Day 1 - Ajax

We had the first day of the UX Week with Adaptive Path... I'll add in the other links for blogs so you can get their view.

Day 1 ended up being more focused on social networking and a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm for letting the user play a strong part...Its all about the user being "contributory". There was unfortunately less about the Ajax side of things - the marketing spin on this day appeared to be much more about tech than philosophy of how people are going to be using the network... Which was a shame. Jesse had to cut his presentation short - which was really unfortunate as the impact of what he's talking about is huge.

AJAX stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML (I believe) but I had to get that from another delegate. We didn't learn much more than is already available on the web so go read the website for more and I'll chime back in when I've dug about some more....

Anyhoo - quick overview - for my mind there were 5 main things to come out:
1) Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 - this is a huge discussion in itself - how can it be so dichotomous? I don't think it can, but that aside.... The focus (briefly) is on:

a) the strength of new technologies (Perl, ruby etc) - front end specialists were a BIG theme here....

b) taking away the "toy language" perecption of Javascript..... an AJAX approach (see the link for Fast Ajax and follow through to where someone somewhere has used the term LazyLoading - your ave tech would call that a "work around"!!)

c) evolving from a page based environment to a page-less-non-submitting environment;

d) from feature rich pages towards feature-stingy (but many stingies together make up feature richness - jigsaw them together

2) "mache -ing" or it could be "mashing" - not sure but THIS is what makes life exciting.... mash together 2 URLs - by using the technology to bring together 2 useful sites. So use googol maps of Chicago PLUS the Chicago crime reports - and bingo you've got an interactive map of where crimes are concentrated...

3) Its all about community networking - I'm not going into this - the enthusiasm for this is enormous but I can't get into the reality of this especially n a b2b world. I'll let you know if they manage to sell me on it! (love it - in its right place - but for us? thoughts? to me its something that's been going on for ages and now its more accessible and more promotable to everyone...which brings with it its own HUGE socio issues....)

4) Design it right!! Essentially as this new tech comes in a lot of the constriaints we've hit before because of page by page approach are starting to dissolve away (hurrah!!) ie nothing we didn't know but nice to see that we're getting there - so we need to help push this stuff. Some of you may have used this - its been around for a couple of years....but its a good example of how the web will be heading.... https://reservations.ihotelier.com/onescreen.cfm?hotelid=2682&languageid=1

5) Here's an interesting aspect to the whole social network - blogs, wikis etc (and they didn't' spend enough time talking about RSS just more about this social networking) but an interesting aside is that enterprise software is all about control and centralised data that never moves (example was of exporting outlook address book to the Mac and how you have to circumvent it using 24 other apps...) ...If we do give users more control and we move towards an opensource mind set - where things are free think of the impact this is going to start to have as we move our data freely - and even when we submit data its still"ours" and the users data is still "theirs"....

apologies for if this is garbled - this was my a-ha moment and not early enough to allow real thought into this just wanted to get it up there for you....will play more later

But think about this - if we move to a pageless environment - where we allow clientside access into the server - more direct and bypass the browser...how does that leave our middle layer? we're designed at a page by page way... and if the logic changes...the business logic changes too. The databases will be safe but the app layer and the presentation layer....hoooheeee....? back we go...begin again...??