Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for user interaction

Model-View-Websockets

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by Garann Means at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

Many front-end developers are familiar with MVC, and almost all are familiar with event-driven architectures (even if they call them something else). How do those two philosophies work together? And, more importantly, how can websockets help future applications become more responsive, more consistent, and easier to develop? We’ll reexamine the Controller concept from MVC and figure out how to combine simple browser messaging and websockets to address our application needs and improve our user experiences.

Model-View-WebsocketsJavaScript

Did well for a while without patterns and frameworks, but once we realized its potential we added everything at once, adding complexity and functionality.

#singlepageappaproblems

Single Page Applications (SPAs) today are everywhere, as well as SPA behavior on static pages, requiring 3rd-party tools and systems of dependencies. It’s easy to set up, but difficult to maintain.

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Coming Soon – The New Google +1 Button

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New Google +1 buttonThe Google+ Developers group announced today that the next update to the +1 button is strictly a UI change, with no functionality differences. I like the look of the clicked button, after you have activated it by using the plus one functionality.

However, the +1 button itself, not clicked, seems a little too camouflaged to me. It blends in with the surrounding area and doesn’t yell “click me!” like a good “call to action” button should. We talk a lot about the difference between what good design looks like and good design that actually gets user interaction, so I’m sure the good folks developing the Google+ button have tested the new design and found that the new design outperforms the old. They wouldn’t just change things to keep changing things, would they?

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Google Plus Badge Gets Some Tweaks

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Google+ badge gets an updateIn the Google+ Developers preview group, it was announced today that the Google+ badge is getting a couple of really good tweaks.

First, the “Add to Circles” button is going to become a follow button and when clicked, it will automatically add the account to your “following” circle. At that point, you can change circles or select a different circle, but it’s an easy one-click way to add a Google+ page to your circles.

Secondly, the sharing functionality is going to get a little easier. Currently, when you +1 something, you have to click twice to get the sharing dialogue to appear. This will now be the default functionality, which will make it much easier to share content on Google Plus. If you are a member of the Google developers preview group, you can already see this functionality in action.

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Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions
Julie Zhuo – Facebook - Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Facebook likes the start-up culture. They believe in small teams: photos, engagement, etc. Each team is treated like a small company with a product designer, researcher, engineers & a product manager.

Facebook uses data to form a lot of the decisions that are made. Data helps understand how users use product and how they can be optimized.

Facebook had great ideas, built products and then left them to move on to the next thing.

Photos

Were using an old photo uploader tool built in Java, didn’t work well and was poorly designed. Built their own tool, which required a plugin. Tested it and only 34% users successfully uploaded photos. Went back to the drawing board. Research showed that people were bailing at the plugin install step.

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