the OS X install that powers the iPhone.

Interestingly, the apps can have the iPhone look and feel. Apple showed a custom iPhone application that worked as an LDAP corporate address book, written by one person in less than a month using around 600 lines of code. Such apps can access iPhone resources, give apps the ability to make phone calls, access Google Maps, and so forth.

The second, and somewhat unexpected announcement, is that Apple has expanded their standards-friendly and open-source derived browser to the Windows platform. Version three is available now, in beta, on Apple’s Safari site for both XP and Vista. This has a number of implications:

• Easier testing of web sites for compatibility with Safari, making a Mac an option for the Windows-based developer
• The very standards-friendly WebKit engine can now expand its user base beyond Macs and the iPhone (Safari), Linux (KHTML) and Nokia phones
• Yet another standards-friendly browser for Windows is now available – competition is good.

Mac users also can download the v.3 beta for Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Tiger) but be warned that the install will overwrite your v.2 install. Clearly, Apple believes this beta is stable.

Lastly, you may notice that Apple also completely revamped the look and feel of its well-regarded and highly-trafficked website quietly while Steve had us distracted during the keynote. They’ve simplified the navigation panel at the top, widened the page and redefined the visuals to fall inline with the upcoming Mac and iPhone software.

In the Apple sphere of influence, it was a big day for web developers. And that sphere seems to grow daily.

[ Postscript: If you've found this post interesting, I've written a more speculative commentary on my personal blog, discussing what impact I think Safari will have on the mobile web, check out my post on WWDC '07 ]

Back in January we had planned to have Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, speak at our Web App Summit. Sadly, events conspired to force Stewart to Europe at the last moment. In his stead Peter Merholz and I got together to lead an analytical interactive discussion on what makes Flickr such a success in the Web 2.0 space, and as a popular destination in general. What makes it such a draw? It can’t just be AJAX.

» What tools does Flickr use to foster its community?
» Does the service have a personality?
» How is it different from competing sites?
» How does Flickr invite you to discover new tools?
» How does the app leverage its API to increase its values?

Flickr is often mentioned in our individual talks for just a few minutes. It was really interesting to collaborate and dig deeper into the app and explore its many layers of innovation. I hope you enjoy this recording as much as I enjoyed the session.

Unlike most of its hardware and software rivals, Apple has eagerly used open standards and open-source software to develop–ironically enough–a system that combines proprietary hardware with proprietary software. Apple’s iCal was one of the first widely available desktop calendar programs to adopt the iCalendar standard; Apple embraced iCalendar so early that many people mistakenly thought Apple had invented it.

Being so intimately familiar with Apple myself, sometimes I forget than many people may not know how involved in open-source software Apple is. It has a reputation for being proprietary, but since the return of Steve Jobs, UNIX and other open-source projects have become a staple upon which Apple innovates.

All this borrowing is completely legal, and the result is that Apple is able to direct more of its R&D dollars to developing distinguishing technology, since it doesn’t have to spend as much on the “plumbing” of today’s information infrastructure. That directly benefits customers by lowering Apple’s cost of innovation. It also benefits Apple’s third-party developers by making Macintosh development not all that different from Linux development, which is generally regarded as a lot easier than developing software for Microsoft Windows.

If you’re curious how much they are leveraging this, Apple’s produced a 20-page PDF on the topic of open-source and UNIX in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Expect more in 10.5 (Leopard) this October.

Could you free up some resources by using more pre-fab plumbing in your product?

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

You can fin the first episode and more about what’s in this episode here.

Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments on this page or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

You can fin the first episode and more about what’s in this episode here.

Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments on this page or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

In this episode, the SpoolCast crew convened to discuss:

• the impact of the pending Target Suit
• mixing automated and in-person testing techniques
• multi-variate testing
• designing tasks for testing
• moderated vs. unmoderated testing methods
• using Flash and AJAX on home pages
• the importance of validating inferences
• the interface paradigm of the Nintendo Wii
• the impact of new devices, such as the TiVo, Wii, and Guitar Hero on future interface design

We’ve divided the recording into three parts to make it easier to digest…
Part 2 is available here.
Part 3 is available here.

(Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.)

Sorry it’s taken so long to get this one out. It’s been crazy ’round here!

Production assistance on this SpoolCast from Brian Christiansen.

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments on this page or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

(If you’d like to get all of the Brain Sparks Audio Library in iTunes, just paste this link into the Subscribe to Podcast feature.)

