RIAPalooza Recap - Thoughts, Photos & My Presentation Slides

The inaugural RIAPalooza event turned out to be quite successful and interesting for everyone who attended. For photos, check out the stream on Flickr and also view the Twitter stream.

I find that a lot of conferences become clouded with sales pitches disguised as presentations and force-fed information that is designed to push agendas of one form or another. This is why RIAPalooza was such a refreshing difference.

As an event that was conceived, planned, and put on by members of the Chicago development community, RIAPalooza was really focused on honest expert opinions and group discussions about the various platforms available for RIA design and development.

I was honored to be able to give the conference opening presentation on Friday evening. As usual, I couldn't help but to talk abou the importance of user experience and about how the technologies that we now have as part of our design and development toolkits are much less about technology and more about enabling people to take creative ideas and bring them to fruition.

In my presentation, I gave an overview of the last 13 years of user interface technologies that we've had at our disposal and how they've evolved to the fantastic tools that we have today. In addition, I shared some concepts with the audience that I believe will be instrumental in the next 3 or so years as we continue to work as creative problem solvers with a flair for digital end-products and both online and off-line user experiences.

Here is a copy of my presentation

After my talk, all of the speakers that were in attendance joined me in front of the conference attendees for a rather lively panel discussion. There was no topic for the panel, rather "just ask what you want to ask". This format lead to some rather interesting and unexpected topics. One would think that most of the questions would be related to specific technologies or "the how" of Rich Internet Application development. Instead, the audience seemed to focus their questions on other topics, all of much more interest to a guy like me! Some of the items that were touched on:

• What business factors go into deciding which RIA platform would be best for me?
• How can I convince my upper management that user experience matters and that we need to build more experiential software?
• How do you convince large corporations to adopt new creative technologies? What is the justification?
• Are plugins an issue? Whether it be Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, users need a plugin. How do we justify this?
• How is the process of designing and building a Rich Internet Application different than the Web sites or software that we have been building?

As you can imagine, the panel of experts had a lot to say! The information that was shared with the audience was spot on and extremely useful and I am sure that the panel discussion added a lot of value for those in attendance. The panel, which was supposed to only run for a bit and end prior to 9:00 PM went over and we were still taking questions when the facility started turning off lights and kicking us all out. That doesn't happen often, and was a sign for me that the presentations for this conference were going to be really valuable and interesting.

The rest of the conference (on Saturday) was filled with back-to-back knowledge sharing and expert insight into RIA design and development and because of the mix of presenters, covered the range of tools and technologies available in the market.

I spent the majority of my time speaking with Josh Holmes and Mike Labriola. Josh is a new Silverlight/RIA evangelist from Microsoft and Mike is a friend, fellow Chicagoan and perhaps one of the most wicked Adobe Flex architects on the planet. Mike is the founder of Digital Primates and works with Jeff Tapper and Mike Nimer... some of the brightest minds in the Adobe enterprise development community.


Josh and Mike teamed up to give a co-presentation on RIA best practices from both a MS and Adobe technology perspective and didn't only provide some great information, were great together and highly entertaining. I really hope to do some more talks with these guys and would love to seem them tag-team again at some larger events.

Personally, I found that the information presented by the handful of Microsoft staffers at the conference to be really valuable. As the guy who manages Roundarch's relationship inside Microsoft's "Mercury Agency Professional Program" I am often more focused on strategy and creative idea generation than "how to build" things. For someone who is generally a bit further away from the code than I sometimes should be, the information that was presented was worthwhile to say the least.

I learned a lot from Corey Miller and Anthony Hendley, clearly experts in MS Silverlight, WPF and XAML and was blown away by the expertise that both Corrina Barber and Tim Heuer showed (and shared) regarding Silverlight development and designer-developer collaboration and workflow. Very valuable and eye-opening stuff, and critical to anyone that is going to embark on a Silverlight-based project.

I was also really pleased to hear some of the ideas that have been brewed in my fair city of Chicago as Ka Wai Cheung (From We Are Mammoth) talked about his project that combines .NET with Flex and is essentially an online application built in .NET that builds Adobe Flex applications. It is innovation like this that really inspires me (and should inspire everyone!)

Lastly, Geoff Cubitt, President of Roundarch, showed off some of the applications that we've built in both AJAX and Adobe Flex and talked about how application development changes when moving from non-rich to "richer" to "very rich" UI technologies. People really "got it" when he showed off the demo application that we've developed for Fast (enterprise search) with an Adobe Flex UI. Fast was just purchased by Microsoft so it was great to show another example where technology from both Adobe and Microsoft have been leveraged to create a killer user experience.

All in all, it was a great experience and I was fortunate to have met some of the interesting people that I did and have such great conversations. It is a real testament to the will of the "community" that events like this are taking shape across the country (and world). It is thrilling to see that a lot of the ideas that I've been harping on for years becoming accepted by the masses and that the community as a whole is now focusing on technology as a means to create better user experiences.

