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.

On May 8th, Chicago will be the host to the 2nd annual RIAPalooza mini-conference, and in the same fashion as last year, Roundarch will be one of the event sponsors.

The 2008 RIAPalooza event was a great success, and brought together designers and developers from the Microsoft, Adobe, AJAX and Java camps to discuss the progression of Web and Web-connected desktop applications and to dive in and take a look at the competing technologies in marketplace.

RIAPalooza is different from many of these types of events and the organizers are committed to keeping RIAPalooza a “platform agnostic and PowerPoint-free zone”, which means a strong focus on keeping the presentations compelling, with no hidden agendas and company marketing pitches masked as presentations on technology.  RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.

Roundarch is proud to be a sponsor of the event, and I am excited to see that our own Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be one of the featured presenters. We wanted to give a talk that would capture the interest of attendees and cover something different than what they may have seen at other events. Because of this, we settled on the topic “RIAs beyond the mouse and keyboard”.

This talk is going to show off a variety of technologies, including our own Merapi Project, a bridge between desktop software and the local operating system and other technologies, including Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX.Be prepared for Adam and Pek to show off some of the exciting things that they’ve been experimenting with. I am positive that the content of their presentation will inspire you.

Other speakers at the event include Kevin Hoyt (Platform Evangelist at Adobe), Josh Holmes, (MS UX Architect Evangelist), Michael Labriola (Lead at Digital Primates and author of “Flex 3 Training From The Source”) and other RIA experts from Chicago companies working with Rich client technologies.

For more information and/or to register for RIAPalooza, be sure to visit  http://www.riapalooza.com.

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.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, speaks with Joshua-Michéle Ross of O’Reilly Media, Inc. about the evolution of search and how it relates to RIA. Cubitt explains how Roundarch and FAST have worked together to bring search out of “the little white box.”

FASTforward’09 Interview: Geoff Cubitt, CTO, Roundarch
Joshua-Michéle Ross
February 10, 2009

Next week Roundarch will participate as a Silver Sponsor at FASTforward ’09 in Las Vegas. FAST, a Microsoft subsidiary, will host the conference which focuses on FAST’s technology platform and enterprise search solutions. We are very excited to be a part of this event because by partnering with FAST Roundarch has been able to develop first-of-its-kind tools to solve complex issues for our clients and take search out of the white box. Roundarch has worked with FAST to develop rich web solutions that work with existing content management systems and integrate search technology into an environment that is efficient and a joy to use. We will have a booth in the Partner Pavilion at The Mirage so stop by and check out our solutions.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, will be presenting “Financial Services and the Role of Search” on Tuesday (2.10) at 1:20 PST in the FASTforward ’09 Partner Theater. The presentation will focus on the evolution of search as Rich Internet Applications become increasingly vital to the success of Financial Services.

Please contact us if you want to plan a visit during the event or just stop by our booth (#302).

At Roundarch we often work behind the firewall – which for people not familiar with our terminology, means we work on projects we’re not allowed to discuss, much less show publicly. As designers, not having a public audience/forum for our work can be both liberating and frustrating. So when Sam Lessin and Chad Stoller from drop.io contacted us to assist them in redesigning their simple yet powerful service, our ears perked up. Not only would we have an opportunity to creatively contribute to a product we all believed in, but we could do so publicly without risking the ire of valued but secret clients.

I can’t stress enough how useful their tool really is. I use it all the time. I have used it for an internal Roundarch presentation on Cloud Computing as well as for other personal things like picture drops and quick file transfers (when my IM craps-out). The ways in which to use their service seem to grow with each user’s imagination.

Roundarch and drop.io
Roundarch was brought on board to work with drop.io for a few reasons.  As a company, we are focused exclusively on designing and building leading edge digital experiences.  We are known in the industry for tackling the toughest design challenges and for bringing both breakthrough design and enterprise scale technology.  We are also known for being a leader in the development of Rich Internet Applications.  This is really a long way of saying we understand design, user experience and technology and we know how to bring them all together seamlessly.  We also understood that drop.io has a long-term road map for the services it provides.  The old design was quite a bit confusing and not able to keep up with new technologies and service improvements.  They needed a design that would complement and grow with future services.  We understood this challenge and were able to collaborate on a design solution.