This is the inaugural episode of a new show we’re temporarily calling The Josh and Jared Show. Every few weeks, my colleague Joshua Porter and I will get together and discuss the interesting happenings in the world of experience design.

This episode focused on the role of information architecture and some of the changes the discipline is undergoing. Among the things Josh and I discussed in this episode are:

• Josh’s post: Why do People Tag?
• Gene Smith’s Tagging Cheat Sheet
• Differences in tagging on Del.icio.us and Flickr
• How important is the categorization of items on Amazon?
• The weak way Best Buy for Business does categories
• Josh’s war on information architecture
• When is completeness necessary for an information taxonomy?
• Will there be an evolutionary change in how law firms organize electronic information?
• Would you call the people working on Netflix’s movie recommendation system Information Architects?
• The difference between Specialists and Generalists

We want this show to be interactive. Send us your thoughts and questions. You can post them as a comment to this blog, send them in email, or use the feedback feature of uie.com. If you’re really adventurous, send us a short (30 seconds or less) audio comment as an MP3 file and we’ll include it in a future episode.

One way you can help us is to suggest new names for the show. While Josh & I are both fond of our names, we think the show could be named something more creative. What do you think?

Recently, I’ve been playing with a new feature of Google.com: Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Trying these out is a must-do activity for any interface designer.

At first glance, they look just like any other word processor or spreadsheet. However, that’s what makes them impressive. They are implemented completely in a browser, using only standard HTML and Javascript.

The line between what we do on the web and what we do at our desk has significantly blurred. This presents opportunities for application developers that were previously unthinkable.

Yet, it also presents challenges and puzzles to solve. We need to learn an entirely new interaction style, with new constraints and new boundary conditions. (For example, how do you make accessible AJAX work?)

Two people who are at the head of this curve are Bill Scott and David Malouf. Bill is Yahoo!’s local AJAX evangelist and David has been a major player in the founding of the Interaction Design Association. Both have been at the forefront of this new wave of interaction design.

Josh Porter and I recently had a chance to talk with Bill and David about some of the challenges and changes that are happening in the interaction design space. We were supposed to talk for only a few moments, but the discussion was so fascinating, we kept talking for almost an hour.

In this issue of UIEtips, we’ve put together some of the best parts of that discussion. You’ll read what David and Bill think about choosing AJAX versus Flash, what’s a good starting point for learning these technologies, and how design patterns can help with the development process. I’m sure you’ll find it as fascinating as I did.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Have you been experimenting with RIAs and AJAX? Is this an area you’re thinking of moving to? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. David and Bill will present their acclaimed full-day seminar, Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs, as well as give their own short talks. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

“We are reorganizing the content on our site (Customers continually tell us they can’t find things, the context is overwhelming, etc.). I was hoping to use tagging to get an idea of how our customers look for things and then base the structure accordingly. Is this appropriate?”

Yes, this is definitely appropriate. Any insight into how customers look for things is valuable. If you can gain knowledge about how people value your content from the way they create and use tags, then you have a virtual obligation to do so!

As I mentioned in the seminar, tags are simply trigger words. As trigger words, they are triggers to action. When a person sees a trigger word, they act. If you can fill your web site with people’s trigger words, you’ll make them happy because they’ll find the content they were looking for.

In general, we’ve found several ways to discover people’s trigger words:

• Search Engine Queries
  By cataloguing the queries people enter into search engines, you can get a clear idea of the actual words people are looking for. We see it over and over again: when people can’t find their trigger words on a page, they go to search. What do they enter into the search box? Their trigger words!
• Actual Clicks
  By looking at the actual clicks that people make, you can get a good idea of what words trigger them to action. The words might be the words in the actual link, or words nearby.
• Tags
  Tags are a new way to uncover trigger words. Since users are the ones entering tags, we have access to their own vocabulary. This is much more valuable than just a way for users to save things for later (which is the primary reason why people tag). Information architects can gain valuable insights into what language can inform future versions of the web site.

If you haven’t noticed, we’re excited by tags. One of the reasons why is that they are a source for ever-valuable trigger words.

Several of the questions dealt with a common concern: tags are messy.

Tag are messy because there are no rules about how to create or use them. This makes it possible to do almost anything with tags, including, but not limited to:

• Misspell tags ( new-york-sity )
• Use different tags for similar things ( new-york, newyork, newyorkcity )
• Use slang ( bigApple )
• Use context-specific tags ( my-hometown )

The concern with tags like these is that meaning is lost when people tag this way. For example, what if someone is looking for all the information on New York City? Wouldn’t they have to look under each of these tags (and probably many more) in order to find all the useful stuff?

