Sunday, January 21, 2007
Full-Day Seminar, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe

Deconstructing Web Applications: Learning from the Best Designs

Hagan Rivers, Two Rivers Consulting

Are you currently building web-based applications? Do you know what makes a good design? Do you feel like you're inventing every little detail, even though dozens of sites have already faced similar challenges? Web application developers want to avoid “reinventing the wheel,” yet there aren't any resources available to learn what others have already tried.

While web applications have real advantages over software applications, up until now, most of them have been designed on a completely ad hoc basis. Most developers working on web applications have very few success stories to draw upon to help frame their design work. Designers are constantly struggling to build and improve their web applications. For example:

  • The developers at a major financial institution have just rolled a mission-critical application to more than 7,000 financial consultants, but they have no idea whether the application will be successful. They don't know if the application makes the users' work easier or if they've just added complexity to an already complicated job.
  • A major software manufacturer is beginning a project initiative to migrate their interactive application to a web-based platform optimized for text and links. Where should the developers start? How do they avoid making the same mistakes that other web application developers have already made?

To help designers solve these types of problems, we've asked Hagan Rivers, a pioneer designer of web applications, to teach her popular tutorial exploring some of the web's most sophisticated applications. In this information-packed day, Hagan will walk you through dozens of examples of web applications—some great designs and some awful. You'll look at applications ranging from banking and investing to educational software and system administrator tools. By deconstructing the designs, you will leave with a head start for building and improving your own web applications.

To learn what it takes to create successful web applications, Hagan has put together an information-packed full-day seminar. Over this day, you will:

  • Examine dozens of web applications in-depth. Hagan will walk you through publicly accessible applications and intranet applications. These examples will give you designs to draw from, shortening the time it takes you to prepare new designs and improve your existing designs.
  • Learn how to characterize the types of web applications, see how they were built, and investigate the strengths and weaknesses of each one. You'll discuss the best practices of the most successful implementations and the mistakes of the designs that are failing. You’ll explore the differences between a web application and a desktop application and the difference between a web application and a web site.
  • Learn about the basic building blocks of web applications. You’ll see how you can break apart a rich, complex application into individual components that are easy to design.  These components include the hub, the interview, list management, data entry, authoring, searching and filtering , and information presentation.

Hagan has helped dozens of clients solve their biggest application development challenges, and she will share their success stories. You will deconstruct web applications from sites such as Amazon.com, Cingular.com, FlySong.com, Google.com, Hotmail.com, Mac.com, NetworkSolutions.com, TicketMaster.com, TurboTax.com, Upromise.com, and Yahoo! Mail.

Who Should Attend

This seminar is perfect for designers who are working on web applications, but have few examples to draw upon to help frame their design work. It's perfect for designers who now find that the clever little application they built a few years ago is now much more complex.

Hagan has also designed this tutorial to help software developers who find themselves on the alien landscape of web applications that seems both limited and full of greater possibilities than the world they know.

If you want some great ideas to tackle your biggest application development problems, this tutorial is just for you.