Blogs

JPMorgan Predicts 2008 Will Be “Nothing But Net”

“JPMorgan expects 34 percent earnings growth in 2008 for the Internet stocks it covers”

So hopefully we’re in for another good year, or the bubble is stretched tight. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

We all have some vague notion that we can’t visually focus on everything in our field of vision at once, but just how little can we really see at once? This is a very important question for web designers and information architects. James and I are working with Andy Edmonds of StomperNet to build a browser type application “that simulates the limited high resolution vision available to humans as they use the computer”, called or
Foveal Gaze Simulation Software Scrutinizer.

Basically the app applies a filter over the web page your viewing that allows the region around your mouse to be in focus, while the rest of the screen is blurred out. This is to illustrate the difference between what your fovea and periphery of your eye see. This way you can see what your users see more or less and apply some usability best practices to improve conversion or generally make your site easier to use. Specifically you can make adjustments like button positions, whitespace, navigation bar headings and typography. The idea is to use the science behind vision to improve your site without really needing to understand it all;-)

James built this app with AIR. Using the HTML functionality to implement a simple browser and Flash to create the filter over the web page. We had a few interesting challenges getting the page interactions and events to work through the Flash filter, but it’s working pretty well now and will only get better:) On interesting feature you might miss is that you can adjust the size of the focused region with the mouse wheel. This simulates the narrow detailed foveal view when zoomed vs the larger less focused foveal view for rapid scanning when zoomed out.

The masses really are starting to think that usability is cool, even Scoble plugged Srcutinizer! Quick buy some shares in user experience!

Scrutinizer is free, so go download it.

[Update] There’s a super handy Top 10 uses for Scrutinizer posted on the site that includes suggestions simulating eye tracking in a usability study, testing findability, assessing the ease of a multi step process and more.

Web designers can watch how visitors behave on sites

What are you looking at?

Sometimes, website designers don’t see the flaw of their own creation that deters a site’s visitors. They are so familiar with the site they built that they think everyone will be able to use it as easily as they do. If you want to see how people are really using your web pages, use Robot Replay to watch them interact with your site.

It’s neat to see RobotReplay picked up by some mainstream media…I wonder is that means it has a much broader appeal than we first thought. I do feel like usability and user experience are hitting main stream vogue, but I may be stuck in an echo chamber. Help;-)

I figured with end of year and holidays approaching we’ve all got a lot of stuff we want/need to get done, here’s how I’m probably going to operate.

Check out more awesome funny graphs: Crappy Graphs! - “Time before deadline / work”

Dave Johnson just put up a post titled “Ajax Alive and Kicking” that looks at where Ajax is today and what some of the new innovations in the space are. He identifies the key factors in why Ajax is still continuing to the be successful versus other RIA technologies and in particular Flex.

An additional benefit to Ajax (HTML + JS) is that its interactions are somewhat measurable, which is much more difficult in the Flash world. If you put Google Analytics on your Flash site and you don’t get much, a little bit more now with “Events” in Google Analytics but not much. How meaning is a page in the historical sense in an RIA? Of course this falls down in Ajax sites too, but tools like our RobotReplay are springing up to fill that void already, but I don’t see the same happening for Flash/Flex. Of course we’re looking at it, but it’s definitely a chicken and egg thing. One might choose Ajax over Flex because they can measure interactions and effectiveness of their public facing Ajax more easily, and we chose to build RobotReplay for Ajax first because more people use it. This is a very important decision if ad revenues and/or conversion rates mean anything to your business.

Old Rules; beg for coverage and beg for each sale;

New Rules: create thought-leadership by participating in a community that helps customers buy.

This is a great quote from on thought leadership — Pragmatic Marketing. And something we’ve been working on for the last couple years at Nitobi. I think we’re getting somewhere. Begging sucks!

A LinkedIn API is coming soon. I can’t believe it’s taken so long.

LinkedIn hasn’t disclosed exactly when the API will be readily available but the company does say that the API will eventually be accessible to any and all developers sometime in the next year. The API will provide access to information in profiles, connections, search, network updates, and the “company insider” (its news article service).

Considering I have the majority of my important business contacts locked up in LinkedIn I’m very excited about this. We’re going to be looking at this very carefully for at least 2 projects Nitobi is currently working on, JumpNote and Jiibe. Hurry up, knock down those walls and let us into your garden!

Goes a little something like this.

Well kinda. Our super duper intern Andrew Lunny put this together as a side project for UBC’s Comp Sci program.

How to get a job in Computer Science - shot in Vancouver, November 2007. Everything done by Andrew Lunny and Eugene Katsov, Team Discovery Channel, except the bits we didn’t do.

It was fun to be part of it. Hopefully we can do more of these fun little side projects as a team, it was a blast!

Although we’re all building Ajax applications, tools and framework at break neck speeds it’s probably wise to pause once in a while to consider the potential risks.  As with any technology there is good and bad.  You don’t want to take a wrong turn that could jeopardize your software development project or even your business.  For a sober look at the risks associate with Ajax projects check out Alexei White’s article “Are you ready for AJAX risks?” on Computer World.

The 3 main areas of risk are:

Technical — These are issues that directly relate to the design, development and maintenance of software, including security, browser capabilities, timeline, cost of development and hardware, skills of the developers, and other things of that nature.

Cultural/political - These are fuzzy issues that focus around the experience of end users, their attitudes and expectations, and how all this relates to software.

Marketing — These are issues that relate to successful execution of the business model resulting in sales, donations, brand recognition, new account registrations, and so on.

This article is republished from our book Enterprise Ajax. We finished writing the manuscript for the book and therefore this article almost a year ago and some stuff has changed. For example we now know what Safari 3.0 looks like under the hood. However, much of this article will apply to more than Ajax projects, so it’s worth a read.

One big risk that I think is more relevant now than ever is whether or not Ajax is the best or only technology you should be using to achieve a rich user experience online. Food for thought:)

Technorati Tags: ajax, risks, development, technology, challenges, enterpriseajax, book, computerworld, seo, marketing

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