Apart from the BBC internet blog and backstage etc. @media 2008 had the fortune of hearing a whistle-stop tour of the redevelopment of the BBC homepage. This site has haunted many web designers since it’s launch with comments from colleagues of “Why can’t we do… {insert name of feature here}… like the BBC homepage?”. It became a shining example of what can be achieved.

Tom Cartwright and Claire Roberts presented their short piece on the development of a site that: took them three months to build; had to cater for 6 million users per month; couldn’t contain loops in the code; couldn’t process XML; had to be accessible; where 5% of users (that’s 300,000) didn’t use Javascript. This is web development at the sharp end.

A point of interest is that they managed to get 60 image requests down to just 3 using sprites. This had the affect of reducing the number of HTTP requests, a big saving on a highly trafficked site.

The size of this project is reflected in the fact that the development team recognised a need to drop JQuery as a Javascript framework and develop their own. Tom described Glow (www.bbc.co.uk/glow), a new framework that supports Safari 1.3 (apparently unlike JQuery). We were told that Glow would be available as open source software towards the end of the year, but judging by the password it looks like this still hasn’t been finalised. They also mentioned that their next project will look towards a pan-BBC identity system for users. The idea is that they’d have implicit and explicit personalisation and that, once logged into one BBC site, your credentials would follow as you traverse the sites. In support of this the BBC joined the OpenID federation, looking at becoming a consumer.

For insights into the future of the BBC homepage see www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/. They recommended Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites (he really knows optimisation).

Jeff started by describing his childhood in the 1970s and how at the time the world was changing around him. At a young age he came across a pong game encased inside a table at a restaurant. For him, before then media had been a passive experience, suddenly there was interaction. He terms it as society going through a “conceptual progression in how we can communicate”.

He went on to describe how this expectation picked up momentum as data storage became cheaper and computer processing became more powerful. In his view Moore’s Law works across all technologies. The two key aspects vital to this revolution where the tools for participation and the scale of data.

In 1973 the IBM Winchester 3340  was released with a capacity of around 70Mb. On release it cost $100,000. In comparison, Google currently archives 4 – 5TB of data every afternoon. From this we see that the tools have developed massively and so has the scale of data.

Designers must turn this raw data into information. Whether or not this is achieved is a subjective judgement as it relates to perceptions of the audience. Jeff’s example was to communicate monthly rainfall based on the size of a cartoon raindrop. If the audience had been meteorologists, they’d probably have preferred a numeric representation, perhaps in inches or centimetres. So it is the job of the designer to remember to take the design of data from decorative to actionable. Success comes when the designer has managed to “convey promptly to the eye something that would otherwise require mental calculation”.

A great example of this was John Snow’s mashup of Cholera deaths and location (a street map). Just as valid is Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s March to Warsaw. Edward Tufte was another statistician who used chart’s to bring out the story with the crash of the challenger space shuttle. Also of interest is the air and ground traffic visualisations from Britain from Above (although mostly for entertainment purposes). All were designed to get the heart of the story without being untruthful.

Google Analytics was designed to do just this. Jeff’s tactic with this was to shelve any ideas and reassess them two weeks later. His inspiration for the final graph design was a travel montage from the film Indiana Jones. :)

The point is that the audience is all important. In his work with Adaptive Path, he would identify what people want to do, not what people want – an important distinction. They would take transcripts of user interviews and take out sections that sounded like tasks. Charting the mental model with sticky notes helps provide vital communication for designers and managers. To get the product to production, look at all the options and reduce down to only what you need at launch. What we leave out is more important than what we leave in, we must remember to tell the story.

Some further reading: The Ghost Map, Anything by Edward R. Tufte and of course the presentation.

This week I’ve found myself reading Read/WriteWeb more and more. If you’ve not seen it, they produce thought provoking articles on all sorts including some that analyse the past and offer an academic look at the possible future of the web. In the last few days I’ve been contemplating their posts on “Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three Approaches” and “Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee’s Graph is The Next Level“. These posts led me to Tim Berners-Lee’s “Giant Global Graph” and Google’s ‘light-hearted’ “Social Design Best Practices“. I found these good for getting to grips with possibilities for the web’s future direction. What’s interesting is that it all seems to tie together the thought as Tim quotes:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important

Anecdotally, blue flavor alluded to this last week after recapping on FOWD with the statement ‘content is still king.’. Well actually Tim abstracts this even further by stating it’s what the content is about that’s important, but both follow similar lines by stating the importance of ‘situation-appropriate’ web access (another quote from Tim’s post).

So after digesting all of that freely available info, who needs to go to conferences like @mediaAjax? We’ll actually I do and I was quite sociable at the after conference gathering, although I didn’t have the moola to attend the event.

