Human Factors

My last session for today, after this one I will go up to the hotel room for a wee rest and get back for the last couple of minutes of the sneak peak session before the huge MAX party starts. They promised that it will be the best MAX party ever, although I can’t imagine something better than the roller coaster party in Disneyland 2005. So I’ll wait and see what awaits me tonight, but now is the time for another learning experience. Apparantly Jesse James Garrett is quite popular – the room is the biggest one I’ve been in so far and it’s almost full and people are still coming. I think I haven’t heard of him until earlier today, when I bought his book (which was almost sold out already, again an indication that he’s popular), so I’m really curious how it will be.

While waiting I just googled Jesse James Garreth and he even has a Wikipedia entry, that explains the number of people here and pushes my expectations even further… ;-)

He starts off with promoting his book (good that I already got it) and explaining what his company Adaptive Path does. He then goes on with the question “What is the web good for (or at)?” and goes back to the invention of television, which was only compared to things that were known before (it’s like radio but with pictures/it’s like theater without going out) and only some ten year after the invention people started to understand the real purpose of TV. He thinks that this is exactly what’s happening to the internet right now. He (as everyone else at this conference as well) sees the power of the internet in the content and in the combination of content and RIAs. He sees the beginning of the current hype in the late 19th century, when visions about the change of photography (from taking the pictures on glass to taking them on film rolls) changed the use of cameras from being professionals based work equipment to something everyone could use because it was so much simplified and suddenly usable.

Reasons for creating a new product could be to produce something profitable or reliable or, in the best case, something people say “I can’t live without it”. He goes back in history to show the development of some products that changed people’s behavior and desires, like video recorders or early word processors and how devices became more and more complicated and harder to use by adding more features. He does a quick digression on video games and digital music players leading to the success of the iPod. The reason why a product that came later to the market and had fewer features than the competition’s could ever get this popular, is, that people see their favorite products as people, too. He mentions a couple of more products and applications that changed the user experience over the last couple of years (eg. google calender, medicine packaging, flickr, mobile phones) and points out that it’s not only the website that makes the overall experience for the user, but the interaction of every party involved (call center, mail advertisement).

Getting to the end of the session he shows a video about the Adaptive Path’s vision of a new medical device called charmr for people with diabetis, a really cool device which sounds so useful that it should be created and hit the market!

This is a live entry, straight form the keynote session at Adobe MAX 2007, so sorry for oversights. The whole session is being recorded, so hopefully it will be available on YouTube, too…

The MAX keynote feels a bit like a religious event: huge crowds (more than 4000 attendees) celebrate Adobe, themselves and the community. Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe Systems, welcomes everyone and presents the Adobe Developer Connection, a developer’s network which was just ready on time for MAX. For Abode’s 25th birthday we get an overview how things developed from floppy disk in the 80s, over CD Roms in the 90s to RIA’s in the 2000s.

- After a big thank you to the community he hands over to Shantanu Narayen (president and COO of Adobe) who talks about the importance of contents and User Experience and how usage of devices needs to be personalised and simplified to be attractive for users. After this he presents the new Adobe Media Player, which covers all of the above.

- Back to Kevin Lynch we learn more news about Flash and its current updates. Flash Player Moviestar for example offers an incredible quality of video, it’s really amazing. The new features include H.264, HDTV with 1080p and full-sreen hardware-based scaling. The Adobe Media Player is meant to be a desk top application in addition to Flash Player to bring the online experience to the desk top. The family is complete with the addition of Flash Lite 3, bringing the experience to mobile devices (available from next month on the Adobe website).

- Scott Fegette and Ben Forta, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion heroes, talk about new features of these Adobe products. Here it gets a bit too technical for me, but again all that’s shown is awesome. There are no boundaries for imagination anymore.

- After Scott and Ben, Kevin Lynch is back on the stage again and talks about Scapblog to show the limits of web browsers and how people develop and adapt existing applications to overcome such limits.

- Next in front of the camera is Ed Rowe, talking about Adobe AIR, here again we see a lot of coding and the outcome is impressive. AIR really puts a rich experience to existing websites. AIR Beta 2, Flex 3 Beta 2, Dreamweaver Air Extention and Flash Authoring Air Extention are available for download at Adobe Laps today.

- Next presentation, by Heidi Williams, is about Flex Builder. She shows the Profiler, Language Intelligence, Advanced Data Visualizations Comps and Flex Framework Caching as a taste of the new features of Flex Builder.

- In the last couple of weeks Adobe had an AIR competition, called the AIR derby, and Kevin Lynch presents the winning applications of this contest, called Agile Agenda.

