On Thursday June 18th, a Chicago RIA community including the Chicago Flex Users Group and the Chicago Adobe Users Group welcomed the Adobe User Group World Tour that came to demo the latest version of Flex 4. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt presented Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new interaction design tool geared towards rapid creation of rich internet applications, Flex 4, the latest version of Flex, and Flash Builder, Adobe’s new offering for creating RIAs. Flash Catalyst was presented at Ascend training in the afternoon while Flex 4 and Flash builder were demoed at the Roundarch Chicago office in the evening.

Here’s a video of the Flex 4 Flash Builder presentation at Roundarch.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

The second Riapalooza will be held on Friday May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker 15th flr) from 9AM-5PM. It’s an unconference gathering of RIA (that’s Rich Internet Applications for you not in the know) professionals who are passionate about what they do.

There will be 6 exciting talks as well as ample opportunity to network. Here are the panel titles:

• RIAs Beyond The Mouse & Keyboard
• Top 10 Questions About RIA That You Never Had The Courage To Ask
• RIA Problems You Never Knew Existed
• Building Interactive Applications using UX Principles
• Empowering the Client-Side: Consuming Internet Services in RIA
• Social Media, RIA and Sustainability: A Website Development Case Study

Roundarch’s Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be giving the talk on RIA’s Beyond the Mouse & Keyboard. This talk will be the last talk at the end of the day so we’ll keep it short, fun and sweet so people can get to the beer at 5. Without giving away too much, we’ll talk about how RIAs and computer interaction in general is moving away from the keyboard and mouse interface as can be seen by the success of the iPhone and Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a couple of sneak peek videos of some of the stuff you’ll see at our talk.

Flash + Merapi + Lego Mindstorm =

Flash + Papervision3D + Augmented Reality Toolkit + Twitter =

So be sure to join us as we demo some really cool stuff.

Earlier this year, Roundarch sent a team to the SXSW Interactive Festival, a yearly gathering of digital creatives, visionary technology entrepreneurs and everyone in between. While there, members of the Roundarch team were asked to give their perspective on industry and technology by Level 3 Red Couch, an online video site that interviews industry leaders. Here’s Roundarch Engagement Director Saurab Bhargava’s take on where the industry is and where it is headed.

I love websites that really engage you. Kathy Sierra, a SXSWi regular, talks about Creating Passionate Users and how you can do that by making them feel like rockstars. The JAG Black jeans website made me feel like a rockstar photographer for a brief 5 minutes and here’s how they did it.

1.The homepage lets you choose between a male and a female model. I picked Marian.

2. A brief instruction screen kicks off the photo shoot right away. Shooting is as simple as moving the camera with your mouse and clicking.

3. I create a magazine layout based on all the photos I took of Marian.

4. A personalized photo book is created ready to be shared with all my friends. Notice the personalized icon on the top left of the left page. You can flip through the 3D magazine like a real book. The camera is loose and enhances the sense of realism further engaging you. (For you RIA geeks, this was probably done using Papervision or Away3D).

What made this microsite successful was that it made me feel accomplished. In about 3 minutes (which is about all the attention span I have nowadays), I went from picking a model, doing a photo shoot, and creating a magazine layout. I was the decision maker at every key point. And before I even knew what hit me, I had infected all my friends with this viral campaign by sharing my custom photo book with them and repeating the cycle all over again. Check out the website here.

If you haven’t seen Kathy Sierra’s talk “Creating Passionate Users”, you should check it out.

Paul Annett‘s panel “Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)” was one of the few that stood out for me. Not only was his content compelling, but he’s also a great presenter and story teller. His years of experience as an amateur magician no doubt contributed to his skills on stage. The talk was a showcase of websites that are doing some very clever CSS/Flash tricks to create more engaging user experiences.

You might look at some of his examples and go “OK, that’s pretty neat, but this is more like an easter egg and is not really essential to the overall goal of the site.” To put it in terms of ROI and business value that a client can understand, you need only look at what his company ClearLeft has done for their product website Silverback. Back when the site first launched, it was a only splash screen for an upcoming product with very little info about the product itself. However, detail oriented web designers noticed that when you resized the browser on the Silverback website, the vines in the background had a parallax effect creating the feeling of 3D. In a short amount of time, designers were blogging and tweeting about what essentially amounted to nothing more than an easter egg for a website, resulting in tremendous traffic, to the tune of over 100,000 hits. To top that off, a very large percentage of that traffic signed up to hear more about this phantom product without even knowing what the product was about, solely because of this little effect. Several other sites now implement a similar effect hoping for similar results. Small little hooks can have a tremendous amount on the bottom line.