Ironically, what makes tags messy also makes them powerful. The flexibility of tagging systems to support a set of tags for each individual is powerful because people can adapt tags to their needs as they see fit. They can use them however they want to. If they want to tag something using slang, they can. If they want to use different tags over time, they can. If they want to use a cryptic language that nobody understands, they can.

Much of the concern about messiness, however, is about the social use of tags. How can I use someone else’s messy tags? This is an interesting question, but if we were to get away from messiness we might have to start instituting rules about tagging. One rule might be: “if you’re tagging something about New York City, use the tag NYC”.

So there’s a tradeoff between the flexibility of tags and their social use. The more flexible they are for users, the less valuable they are to others. The less flexible they are for users, the more valuable they are to others.

But instituting rules for tagging and making them more valuable to others might not be the right way to handle this because most tags are created with a personal use in mind. How can I tag this thing so it is valuable to me? As we’ve seen, people find tags valuable in different ways. This diversity requires flexibility.

If tagging systems weren’t so flexible, they might be less messy. But we might lose their benefits, too.

Information spaces on the Web are becoming increasingly filled with complex interactions. Even simple transactional solutions like shopping carts and document management systems are becoming more complex with richer desktop-like interaction models. Because of this, today’s designers need access to disciplines like interaction design and software design to create powerful and successful web applications.

One of the areas that excites us the most is that we’re now seeing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) applications suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results. Every day, we’re seeing sites such as Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us use new interaction models to create more powerful user experiences.

In this week’s UIEtips article, UIE’s Joshua Porter has interviewed David (Heller) Malouf, a premier Interaction Designer, to discuss the issues involved when development teams are thinking about designing web applications using AJAX and RIAs.

We’ve been so impressed with David’s commentaries on thr topic of RIAs, we’ve asked him to co-present a full-day seminar with Bill Scott at User Interface 11. David and Bill will teach a full-day seminar exploring some of the most important issues surrounding the web’s most sophisticated applications.

Are you currently building web-based applications? Are you tasked with adding more interactivity to your web apps? Join the discussion below.

The two timelines move in appropriately when you slide one (without a scrollbar). You can select keywords to filter by. It’s all very cool.

As part of MIT’s SIMILE Project, the Timeline demo is intended to be a Google Maps, but for time-based information.

Tip o’ the hat to Nina for pointing us in this direction.

“.NET may be considered a stunning piece of development architecture but it is yet another API that has to be learned by the developer. And based on recent history there will be another API along in a couple of years so why bother with this one? You can argue all about managed code and the like but the fact remains that, as a developer, I’m tired of having to continually refresh my knowledge for little apparent benefit to me or my employers.”

“If people need to spend all their time learning they are not going to be doing and a lot of people hit that point a while ago. From a consumer point of view Office already does just about everything they want – write a letter, build a spreadsheet and make some slides – so there is no need to upgrade.”

“Look at what Vista promised and compare to what it says it will do when it eventually arrives. The same is happening with the Xbox. How many security patches have I had to install for Windows and IE? Not to mention all the viruses and spyware. The TV ads promise me all sorts of wonderful things I can do with MS products but I’m too busy running McAfee to get around to using them. This leaves customers feeling as if they have been hit with a bait-and-switch and that builds resentment.”

“The delay on Vista is not causing all this grief for MS, it’s due to a large number of factors which have been building for the last decade. By themselves they can all be considered spot fires but when they start running into each other a lot of people will get burned.”

These are sentiments left by a reader of a recent post on the Mini-Microsoft blog. What struck me about these remarks is they go beyond product features and talk directly about this software developer’s experience with Microsoft’s products and tools.

Experience involves all the touchpoints your organization has with your customers and clients, not just the individual functionality delivered in a single release of a product. It’s about how what you do fits into their total life.

Microsoft, for the most part, seems plagued by focusing on features, not experience. We see that time and time again.

Take, for instance, the recent demo of some new hardware supporting Microsoft’s recently announced UMPC (codenamed Origami) tiny PC technology. Here executives from Samsung, Microsoft Korea, and Intel Korea had the experience of trying to give their PowerPoint presentations from Samsung’s new Q1 machine running the UMPC operating system: (Thanks to Om Malik)

Kim Hun-soo, vice president of Samsung’s PC division first tried to start the PowerPoint presentation, which was saved in his Q1. But after introducing himself, he failed to turn to the second page while his staff nervously watched him. Kim later admitted that Q1 has three hours of battery life and two hours when watching a DVD, which is comparably short to other laptops.