- A lot of major global market players (like AOL, FedEx, SAP, QVX) are running on AIR and Ebay is relaunching today. One company, frogdesign, actually gets stage time to present their app (developed in AIR), it’s a tool for travel agents to book travels to Disney Parks. It’s pretty cool as it offers all the features that travel agents usually ask for (like local storage), it’s easy to use, makes comparisons easy as and offers extensive mapping features. Great!

- Kevin shows a couple of more applications in AIR (tweetr, Snippage, Pronto!, PayPal, SAP-Briefingbook and a new messanging tool for facebook) and plays around with sounds in digimix. He presents a kind of desk top letter magnets to build words and shows “buzzword”, a very cool word processing application, that can even work with word-documents. The guys who developed this application now belong to the Adobe Family… ;-) Next he shows the overall shopping experience at Anthropology, starting with an email, going over a great online catalogue and ending with an easy exiting process buying and receiving the stuff ordered. Most amazing part is, that once you decided buying something, you can search for other clothes that matches in color. And you can even upload a photo and search for matchings clothes for stuff you already own.

- Next generation Flash will be called “Astro” and will have Advanced Text Layout Support, 3D Effects (simple API for transforming display objects in 3D space, full interactivity, high performance), Custom Filders, Blend Modes and Fills (to build your own effects).

Wow, this was a great keynote! We really need a lot more of this stuff in New Zealand.

Although this was a good session, I was really disappointed. As I spend a lot of time keeping myself updated with what’s happening in the world outside New Zealand, I read a lot of blogs and watch videos on User Experience and Usability, and so it came that I have already watched this presentation a couple of weeks ago. I chose this session because I was really keen on meeting Jared Spool live, after I watched him presenting online and listened to his podcasts so many times. I simply didn’t come up with the thought that he could hold a session that is available on the internet for ages. A short summary can be found at Open Paranthesis, and the slides are available here.I don’t think it’s wrong to give the same talk several times to different audiences (and he is still one of my favourites!), but it would have been nice to give a little “warning” in the description.

The title of this session is a bit misleading, because we didn’t go deeper into real disruptions, but had a look at some really cool applications that do work well. Apparently this presentation was designed for a longer session and so Steven had to skip some of the good examples to stay within the time line of one hour max. One of the sites that impressed me most was an application of an isurance company in Lifecycle based on Flex in which people who had a car accident can drag and drop cars into position to demonstrate how the accident happened. Additionally they can mark damages on a virtual car. But the main purpose of this presentation wasn’t showing the latest flashy applications, but helping designers to ensure a user focussed process during development of a product. Key methodology is the 3D-Model “Discover-Define-Deliver” and keeping the team in communication during the process. My favorite part of the presentation was a short video from the year 1928, showing an average German kitchen and the ways a housewife has to walk to prepare and deliver dinner. After intense studies designers were able to deliver a kitchen that saved up to 90 meters walting distance for the women – so the usability and user experience thought is not new at all! ;-)

Adobe Experience Design is a team of 90 people taking care of the User Experience aspect of Adobe products. Once or twice a month they publish detailled case studies on xd.adobe.com to help the community creating great user experience themselves. In their session Chris and Tom highlighted some of the historic developments (from ghetto blaster via walkman to iPod) and ended with a couples of myths and resulting cornerstones:

Myth 1 – more features=more value
Cornerstone 1 – What’s your point?
Myth 2 – more chrome
Cornerstone 2 – Content is King (this is a big theme this year, we heard it already in the keynote)
Myth 3 – apps are just the sum of their parts
Cornerstone 3 – Create an experience, not a UI
Myth 4 – Animation is gratuitous
Cornerstone 4 – Choreograph sequence and flow

They finish with the conclusion: It’s about immersing your users in an experience, and the experience of content… forggetting that they’re driven. And with this conclusion the official part of Day 1 of Adobe Max ends for me. I will now attend the Sponsor Reception and enjoy my evening!

Two days ago Kai and I arrived in Chicago for Adobe Max 2007. We are still working on getting used to the time difference, but at the moment we are doing pretty we’ll and we are awake although it’s just 3 am back in Wellington. Currently I’m sitting in my first session, a one-day pre-conference workshop called “Unlocking Cross-Media Workflows”. Some guys are showing very cool stuff around image publishing, video editing and other stuff around media. It’s pretty interesting and unbelievable how easy things have become in the last couple of years.

After not having been to MAX last year, I notice one thing that’s quite different to previous years: all the presenters use a Mac to show their stuff and in the audience there are more and more Mac-users as well. So finally people realise, that things can be much easier using the right hardware… ;-)