Here are some of the examples that stood out:

The dConstruct User Experience Conference website has a secret navigation up top that lets you see the progression of the site from sketches to final product through clever use of CSS.

Kyan, a web design and development agency, has a small worm on the bottom of their website. Clicking on it reveals a previously hidden underground secret Kyan labs.

I thought these next two examples did a really good job of tying together the cleverness with the core experience of the product.

The Wario Land Youtube page slowly collapses as Wario causes more and more damage. This is a very ingenous use of overlaying Flash. You think you’ve landed on an ordinary Youtube page, but as the video plays, elements of the Youtube page start to crumble and fall until all you are left with is a large pile of HTML debris at the bottom of your page.

The iPod touch ad on the Yahoo Games page gets clever by tilting the elements on the website as if they were affected by the iPod touch.

Engaging users doesn’t have to be big and flashy. A little hidden gem can go a long way drawing in people. Often times, you just need people to step through the door.

This talk given by Leah Buley from Adaptive Path was by far the best talk I’ve attended at SXSW this year. I felt that after her talk, I left with tools and ideas I could implement to practice good solid user experience design whether I am in a team of one or 30. That’s how she thought you ought to be doing UX – that her lessons applied to all team sizes. Indeed, I felt they did. Here are her slides from slideshare:

Here’s a link of the same talk presented at the 2008 IA Summit, with audio!

Subtitled: “How we messed up so you don’t have to.”

The speakers in this session included: Sandy Jen from Meebo, an online chat room, Kyle Vogt from Justin.tv, a community driven live video site, Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch, and Serkan Piantino from Facebook. All of these sites are huge in their own right and have had to deal with scaling issues. I thought it would be interesting to learn from their experience.

Don’t get married to any one technology, but don’t flirt too much.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t think ahead too much. You don’t really know what’s going to happen. A better approach is to release early and often and see what happens.
• Release incrementally. Test out new releases with small groups of users and slowly roll out. This way, you have a better idea of the load without taking everything down.
• It’s almost always cheaper to throw hardware at the problem than to have engineers spend their time squeezing out 5% more performance/optimization.
• Automate as much as possible.
• Ask users what they want. Users might not even care for a really complex feature you are about to implement. They might just want something as simple as bigger more legible fonts. – hint hint Impost blog.
• Tell your users your problem. Be transparent. If you are having outage problems, posting it on your blog and letting your users know what’s going on is better than not telling them. This makes them feel included and goes a long way towards creating a rapport with the users.
• A simple solution is almost always better than a more complicated solution.

Minority Report User Interface
When you think of Minority Report most people think of that scene where Tom Cruise manipulates a large projection with a unique user interface using gloves with LEDs. That scene takes up less than 5 minutes of the movie yet it is so powerful that people who see any large touch screen or gesture interface invariably liken it to the Minority Report interface. This talk was about how science has influenced film in the realm of next generation interfaces and vice versa.

Incidentally when I was at the Ohare international airport, I walked by the Accenture Interactive Network (Wall) which was a project by my former coworkers at the Accenture Technology Labs. This project by researchers Kelly Dempski and Brandon Harvey was a giant high resolution multitouch projector screen. I won’t go into it since that isn’t really about the panel but you can read up on it some more here.

This talk covered user interfaces in films like Star Wars, Minority Report, Iron Man, Eagle Eye (which I now need to check out), The Matrix, as well as real research such as Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote hacking escapades, MIT’s Sixth Sense wearable tech, OpenCV, and g-speak (the real research that the Minority Report interface was based on). Microsoft technologies such as the Surface and and their vision of the future were also shown. The CNN hologram, which was new to me, made an appearance.

I thought they picked great examples of vision and scifi stuff, but IMHO, the presentation was very thin on actual research. I was hoping that there would be a 50/50 split between scifi film vision stuff and current research being done and what the state of the art was. It’s easy to understand why that was though. Most of the speakers came from film. Jeroen Lapre, one of the presenters had 12 years under his belt at Industrial Light and Magic.

Check out my Flickr feed from the talk.

Here’s a great example of great usability in real life at the Roundarch office. It’s a very simple yet elegant solution to an annoying problem. What happens when you run out of paper towels at the office? Do most employees know where they are stored? People rummage through different drawers to find more. This little PostIt note provides contextual relevancy. It’s visible when you need more paper towels and it tells you exactly where to get it. When the towel rack has paper, you can’t see it so you don’t develop “blindness” towards the message.

Hats off to the person who came up with this.