Workshop Title
Fake It Till You Make It: Rapid Prototyping Using Flash

Presenter
Philip Fierlinger (Xero)

This was one of the most fun presentations of the conference, mostly it addressed a task that I want to like, but find to be a pain: mocking up interfaces. Usually I just do this on paper, and don’t iterate much. Fierlinger showed off how he could effortlessly and visually throw together UIs in Flash. He’d do dozens of iterations a day, sometimes in the middle of user testing. It struck me as incredibly agile.

Interestingly, Fierlinger was barely using Flash at all: He was basically using it as a drawing tool with a timeline. The sweet spot he settled on between interaction and static mockups are what he calls “screenflows.” These are scripted interactions where the viewer is guided through the interaction. These are useful for testing the expectations of users, as requirements documentation for engineering, and as the first pass of a testing plan.

Click through to see the full notes on how he came to this process and all the places in the development cycles that it pays dividends.

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This post isn’t really a set of notes. I was working during the keynotes with only one ear open to the talks. My ears perked up now and again during Tim O’Reilly’s talks. Here are little decontextualized nuggets that caught my attention:

• Tim uses the term “information shadows,” to refer to the unique identifiers and metadata around things in the world. The virtual side of Bruce Sterling’s “splimes.”
• Owning a namespace (@nagutron) is super powerful. Interesting that this convention actually came from the users. Contrast to the long facebook profile URL with id string; people don’t really feel like they own those.
• Clever bit of data harvesting: Power spikes when appliances start up have signatures that can actually identify make and model (AMEE, power monitoring startup in UK, discovered this.)
• “Antigenic cartography” is the term for 2d and 3d visualizations of genetic traits of related organisms. Used for flu virus mutation drift tracking.
• We are beginning to develop a “planetary skin” of sensor data. Tracking every bit of the planet’s health and human behavior. It’s still low-res, but just the beginning. Web 2.0 + World = “Web Squared”
• The Power of Less – Moore’s Law applied to world problems. Change the mindset to exponentially increasing efficiency.
• Gov 2.0 Summit

Workshop Title
Even Faster Websites

Presenter
Steve Souders (Google)

This was the third year in a row that Souders has presented his findings at Web 2.0. Here are my posts from year 1 and year 2. As usual, Souders has been hard at work running experiments on the performance of every part of the web browser, from initiating HTTP requests to rendering CSS. His central nugget of wisdom is that the vast majority of a user’s perceived wait time can be attributed to the frontend. This was an unconventional idea when he debuted it several years ago, but it’s common knowledge now and has only become more true over time. We frontend engineers are writing richer and richer browser-side code, nowadays.

However, my impression of this particular talk was that much of today’s research into frontend optimization is achieving diminishing returns. Instructables benefited greatly from Souders’ first talk, back in 2007, but the CSS optimizations introduced in this talk would shave very little off a user’s wait time. I was reminded, however, that I should install YSlow, which is an open-source plugin that will automatically identify performance bottlenecks on Instructables. I’m pretty sure there is plenty low-hanging fruit that we haven’t harvested, performance-wise.

Practicality aside, Souder’s talk was very interesting. The fact that CSS rules are parsed right-to-left was an eye-opener. I’m not going to go back and optimize all Instructables’ CSS, but this one nugget will allow me to avoid writing any egregiously slow selectors in the future.

You can find full notes and a link to the slides after the jump.

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