Microsoft Korea’s president Yoo Jae-sung spent several minutes figuring out how to start the presentation file.

Lee Hee-sung, president of Intel Korea also failed to kick off his presentation by himself, and had to be helped by the staff.”

And it’s not just Microsoft that finds themselves in this fix. In yesterday’s Washington Post, we see a review of the new Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, packed with features, but missing the right experience for the user. Reviewer Rob Pegoraro wrote:

“It’s not as if the Nokia 770 will be the first portable gadget somebody buys. It’s going to have to earn its way into pockets, purses, bags and backpacks already occupied by phones, Palm or Pocket PC handhelds, iPods, Sony PSP or Nintendo DS game machines or laptops — often, more than one of those. With that competition, a 770 will probably land in a different place: the shelf.”

As it becomes easier and easier for designers to pack more features into the little boxes they want us to buy, it’s going to become more and more important to ask the questions about which features should be included and how will those features improve our lives. This is what experience design is all about. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to do it.

Mashups interest us a lot these days. They are a powerful part of Web 2.0. Using APIs available from different applications, you can combine data and code in creative ways the original designers never expected.

One of my most recent favorites was described in today’s NY Times: Can’t Remember Who Whacked Whom? Just Check the Map on the Web Site. HBO is using the Google Maps API to display key information about important points in The Soprano’s storyline. Imagine using the same technology to describe some important aspect of your business.

What makes MashupCamp so important is who is there. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, Six Apart, Amazon, eBay and other large and small companies are all there to talk about how these APIs are going to change the way we think about designing.

All that being said, just because we can doesn’t always mean we should. Understanding how to design the mashups so users get what they need without frustration is going to take time, patience, and energy. If history is any guide, we’re in for a flood of awful designs before we start to see the truly delightful ones emerge.

We’re very excited about where all this is going and can’t wait see what emerges.

One problem with the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, however, is that some people are still uncomfortable with the term. It is easy to see why: people throw around “Web 2.0″ with wild abandon. Some claim it is the cure for your Web 1.0 failings, whatever they may be. Some claim that it is the realization of the full potential of the Web. Unfortunately, the wild abandon has left us with some unecessary confusion.

So, for those folks still wrapping their heads around the whole “Web 2.0 thing”, I’ve created a page called simply:

Introduction to Web 2.0

On this page I’ve included a quick explanation of the term (notice I didn’t say definition), as well as many resources for further exploration. My hope is that somewhere along this spectrum of publications you’ll find one that suits you.

For those interested in the service behind the page I created, it’s called Squidoo, and is a project by none other than Seth Godin, author of the Purple Cow and Permission Marketing books, some of our favorite reads.

What is HomeLab?

Philips HomeLab looks and feels like a regular home with modern furniture in every room, Van Gogh prints on the walls, and even a fully stocked kitchen. While no one lives at Philips HomeLab, temporary “residents” can stay at the facility for anywhere from 24 hours to two weeks, depending on the type of research being conducted. During their residence, individuals or families will go about life as usual, while interacting with the new technologies Philips has installed in the facility.

Some innovations that Phillips is testing in the lab:

Interactive Mirror

The Interactive Mirror enhances a mirror with a display function, while adding interactivity by sensing user input. The Interactive Mirror demonstrates several application concepts for domestic and professional use, supporting and enhancing our daily activities by providing new possibilities. A set of applications specifically developed for the bathroom enables you to check the latest weather forecast and traffic information, examine your weight, try on new hairstyles, and control ambient lighting. A new application called “Double Vision” allows the mirror to act as a magnifying mirror and show your back view. It also offers an intuitive user interface for adjusting light settings that simulate different lighting conditions, e.g. ‘Outdoor’, ‘Office’, etc.

The lab itself sounds like something CBS would show during prime time. Do participants get voted out?

(Ok. I wrote this before I saw Dan Saffer’s writeup. So, I guess we think similarly…)

A watershed moment is happening with online maps as we speak.

First is was Housingmaps, created by Paul Rademacher, an application so obviously cool and useful that is started a revolution in mapping. Housingmaps was built using Ajax, the technology du jour, and after one look at Housingmaps you no longer needed to know why the Google Maps service is useful. The only problem is determining if it is useful in your projects.

