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Yahoo! was represented at the DUX conference this year by three presenters. Principal designer Samantha Tripodi gave a talk about her work on Yahoo! Teachers titled "Yahoo! Teacher Camp – Creating Tools by and for Teachers.” (I wish they had this when I was in school.) David Ayman Shamma talked about Zync , a plugin for synchronous video sharing and conversing over rich media developed at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. And Joy Mountford spoke about the “The Future of Ambient User Interfaces," and the work we do on the Design Innovation Team. There seemed to be particular interest around two recent projects.

The first was a new visualization of Yahoo! Search data I developed -- Query Bursts across the globe. Thanks to help from Jasmine Novak at Yahoo! Research we are able to visualize queries that have a “bursting behavior,” or rapid fluctuation. In this way you can see how current events impact web search and create spikes or "bursts" around the world. A couple examples are online at our site, including the “Miss Teen USA” geography video and “Hurricane Felix” queries and bursts from earlier this year.

Second was the BookScape project developed by my coworker and friend Michael Chang. BooksScape is a responsive zoomable interface to image data from thousands of books in the Open Library project, from the Internet Archive:

Also, Yahoo!'s own Joseph O'Sullivan helped to orchestrate the conference and did a great job! Thanks Joe.

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This year's Designing User Experience Conference (DUX) clearly demonstrated for me the fluid and complex state of interactive design. The DUX presenters came from a range of disciplines, with diverse and eclectic backgrounds in the arts and sciences. After taking in many views of the role of design in creating user experiences, I left the conference with a heightened awareness of the changing landscape that visual and interaction designers are now adapting to.

Many designers feel their influence has been marginalized by technology innovation. Developers, product managers, and business leaders control the big decisions. Often, usability takes a backseat to feature requests, and design is a superficial layer that gets slapped on top of a product or service which offers something newer, faster, or more competitive. The speakers and attendees at DUX seemed hyper-aware of this situation. They discussed the value of recombining and rethinking top-down and bottom-up approaches to decision-making and project management. By the end of the conference, I was more convinced than ever that designers should know how to code (or at least be well-informed algorithm authors).

Having attended past conferences related to HCI, data-vis(ualization), and graphic design, it was refreshing to hear DUX presenters tackle high-level questions about their roles and their process -- as members of a larger work environment or organization. I'm confronted with many of these same questions at Yahoo!, where I design stuff directly with Processing, an open source programming language and environment for developing images, animation, and interactions. I'm often asked: When is it useful to prototype? How does one evaluate success in interaction design? Where does design stop and development begin?

These are great questions. I still believe that many of these issues would be resolved if designers took more ownership over code and all the design value it contains. At DUX, people confronted real challenges to the role of designers, even the definition of design today. And there were many opportunities for learning.

B.J. Fogg on keeping it simple

B.J. Fogg gave a particularly broad and all-encompassing talk on “simplicity” (I would be more inclined to call it “economies of comfort”). His talk was delivered as a prerecorded movie (vlog style), a format I've begun to appreciate as an articulate and guided method of presentation. He focused on the mindset that a designer tries to create for users.

Fundamentally, Fogg argued that users have limited resources (time, money, physical work, brain power, social deviance, and routine) and that their perceptions of investment vs. return are what ultimately should guide experience design. As abstract and elementary as this sounds, every experience designer out there would benefit by consciously evaluating their own work in light of investment vs. return.

Mindset matters

My favorite example of a designer appealing to the mindset and experience of the user is Wake n' Bacon (by Matty Sallin, Daniel Bartolini, Hsiao-huh Hsu). What better experience could one hope for than waking to the smell of fresh bacon every morning?

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In general, it's hard for me to come up with a destination that appeals to me less than a corporate-sponsored conference. Come to [ insert conference name ]! Nibble on treats we got surplus from an airline caterer, while our stooges try to sell you on our products! No thanks.

But this year, I am spending most of my time writing ActionScript and figuring out the best ways to stream and secure video. I've been coming up with too many questions that I can't find useful or definite answers for. It seemed reasonable to think that Adobe MAX would be the best chance I'd get to be in a room with people who actually know the real deal, and ask them while they're inclined to be helpful. Besides, I have to admit that I think AS3 is pretty great -- Flash finally feels more like coding than black art-- and there are people doing some pretty amazing work with Flash and Flex right now.

Having come to the conclusion a few years ago that Chicago is the coolest city in the US, I figured it couldn't be a total wash. (Note to NYC, my place of birth: Sorry. To SF, my adopted home: Don't be sad. I like you for other reasons, but as a pure city, it's not even close.)

Getting back to MAX--this conference is big! There are about 4,000 people in attendance and there's a wide range of good sessions. As you'd expect, the themes center on Adobe products, but there are technical deep dives, project case studies, all manner of design workshops, plus technology boot-camps and overviews. We've also seen and met a lot of Yahoos (and a few former Yahoos).

In particular, there's a lot of energy around ActionScript 3 and the new H.264 video streaming capabilities of the Flash Player (the keynote features an H.264 demo with Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham that was shot at the Brickhouse space).

This is the first MAX where almost the entire Flash community is working in AS3, and there's a palpable (and sincere, I think) sense of satisfaction among the Adobe folks that they've gotten over the hump of the AS1/2 - AS3 transition to release a solid, well-designed language and API that has shed the cruft of prior versions of AS. People really like it, it performs really well, and it'll be a solid foundation for Flash Player for the next few years.

From the community side, you can also feel that there are lots of new developers (many with much more traditional programming backgrounds than would have typically been the case pre-AS3 and Flex) making all sorts of data- and media- intensive applications using Flex and Flash, that wouldn't have been possible (or sane) just a year or two ago. The recent betas of Flex 3, AIR, and FMS 3 are also adding to the momentum.

As far as the actual sessions went, Flash Player Internals was my personal favorite. It was what I came for -- a chance to meet with the people who write the Flash Player and hear undocumented details about what happens under the hood, and the roadmap for the future. I chased down the guys in the hall afterwards and got a short mano-a-mano session on some low-level screen rendering tidbits from the horse's mouth, as it were.

My co-worker, Matt Fukuda, really enjoyed The New Creatives session, particularly the work from Chopping Block (who also did Kuler.)

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