Yahoo! User Interface Blog

YUI Theater — Bill Scott: “Designing the Rich Web Experience: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction Design on the Web”

For the past two years, Bill Scott worked at Yahoo in a variety of capacities: Ajax Evangelist, Design Pattern Librarian, Engineering Manager for Yahoo! Teachers, and more. Bill set sail earlier this month for Netflix, where he is now the Director of UI Engineering. His incisive mind, sharp wit, and generous heart are already missed here. Everyone associated with the YUI project joins me in wishing Bill the best of luck in his new venture, where we know he’ll bring equal measures of deep thought and user empathy to the challenges awaiting him at Netflix.

Before he left, I asked Bill to reprise for Yahoo a talk he’s been giving for a couple of years at conferences like AjaxWorld, the Rich Web Experience, the Ajax Experience, ETech, and WebVisions. The talk categorizes a variety of interaction patterns that are characteristic of DHTML-enabled web applications. Bill begins the talk with an important anectdote about a friend who learned about this great tree, the Joshua Tree, and went out looking for it, only to discover that there was one growing in her own backyard. The naming and analysis of the object gave her the power to recognize it even in contexts where it was otherwise overlooked. The point Bill makes is that by naming the patterns available to us we become smarter at recognizing and implementing them. Bill was generous enough to let us shoot video of the talk and put it up on YUI Theater for public consumption. While this 51-minute version is somewhat compressed from what you may have seen at conferences, I think you’ll agree that Bill’s taxonomies are phenomenally useful when it comes to thinking through the work we do in frontend design and engineering.

This video is available in Flash format on Yahoo! Video and as an MPEG-4, iPod-compatible (and iPhone-compatible!) download (change the extension from .m4v to .mp4 if your video software doesn’t recognize the extension). (Slides, in Apple Keynote format, can be downloaded here [253MB].)

In Case You Missed…

Some other recent videos from the YUI Theater series:

• Steve Souders: “High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages” (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)
• Joseph Smarr: "High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong" (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)
• Matt Mlinac: “The YUI ImageLoader Utility” (Yahoo! Video | .m4v download)
• Shawn Lawton Henry: "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Update" (Yahoo! Video | .mp4 download)

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