As a result of the Google Maps watershed moment, we now have maps that can help us find schools, view subway stops in Paris, and locate cheap gas. (check out Google Maps mania for many, many more)

Now there is a watershed moment for Yahoo Maps beta, released last week to great fanfare because it sports an even smoother interface than Google Maps. It’s not based on Ajax, though. It’s based on Flash, the much maligned tool that spawned the evil Flash intros that are fading all too slowly away.

Though the new Yahoo Maps is nice, and serves to bolster Flash’s reputation, the real watershed moment comes from a developer, Justin Everett-Church, who has manipulated the Yahoo Maps API to produce something pretty amazing: a map that looks any way you want it to. In his post on the topic, Justin shows off two very different maps, both using the same underlying technology. (note that you’ll need Flash 8 to view it correctly)

Here’s a screenshot of one, a radar map:

The map behind this radar screen is the same map as on the Yahoo Maps site, it only looks different. Justin has taken the Yahoo Maps API and innovated beyond it by adding his own visual filters. While this is only a proof of concept, with further development you could plot coordinates, zoom in, and give folks some of the more advanced functionality that the other mapping applications have.

I think this is another watershed moment in the online mapping area. After seeing Justin’s work, don’t you just want to just go out and make one yourself?

As you may or may not know, we develop the UIE web sites with the goal of developing equally for all major web browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

On this note, I recently checked up on the browser statistics for the Brain Sparks blog. The result was surprising:

As you can see, Firefox is the browser of choice among the Brain Sparks crowd. This is interesting because Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is so well-entrenched in the overall web picture, with estimates of its share running from 55 to 95%, according to Chuck Upsdell’s Browser News, a long running yardstick of the industry.

For those designers out there who are struggling with whether or not to develop for IE-only (a strategy for many banking sites, it seems), let this be another data point on your radar. Not only is Firefox growing (albeit not as fast as they were), in some circles (like ours) it is the most-used browser.

Thankfully, Firefox is not a closed platform, nor do they try to be. As a result, I believe the growth of Firefox and other browsers is a great step forward in how we design, because it helps make the “IE-only?” question meaningless. And that is a good thing.

I’ve talked about CSS Zen Garden here. Like Zen Garden, CSS Beauty is a nice showcase of what can be done with CSS.

Unlike Zen Garden, CSS Beauty shows it with real sites and allows designers to comment and discuss the various approaches and techniques. Plus, the news and announcements portion has a nice collection of useful resources for folks migrating to standards.

Let’s take a closer look. Consider the following text:

Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web
By Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter

Humans can instantly recognize this as a title and authors of a work, in this case a column here at Digital Web Magazine. We know this because of past experience. We’ve seen similar things before. It is apparent that the first line is a title and the second line is two authors. Given this information, humans are able to act on it in a meaningful way. For instance, you could answer someone if they asked you “Who wrote that?”

Machines, with their rigid information processing capabilities, need everything spelled out for them. To be able to do something useful with this title and byline, a machine would need to be able to parse it correctly. It would need to know that the number (2.0) in the first line is part of the title and shouldn’t be interpreted as a numeric value, that the spaces around it separate words from each other, and that the second line is made up of two names and not one. In other words, a machine would need to be able to do algorithmically what we humans do almost without thinking.

This would work amazingly well, and is very possible even today, except that the syntax of titles and bylines changes from person to person and from usage to usage. What if I changed my first name to just be the initial “J”? Or misspelled it? Humans would still understand the endless permutations. Machines, though, unless programmed for every single possible permutation, cannot reliably make the same decisions that we can. The human ability to adapt and interpret is special.

After all, we never really got excited about mobile computing.
Or, ubiquitous technology.
Or, speech technology.
Or, rich media.
Or, tablet computers.

None of these things excited us enough to really pay attention. When clients would come to us and say, “What are you thinking about designing for handhelds?”, we’d just say, “That’s not our area of expertise. We haven’t looked at it yet.”

NASA’s a client and they have a saying about the technology they use: “It has to be old enough for the Space Program.” NASA likes proven technology for their spaceships and I guess we’re very similar. We don’t like to look at something until it’s been around and proven to be something more than hype or a fad.

So, why are we so excited about Web 2.0? After all, it’s really new. So new that nobody can really explain what it is. And, for something you can’t buy or touch, it’s getting a lot of attention — hype, some might even call it.

The thing that excites us the most is what people are doing with it. We’re seeing interesting new applications appearing out of nowhere, all because of this new platform and its capabilities.

It could be that we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid on this Web 2.0 stuff. It could be that we’re falling victim to yet another rush into the unknown. But, from where we stand, it looks like, as they say in the biz, this thing has legs.

