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.

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.

I am headed to San Jose on Sunday for 3 days of giving talks, learning, talking, discussing, poking, prodding and representing Roundarch at the 2008 AJAXWorld RIA Conference.  I’ve been anticipating this event for quite some time, as the theme for this event grabbed my interest when SYS-CON Media first announced it: “2008: Decision Year for RIAs”.

As someone who has been actively involved in the strategy, design and development of Rich Client Interfaces for the Web since the mid-90′s, and who’s been an advocate for better user experience-enabling technology my whole career, I was honored to have been accepted as a speaker at this event.

Not only do I really like the people that work at SYS-CON (they really are nice, smart, fun and passionate about what they do), I know this event draws people from across industries, and more importantly… across the spectrum of Web and software technologies and corporate camps.

We really are at a really important time in the theoretical timeline of what the industry refers to as “RIAs”. To me this acronym refers to “Rich Internet Applications”, and started being used in 2001 or so with the release of Adobe’s “Flash MX” development software. Flash MX changed the game for interactive agencies and software development companies everywhere, as it was the first ubiquitous and stable platform for developing data-driven Web interfaces that didn’t “feel” like static Web pages.

While no first incarnation is perfect, in my mind, Flash MX was a game changer. The follow up to this was Macromedia creating the intial Flex framework for RIA development, Adobe buying Macromedia, Microsoft .NET, AJAX & Advanced HTML usage and more sophisticated browsers (and browser alternatives). We’ve come a LONG way since I started using “The Futuresplash Animator” in 1996.

AJAXWorld Talk

I will be giving my first of several talks at the conference on the first morning (Monday, Oct. 20th) right after the kick-off keynote. Because of the time and place of this presentation, I should have a pretty large audience, which is terribly exciting and fun for me because I think my presentation will be a nice introduction to the overall theme of the conference, and I a hopeful that it will leave the audience with a bit of energy to explore what the conference has to offer.

My talk description is something like:
Take a sneak peek at some of the concepts that have surfaced with Web 2.0 and learn how they appear to be evolving into the next wave of Rich Internet Applications. From 3-D interfaces and data visualization to whole new models of interaction, this session will provide you with real-world examples of how Web applications are moving towards the future.

I came up with that a while back, and since then, my presentation has expanded a bit. Doesn’t that always happen?

I plan to take the audience on a contextual journey of Rich Internet Application technology as well as other technologies related to user experience. This journey will lay out the past, present and future of our quest to enable ourselves to be able to design what we dream, and build what we design… the way we want it, not the way that we had to due to the variety limitations we’ve been faced with.