The Challange
Drop.io is “Simple, Private Sharing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy service to understand. Simplicity can sometimes be confusing. Retaining simplicity while providing a design that was easy to use and understand from day-1 was our primary focus. The real design challenge is that if a user is new to drop.io, and they’re given a URL to go to from someone, say, at a party who has just taken some photos among friends, when that user arrives at that URL they’re deposited right in the middle of a “drop”. No context. No on-boarding. The user just wakes up in a room and needs to figure out what it all means. So the nature of their service is simple: online storage space where files of any type can be dropped, viewed and shared, but partnering with Roundarch was critical to presenting their service to the novice user in an easy, understandable way.

At the core of the drop.io service is inputs, views and outputs – but their old UI and design strategy didn’t reflect this. Switching views was confusing, output controls and parameters were located in a few different places and their choice of using the color red (to be ironic) was amusing to only a few. Our task was to collectively figure out a UI template that met a few key criteria: input, view and output needed to be clearly defined and the design had to be extensible for co-branding and personalization. We also wanted to target Drop.io For Business (DFB) with a template design and information-page that showed the flexibility of their service for businesses.

The Process
We began by taking their existing logo and “growing it up” a bit. We chose a beautiful and clean typeface (Archer) and chose a simple typeset execution.

Our next task was to nail the header. This was critical because the header is really where the concept of the service is expressed in the navigation of the site. Input, view, output became Add, View & Share. By keeping that functionality hidden but handy we eliminated the need for users to hunt around the site to trigger functionality. The trick was that when the user is browsing their drop, we wanted to keep the maximum possible vertical space for their content. It’s only when the user wants to do something with the drop that we wanted to surface UI controls (while retaining the statefulness of the page).

From there we chose to execute the body elements, the actual content of the drop, in a clean and simple way that clearly separated drop-content from any customization the user might choose to perform and future-proofed the content-display area from any other view paradigms drop.io might choose to implement moving forward. At the forefront of our minds was scanability. We needed the user to quickly scan the page and understand where their drop content was located. Through the use of iconography and a change in type size we were able to accomplish this while adding to the aesthetics of the experience. Lastly, we addressed the home page. Like most of the rest of the strategic planning for this site, the home page had a trick to it we needed to get just right. Unlike most homepages, the drop.io home page was most likely not the first page a user new to the experience would see. This is because users most likely would encounter drop.io in the context of viewing someone else’s drop. And in that scenario, the user would be deposited in the middle of a drop as explained above. So their drop page is really their homepage and their homepage is really their drop-provisioning page. It was in this light that we wanted to streamline the process of beginning to use their service as much as possible. 4 steps vs. 3 steps is a big deal in the web 2.0 world of zero patience. We solved this by defaulting certain settings in a collapsed menu and brought the number of steps a user had to do in order to create a drop down to two. Name it and put files in it. Done.

The Results
Needless to say the project was a success and all sides were thrilled with the results. I encourage you to check out drop.io for yourself.  As I mentioned earlier, this is really an outstanding service that will continue to push the limits of what can be done with file sharing and beyond (geotagging, freedom to upload from many sources, collaborative sharing options, etc.).  Sam Lessin sums it up thusly, “Roundarch did a very nice job learning about our product and our future feature roadmap and then helping us conceptualize some of the design vocabulary necessary to meet our immediate users needs, while still leaving us open to future growth and extensibility.” Agreed.

Roundarch continues to revolutionize solutions for their clients by leveraging and extending Web 2.0.  Site Extensions, a concept created by Roundarch, packages key elements of a company’s web functionality into a joy-to-use user experience and a simple technology integration.  This “package” can then be seamlessly distributed by the client to their partners, affiliates, or other sites while maintaining the integrity and security of the client’s brand.  Unlike interactive banner Ads or similar advertising media, these packages extend a site’s reach and allow the clients customers to fully transact with the client.

As an example, Roundarch has developed the first of its kind car reservation Site Extension for Avis.  The main goal of Avis.com is to allow their customers to easily add or modify car reservations.  Building upon existing web services from Avis, Roundarch was able to quickly design the interaction model and develop the code to allow a user to complete all steps necessary to book a reservation within a single screen. Secondly, the use of Adobe FLEX allowed the code to be distributed with ease – Avis’ partners would need only a small snippet of HTML code to have a fully functioning transactional reservation extension on their site. Furthermore, Roundarch also created an admin module to allow partners or individuals to change the look & feel of the reservation extension (within Avis brand guidelines).
Finally, not only can Avis distribute the reservation extension but partners and individuals can “share” their version of the extension with other partners and individuals; increasing the reach of Avis.