Time will tell though. And we’ve been tricked before. We thought Flash was going to be a much bigger player in web interfaces than it currently is. It’s still strong, but not the dominant force in the marketplace.

In the meantime, I think it makes sense to really understand what this Web 2.0 thing is and what it could mean, if it were to catch on. It looks like it can give real advantages to people needing to get sophisticated applications running in a hurry. And that’s always a good thing.

Have you looked at the Web 2.0 platform yet? Are you doing anything with it? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Pop me an email at mailbag@uie.com. (Sometimes we publish these messages in UIEtips or on the Brain Sparks blog. Mention if you don’t want your name published, on the off chance we pick yours.)

Joshua Porter will be talking about Web 2.0 and why we need to pay attention to it as part of his presentation at the User Interface 10 Conference. This session is almost full, so you should sign up soon if you want to hear what he has to say. (I’ll be co-presenting with him. Details here.)

Read this week’s UIEtips: Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype

I haven’t quite figured out exactly what it’s useful for, though it does feel like there’s something there. Right now, it mostly feels like collecting baseball cards: I have this need to get as many as possible, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them once I have a complete set. (Maybe, in 30 years, I can sell all my LinkedIn connections on eBay for thousands of dollars? What’s the equivalent of a 1964 Mickey Mantle?)

Anyways, if you’re a member and want to join my experiment, just put me in for a connection. (You can find my email address by searching for my name on LinkedIn.)

Are you using a social networking site? What benefits have you seen from them?

“I would say going forward that AJAX is going to have a ton of focus and support behind it,” says Joshua Porter, research consultant and director of Web development for research firm User Interface Engineering. “Because it is built on open standards, it is going to be the next plateau that we reach on the Web, like with HTML.”

Something is definitely in the air. But what is it? What is the source of this huge amount of energy?

There are many factors, of course. One of the major ones, I think, is an acceptance of the Web as a viable medium, a viable place to do business, a comfort level. Ten years ago it was unheard of for people to put their credit card number into an input box. It was unheard of to do banking online. It was inconceivable to download a file even approaching 1 MB in size. People were suspicious of cookies, of providing personal information, of encryption strength.

Now that we can do all this, however, it becomes very interesting to see exactly what people are comfortable with. Are they comfortable with providing their bank account number? How about their social security number? Or medical information?

With every advance in technology, there needs to be an advance in comfort. We’ve seen in countless user tests that in order to make people comfortable with new technology, they can’t simply be told to use it. They need to have experience with it, to know the incentives, to recognize the work that’s being done to keep them safe.

So, if you’re working on new web applications, do you know the comfort level of your users?

She had traditionally used oils and acrylics in her work, but was now experimenting with pastels and charcoal. To really understand how these new tools work, she embarked on an ambitious project to see what was easy and what was hard. She chose a vase of flowers and proceeded to draw them over and over again, each time varying little things, like how she held the charcoal or how much pressure she applied when drawing.

It was this act of “testing the materials” that made her comfortable to take on more adventurous stuff. Without this period of experimentation, she could not have produced work she would be happy with, just because she didn’t have the experience of using the new materials.

As user interface designers, we do exactly the same thing when we’re faced with a new technology. The first thing we need to do is test the boundaries of our abilities and see what the tools can do. However, we have to make sure that, through all this testing, we’re still giving our users interfaces that meet their needs and minimize frustration.

For example, when the Flash development environment became available, designers needed to experiment and really understand what could be done. They produced all sorts of interfaces, some good and some bad. As time went on, we began to understand what made a good one work well and what made the bad ones work poorly. (For those of you who are interested in this, Christine Perfetti and Matthew Klee wrote a report on just this topic back in 2001.) Today’s Flash interfaces are typically far more usable than the early ones, when we were still testing the materials.

The same is happening now with new technologies, such as Ajax and Eclipse. We need to experiment with these technologies to see what works and what doesn’t. A lot of what we learned with Flash still seems to be true, but these new technologies bring new challenges, so we still have a lot to learn.

Ajax is the topic of this week’s UIEtips featured article. Joshua Porter has steadily been watching the evolving world of Ajax development and paying attention to how designers are testing the materials. As we learn more about what people are doing with this evolving technology, we’ll be talking about what designers need to know to ensure they produce a quality interface for their users without wasting time or frustrating their customers. (Joshua will be speaking about this in detail at the User Interface 10 Conference in October.)

Are you experimenting with Ajax and other new technologies? What are your experiences? Good? Bad? What lessons have you learned? I’d love to hear what your discovering.