Last night I went down to Google for Bill Scott’s presentation on Designing for Ajax and I’m glad I went. I can’t say that I learned a lot but his presentation was the most thorough and well rounded argument for spending time getting client side behaviors right.

Creating this stuff with all the slick interactive and animated features is no picknick. But making elements interactive and intuitive can provide big windfalls in usability.

Here’s Bill’s blog which is chock-full of goodness on the subject (and others). In a post about the talk Bill says:

In the course of giving the talk I have now simplified it to 7 interactive design principles:

  • Keep it direct
  • Provide live feedback
  • Offer an invitation
  • Cross borders relunctantly
  • Create a light footprint
  • Show Transitions
  • Think in Objects

I will be giving this talk (or variations of the talk) in the next couple of months at:

  • CSU/Hayward (not open to public)
  • City College/SF (not open to public)
  • Oracle Brown Bag
  • Adobe/Macromedia Brown Bag
  • eBay Brown Bag
  • Adaptive Path/Austin
  • The Ajax Experience/SF
  • Adaptive Path/Amsterdam
  • SIGCHI.NL/Amsterdam

You can download a medium sized Quicktime version of the presentation here.
You should download it to your desktop as I don’t want my host to have to suffer with streaming it. Also, the interactive (click to move through presentation) works better when downloaded.

The PDF version is also available here.

The presentation links above are interesting, but they aren’t very useful without him giving the talk, but you can see what the basics are regarding the talk.
I asked Bill if he’d be willing to come up to SF to give the talk here. I was joined by numerous peeps from the design staff (I was happy to see them make the trek down there… and offer me a ride to boot), but really this thinking needs to be in the heads of the various product managers out there.

Interactive elements and transitions have a big effect on our business model (which, to date, is based on counting page loads) as well as our product design. Hopefully Bill will be able to come up and school you fools.