Anti-Pattern: Misguided Misdirection - DirecTV Ok, so I moved to the bay area a couple of years back. I am from Dallas. So with the cowboys doing such an incredible job and the local teams being so horrible I decided to watch some "good football". So I added the NFL Ticket to my
Anti-Patterns: Talk at Web Builders 2007 Earlier this year I started giving talks on Anti-Patterns for Interaction Design [http://billwscott.com/files/rwe/Antipatterns.pdf]. What are anti-patterns? > Anti-patterns, also called pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. They are studied as a category so they can be avoided in the future, and
We are Hiring Ok, so I am still new at Netflix. But thought it might be interesting to write up my first impressions. Sean Kane [http://seankane.wordpress.com/], my predecessor did a really great job of helping me understand the culture so there have been no surprises. No surprises, but a good
Netflix Here I Come! Over the last 2+ years I have had the honor and pleasure of working for one of the greatest companies on the planet and with some of the greatest designers & engineers on the planet. Yahoo! has been a great place for me. I learned a lot. Feel like I
MIMA - Jason Freid Finally got to hear Jason Fried [https://gettingreal.37signals.com/] (37 Signals [http://www.37signals.com/]) in person. I know that Jason is controversial and his stance on team size, ways of working are controversial and cannot (I believe) be applied in every situation. Its a lot like Extreme Programming
My MIMA Talk For the folks at MIMA (or others interested), the latest version of my talk Designing for the Rich Web Experience [http://billwscott.com/files/mima/] is available for download. Thanks for all the wonderful comments and discussion afterwards. I also gave this talk at Yahoo last week. Look for it
MIMA - Lee Rainie - Internet Usage I attended and spoke at the MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) Conference [http://summit.mima.org/07/] yesterday. The conference had around 700 attendees with backgrounds in design, marketing and advertising. I was really impressed with the conference and came away with some nice nuggets. First up was Lee Rainie
Anti-Patterns: Talk Recently, I have been giving a new talk on Anti-Patterns [http://billwscott.com/files/rwe/Antipatterns.pdf]. [http://billwscott.com/files/rwe/Antipatterns.pdf] Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this talk, I am exploring the common mistakes
Why Protoscript? UPDATE: Protoscript was an interesting experiment. The reality is jQuery continued to take off, prototyping got easier and even toolkits like AngularJS have made prototyping experiences simple. Still I think it is a fun look at one approach to create an "interaction design language" totally in JSON"
Announcing Protoscript Wow. It has actually been 2 months since my last post. Nope. I have not fallen off the planet. This has been one of the craziest times I have experienced in a long time so while I have had a lot to chat about I have not had the time
Come Work With Me! I am having the hardest time filling two positions on my team. And I am working on what I think is one of the coolest products in Yahoo! [yahoo-teachers-and-the-yahoo-gobbler] (Yahoo! Teachers [http://teachers.yahoo.com]). I don't feel like I am asking for too much. Here is what
Simple Debugger - Based on YUI Logger I decided to wrap the YUI Logger [http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/logger/], add a JavaScript command line that outputs the results in a hyperlink format to facilitate simple drill down. Works on IE6, IE7, FF. Haven't tested the other browsers. Just a quick hack to make some
Pattern: Teaser Pattern - Carousel Cue'ing the User One of the challenges with the carousel is clearly delineating that there is more content hidden behind those back and forth arrows. There are a number of ways to cue the user that there is more content. You could: * Show a series of dots that
Express Yourself! UX Event Our local Microsoft UX Evangelist, Will Tschumy (formerly of Flock) is putting on a UX Design/Bar Camp-like event. They have asked 5 leading design firms in the bay area (AARF, Organic, AKQA, Frog, IndustryNext) to compete head-to-head to solve real world problems. Focus will be on using Microsoft Expression
New Carousel (0.5.0) & ycarousel Group for Discussion Update: Version 0.5.1 added. It adds a spotlight & preview demo. Just posted a new version of the carousel at: http://billwscott.com/carousel/ Lots of fixes around vertical carousels along with better calculation of size. Additionally, lots of clean up of the documentation, HTML example code (for
Upcoming Talks - Mid Year 2007 Mix'07 in Vegas Looking forward to Vegas! I was fortunate to be invited by the friendly [http://www.microsoft.com/design/People/Detail.aspx?key=surya] folks [http://ux-strategy.com/] from Microsoft to give a talk about rich web design at Mix' 07 [http://visitmix.com/]. Should
Yahoo! Teachers and the Yahoo! Gobbler In my last post I said that I was putting my head down to work on something at Yahoo! that I believe strongly in. Strongly enough to set aside my evangelism role and focus on a single product within Yahoo! I am glad to say that I can now freely,
Ajax 101 Presentation Just posted my Ajax 101 talk. Ajax 101 Workshop [https://www.slideshare.net/billwscott/ajax-101-workshop] from Bill Scott [http://www.slideshare.net/billwscott] I have given this talk in a number of venues starting in January 2006 with Adaptive Path in the Designing & Building Ajax Workshops we hosted in
New Role: In the Trenches So as the new year came round I start re-evaluating what it was I wanted to do at Yahoo! I have had an amazing 1.5 years here getting a chance to launch the public design pattern library [http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/], doing evangelism for Yahoo!, creating some components
Carousel - 0.4.0 New release of carousel. More documentation, better runtime configuration support, methods that let you show, hide and recalculate size. Check it out at the carousel site [http://billwscott.com/carousel/].
Slideshare My friends Rashmi Sihni [http://www.rashmisinha.com/] & Jonathan Boutelle [http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/] recently released a really cool product, slideshare [http://slideshare.net/]. Simple idea. Think youtube for presentations [http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/06_12/slideshare%20businessweek.html]. Upload a PPT or PDF, it converts it to
Easy 7 Conference - Bangalore Having a wonderful time in Bangalore. Due to the excellent Yahoo! Bangalore staff, my friend Sameera Gopalakrishna Rao who is here on holiday and the excellent Easy 7 Conference I had the opportunity to speak at yesterday. Easy7 [http://www.chi-si.org/easy7.htm] is a SIGCHI-SI conference held annually
In the Flow: Scrybe Someone pointed me to a new product that is in limited beta release. It's called Scrybe [http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php]. And all I really have right now is the YouTube video demo of the product (on their main page). But what little I have seen, I
Me on Google Earth! Ok, the ultimate vanity search :-) Back at Foo Camp, O'Reilly contracted to have a plane fly over and take 3" resolution images for inclusion in Google Earth. It happened on Saturday, the first full day of camp. Gregor Hohpe from Google & I decided it would
Foo Lessons: Kamishibai Back in the summer I had the opportunity to attend Foo Camp '06 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp] at the O'Reilly offices in Sebastapol, CA. Foo Camp is a loosely organized gathering of folks that O'Reilly invites to flock together for a weekend