Cathy Wang

Usability for Rich Internet Apps

Highly functional and responsive interfaces have long been crafted for the desktop, but bringing that same richness to the web is a still-maturing proficiency for both designers and engineers. In this talk, Nate will share lessons he’s learned from focusing on this specific issue within Yahoo!, and from helping to create the open-source Yahoo! User Interface Library. In particular, he’ll discuss the importance of moving beyond “implementation model” to “mental model”, important new instruments for communicating today’s more complex requirements such as “interesting moment’s matrices”, and a sane approach to creating the toolkits that make it all possible.

speaker: nate koechley

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution

Consider this:
* Google now uses over 100 pieces of information gleaned from your online behavior to serve you the most personally relevant ads.
* Applications like del.icio.us and Flickr enable a kind of massively multiplayer information architecture – collaborative structuring of data that supports personal, local and global views of the information space.
* And social networking sites promise to increase the relevance of everything from your personal network (Linkedin) to your RSS feeds (Rojo)

Social metadata – information about who we are, who we know, who we trust and what we do – is the fulcrum for new applications that leverage an understanding of your behavior to bring you meaningful content, products and services. It’s the foundation of the collective intelligence systems we see at work in Amazon, Google and eBay.

When Tim O’Reilly says collective intelligence will … Read More »

Thursday, July 20, 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
Category: Trending Issues

A language of interaction has been opened to the community: the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php. Its goal is to share a vocabulary around designing for engagement. It informs the newest areas of design within Yahoo! and provides a home for sharing the best design and code solutions with the community at large.

Patterns are optimal solutions to common problems. As common problems are tossed around a community and are resolved, common solutions often spontaneously emerge. Eventually, the best of these rise above the din and self-identify and become refined until they reach the status of a Design Pattern.

Design patterns are a nice concept, but how do they fare in the real world? This session will also draw lessons and pose questions based on the experience of that eBay’s User Experience & … Read More »

Designing for Social Sharing

Thursday, July 20, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Category: Design

In recent months, a term that has become increasingly popular is “social search”. In this talk, I will argue that we should be designing for social sharing instead of for social search. In order for Page-Rank based search to work, we need people to create hyperlinks to web documents that they feel like linking to. Similarly, in order for social search to work, we need people to share their information, media, opinions and preferences. I will discuss tagging systems such as Flickr & del.icio.us, and media sharing sites such as YouTube as models for the design of participatory systems.

I will discuss three trends that designers working with such systems should think about. First of all the web has evolved from its geeky roots and become a social sphere for … Read More »

A while back, I had a great conversation with uncleweed about podcasting. Uncle weed is a podcaster with lots of personality who lives in Vancouver. (You should listen to his shows). At the end of the day, as he said, it’s all about the content you have.

In today’s web, to the recent two-tier internet talk, is about the struggle of content. When everything is about media, creating media content becomes a crucial element in the whole mesh-up of digital age. The media should suit the context of the content. Different styles of media deliveries and technology style determines the final communication of content. Looking at video as one example, all the different ways of recording videos, and putting videos online have changed in its own ways. The fact that everyone can put their video on youtube or any other places … Read More »