• The @media 2007 podcasts have been released (for the first day anyway).
• Snook.ca posted a piece about Co.mments. Anyone who knows me will understand that anything that aids keeping track of stuff must be a good thing.
• The Simpsons Movie website is totally flash based (boo), but totally fun (yay). Still under development (all locations except Mo’s Tavern are ‘coming soon’ – a phrase I dislike) but what’s there has a good quirky feel to it. On the downside I haven’t managed to register (I guess a problem with my network connection?) and downloading the mobile screensavers seems to only be an option available to people in the US. Does this fit with anyone else’s experience?
• Rebtel.com are offering free – yes *free* – international mobile-to-mobile calls (land-line handsets must have a display). It’s a new application of VoIP and a nifty way around the problem of not having a VoIP ready gadget, required by networks such as Skype. Rebtel seems more convenient than the rest, but what’s the line quality like? I haven’t tried this service yet and my only experience of VoIP was back in 2001 while at Uni (trying to save money on phone calls home), suffice to say the line drop-outs were so numerous I gave up. I have high hopes about this tho…
• Thanks Phil for pointing this out, Photosynth & Seadragon. This kind of technology opens up a world of possibility.
• Found these at the wireless festival, really fun, Music Monster.

Beyond Ajax

In his keynote presentation, Jesse James Garrett focussed on the importance of user experience and the idea that the top web products create the best end-to-end system designed from the ‘user perspective’, not the ‘programme perspective’. Sam Felder and Peter Merholz have both written articles that seem to be based on versions of this presentation (Jesse doesn’t seem to have posted any notes so far). BTW, I enjoyed the Steve Jobs quote.

The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All

Molly Holzschlag firstly announced that she will no longer be speaking at general web conferences, as she blogged a few days before. It’s a shame, I like her style, it was fortunate for me that I got the chance to meet her and have a chat about energy etc – a usual drunken topic of conversation for me ;) – with her in the pub that evening. Interesting points from her presentation included an analysis of the reasons why each web browser develops so differently, she described six implementation variables:

1. Development Approach – browsers have different life-cycles, non-linear iteration has been the best technique so far.
2. Working with Standards – CSS2.1 is being used in some browsers but it’s not a recommended standard yet. W3C specifications are ambiguous, especially a problem.
3. Operating Systems and Tools. (didn’t write anything for this!)
4. Extending Browsers – example is browser bugs fixed in IE6 through use of JavaScript.
5. Proprietary Development – Past examples are Netscape’s ‘Blink’ and Microsoft’s ‘Marque’ technologies. Initially both of these took precedence over implementing CSS support.
6. Fractioning Specifications – Conversation has moved from CSS back to HTML over the last year. There is no specific sensible end to creating an evolved HTML.

Pathways to success:

• Create common baselines. Consistency between browsers.
• Clarify ambiguity – her case studies described how the W3C standards state one thing, but browser developers implement behaviour very differently.
• Transparent development cycles.
• Keep an open dialogue – currently Apple is the only major browser developer that isn’t joining the discussion.

High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation

Simon Collison describes his passionate contribution to @media07 better than I ever could. Drew McLellan also gave a rousing arguement. Joe Clark live blogged the whole event (and I *mean* event).

Interface Design Juggling

Dan’s presentation. I don’t think I can add much more, I didn’t write much for this one, I guess you had to be there :)

Microformats, Building Blocks and You

Having missed last years inspirational talk by Tantek (I know this because my friend Rik came back bubbling with enthusiasm) I had to see it this year. Here’s his presentation. Tantek has a tendency to write every point on his slides, so there’s not much sense in me explaining. A few useful microformat links are Operator for Firefox and pingerati.net. If you haven’t already checked out microformats (trust me they’re useful), do so first!

When Web Accessibility is Not Your Problem

The last presentation of the day. I’m going to leave this controversial (on the face of it) presentation to my next blog post, I suspect it needs a fair amount of explanation.

Anywho, in the mean time, check out this geek error 404.

• Jesse James Garrett,
• Molly Holzschlag,
• Drew McLellan,
• Simon Collison,
• Dan Cederholm,
• Tantek Çelik,
• Jeremy Keith,
• Joe Clark,
• Jon Hicks,
• Shawn Lawton Henry,
• Andy Clarke,
• Richard Ishida.

As usual accessibility was high on the agenda, but this year the debate about where the responsibility lies turned more towards the user agent developers than ever before. As part of this theme Joe Clark presented “When Web Accessibility is Not Your Problem“. The comments he made, along with his take-no-prisoners style seemed to shake the audience up (and at least one other speaker). To tell you the truth, I’m still a little uncomfortable with what he had to say, I’m going to have to revisit that one. Also, there was a lot more about design, including the hilarious “High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation“. Drew and Simon (mentioned above) presented a rousing debate culminating in Drew running into the audience handing out placards stating “THERE IS NO FOLD”. The event seemed to get the ‘designer’ and ‘developer’ tracks sorted this year (when compared to last), however as always you find yourself wanting to split in two for some sessions.

In retrospect, I’m a bit miffed I missed Nate Koechley‘s “High Performance Web Pages“, as afterwards I heard really positive things about it. Also, I found the choice between “1 Web, Acid2 and CSS3” and “Advancing Web Accessibility” to be difficult, it ended up being a bit of an ‘ip-dip-doo’ situation (very scientific me). Anyway I did see some really interesting and thought provoking presentations, I plan to blog them in my next few posts (I wrote 48 pages in an A5 note pad across two days, I’m not going to write it all up here but it’s a lot to go through). I’ve also got a few pictures I know I should post, still thinking what’s best for that but I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get a Yahoo! ID and use flickr.