Color Blind Considerations for UI Design

I've been doing a bit of research for a project where I am mixing and matching colors for the user interface of a web site. This project is not unique that it has the requirement to match the brand's colors, but as an application, the look and feel of the brand needs to be able to also be experienced in the color of icons and supporting UI graphics that appear as part of the site's User Interface.

In addition, as the the site is going to have ad-serving capabilities that will drive both "off site" as well as on-site promotional images that should "fit" into the design of the site. All basic issues of design for the Web when you are creating a heavily branded, yet sophisticated "utility-like" Web application. Our team is working under the best-practices principal that color-only should not be used as a solo visual indicator. As we get closer to finalizing the user interface, I've been doing a bit of thinking and additional research on the topic.

Ironically, today, while browsing my google home page, I came across an article that appeared on Wired.com about the subject. This piece, which is actually an Associated Press article deals with the problem faced by those with color blindness when using computers and a new software product called EyePilot that is going to be aimed at helping to take accessibility to yet another level.

I understand the frustration that can be encountered by those who suffer from color vision defects, as my Dad has been slightly affected by red-green color blindness since I was a kid. While it never caused any major issues, it was sometimes a source of comedy as he and my mom would pick out furniture, rugs or paint. I do wonder, however, how his interpretation of financial charts, graphs and business data could have been impacted over time... At least made less frustrating if color blindness was taken into consideration more often when designing digital content (and especially for the make audience).

Color vision defects usually affect people in one of two ways: red-green confusion and blue-yellow confusion. These common forms are inherited as a sex-lined recessive trait, making females carriers and makes more likely to be affected. While only 1 in 100 females are color blind, 1 in 8 men are colorblind to some extent.

This raises two rather interesting issues for usability professionals as well as user interface and creative digital designers. The first of these points is just a question: How often do you or your teams take this into consideration when user interface color schemes or artwork? This obviously is much more of a consideration with male-centered content as well as for brands that have either a "red-green" or "blue yellow" color palette, however even in the design of icons, link & text colors, and other UI elements should see this as a consideration during the creative design strategy and conceptualization.

The second issue is that software such as what they talk about in the Wired article (EyePilot), can offer even more challenges for design teams as users may eventually end up with full control over the colors that are being displayed on their own computer monitors. I realize that this sounds a little "far out", however almost as soon as we had "desktop /windows-based' operating systems, users showed a desire to be able to customize and personalize their digital environment. For many computer users customizing icons, desktops, color palettes, and fonts has become a regular practice for them on their mac, windows and linux-based computers.

This most definitely carries over to mobile devices as well. Screen savers, ring-tones and phone background pictures account for one of the fastest growing segments of personalized content and is now a huge source of revenue for mobile providers as well as 3rd party content creators.

I question whether or not the evolution of both accessibility as well as user customization for digital platforms will introduce the wide-spread ability for users to control how their computers, phones and other screens display color information. Will operating systems eventually have a "color control kit" built in? Will users eventually be able to control the color schemes of any user interface that they work with? Could a user who just loves orange and brown make every piece of content that they view on-screen take on their favorite color palette? Will users eventually have control over things to an extent that the colors picked by design professionals be as easily overridden by ambitious users as the fonts on a web page?

Whatever the future holds, I think that both of these points raise interesting points:

1. Should usability and design teams take color blind users into special consideration when designing user interfaces?
   
   
2. Will the adoption by users of their ability to customize the output of their digital displays (computers, phones, handhelds, tvs) eventually create the expectation that users will override branding and intentional use of colors for those that the prefer?

I feel that the answer to the first point is a loud and clear "yes", especially when designing content that will be geared towards men who are much more likely to suffer from the impairment. I am not saying that this should be a major focus of design efforts by any means, however taking it into consideration is truly a best-practice consideration of both accessibility and usability for digital design.

Point number 2? I suppose only time will be able to tell us the outcome. I suppose that the experts at Apple and Microsoft have aired this out during previous operating system designs, and have done their own research into the topic. Because of this, I also assume that they've determined that the current maturity of user behavior doesn't warrant the ability to override colors in this manner. One thing that is clear is that both Apple and Microsoft spend a ton of time and money researching color.

Then again, it could be hiding in the "Field of Dreams" effect: "If you build it, they will come" (or customize their colors if you will).

Some links of interest on the subject:

• Designing for the Color-Challenged: A Challenge
  
  
• How do Things Look to Color Blind People
  
  
• Why Color Should Never be the Only Visual Cue in Design

This micro-test for color blindness consists of a set of five images. Each image shows a number in one color on a different backgound color.



People with normal color vision will have no problem seeing the numbers contained within, but people with color blindness will see only random colored dots. What do you see?

Seventy-five percent of color blind people have poor green perception. Of the remaining, 24% have poor red perception, and one percent are affected by a rare tritan type.