The premise for Avis was simple but powerful: the partner keeps the user traffic while Avis gets the transaction and extended reach. The reception has been tremendous.

Within just a few months of our initial launch on www.rentacar.com, the potential was further realized when Avis Australia/NZ positioned the site extension on Air New Zealand’s own website as a central negotiating point of a multi-year partnership between the brands. For Air New Zealand, they were able to further their own travel offering with the inclusion of discounted rates with Avis (and Budget) cars. For Avis, it represents millions of dollars in expected revenue over the next few years – they now have the ability to grow their customer base with the inclusion of Air New Zealand customers. Roundarch customized the existing USA version, which is now live for Air New Zealand.

Site Extensions are the natural evolution of Web 2.0; allowing companies to extend their reach with targeted functionality and interacting with customers at the time and place most convenient to the customer.

These are certainly interesting times. And if you make a living driving innovative web projects like Roundarch, then things just got a whole lot tougher. In the past week, three of my most senior clients cited the Sequoia presentation as an indication of their bearish outlook for the future. Everyone seems to be preparing for the nuclear winter which in many companies will include spending and hiring freezes, layoffs, and a tendency to play it safe rather than make bold strategic moves. At Roundarch, we have believed for quite some time in the transformational nature of rich internet applications, and our clients who have deployed them across the enterprise have achieved outsized gains vis a vis their competitors. Is it still possible to create competitive differentiation using rich internet applications in these difficult times? We think so. Two quick facts: the iPod was launched shortly after 9/11 and Fortune Magazine was launched in 1932. We believe that turbulent economic times are the perfect time to launch transformational technologies. Several of our clients are using this time to build rich applications that should revolutionize their marketplaces. But even if you can’t convince your management to make bold moves, there are many ways to keep innovating using the rich internet as a tool of differentiation. Uris and I are looking forward to discussing how AVIS, A&E, Motorola and others are doing just that in our talk on Tuesday (Nov. 18, 9:00 am – 10:00 am). For example, AVIS and Roundarch have created transactional banner ads (in Adobe Flex) that allow AVIS customers to complete a full reservation without even visiting AVIS.com. This innovation completely changes the traditional strategy of pushing everyone to your URL. They also have a full page version that they are deploying on affiliate sites. In both cases, AVIS is using rich technologies to completely challenge the status quo and doing it without breaking the bank.

The title of the talk is “Building Successful RIAs for the Enterprise in a Climate of Financial Uncertainty.” It is a mouthful. Perhaps a better title should have been “Thrive vs. Survive” which is core to our message. We strongly believe that those companies that use this economic downturn to push even more innovation will take significant share from those who just try to survive.

AdobeMAX

I recently had the chance to present at two different user experience conferences. While the venues were different, the subject matter was the same—user experience documentation for rich interfaces.

First was the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in September. I had a packed house for a three-hour workshop. Then just a few weeks ago, I covered the same topic for a smaller crowd, in a one-hour presentation at Web Builder 2.0 in Las Vegas.

Why this topic? As the work we do at Roundarch moves away from the “page” metaphor and toward richer, more interactive experiences, we designers are faced with moving beyond the site map and static wireframe. We need to be able to communicate more fluid interfaces and interactions.

Sometimes this means documenting very detailed functionality and almost infinite “states,” or representing motion in a static medium. But it can also mean stepping back to paint a broader picture—establishing and communicating the fundamental approach for a site’s interactions – to build consensus before the detailed work begins.

My presentation covered several highly-visual documentation techniques, which attempt to communicate the exact right amount of information—to the right stakeholders—at the right points in the project. From presenting a high-level concept map or user experience brief to an executive, to producing a usable functional spec for visual designers and developers, to building a proof-of-concept prototype, we touched on a wide range of deliverables. Supporting each example were tips on when and why to use a particular documentation method, best practices for design, limitations and challenges, and special considerations for rich Internet applications.

Links:
Web 2.0 Expo
Web Builder 2.0

For an outside perspective on the New York workshop, take a look at this attendee’s blog entry.

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.