Thursday, November 4, 2010

A conversation with Luke Wroblewski

Actually, I listened to a podcast of a conversation between Luke W. and Jared Spool. Luke was previously employed with Yahoo but now owns his own company, Ideation and Design. While he was at Yahoo, he was instrumental in creating many innovative web functions and applications, most notably LiveSearch back in 2005. But Yahoo chose not to put LiveSearch on Yahoo because of the server load implications. LiveSearch doesn't wait for the user to complete the search term and click Go before beginning the search, it actively searches based on what the user is typing, a search as you go. When Yahoo developed LiveSearch in 2005, servers and programming languages weren't as robust as they are now and server hits and loads were a big issue. Luke and Jared brought up LiveSearch because Google just announced a similar product, Google Instant. Since Luke developed LiveSearch in 2005, he feels Google is tardy to the party with regard to active searching. However, user expectations are much higher now than in 2005 and we expect to have our search results immediately. So maybe Google isn't tardy but just fashionably late.

As the podcast continued Luke stated several times that just because you can develop and deploy a new design doesn't mean you have to. As a web designer you have to be very careful in choosing when to use cutting edge techniques, both for the client paying you to design and for the end user. An example of cutting edge technology on the web is dynamic web forms, basically building a form that uses JavaScript to "do something" based on what the user does with the form. Think radio buttons that determine what data to return or spell checking on a text field or retrieving data from a data base. You have to be choosy on where you put these interactive forms because you want the most bang for your buck.

Another consideration, especially with dynamic forms is what to do about older browsers that do not support such technology. Per Luke, don't worry about the older browsers just concentrate on the newer ones. I'm not sure I totally agree with this. You have to carefully determine your target audience demographics, including browsers, and then decide if you can basically ignore a large segment of the web population. In my opinion, only after this careful evaluation can you consider targeting only newer browsers.

Lastly, Luke and Jared discussed Apple Ping stating it is an example of a poor user experience. They said Apple usually gets it right with regard to a great user experience but not this time. Both feel that Ping is beyond help and should be quietly withdrawn, reworked and redeployed so that it provides the user experience we all expect from an Apple product.

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