This session was a more general “patterns” type of session where there were several UI patterns demonstrated to help you make a better user experience when working in AJAX.

The patterns and principles discussed can be found in the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library.

The idea is that a common vocabulary needs to be arrived at so designers and developers can have meaningful discussion about user interaction.

Principle - Keep a Light Footprint The idea here is that in a rich Internet application you can reduce the number of steps in a workflow or process and ensure simple interactions are simple. Identify pain points in the process and shorten the path. Design for engagement - keep the user’s attention. An interesting side note - it’s good to make things easier, but in some cases a design can have a very real economic impact on the application - for example, providing a lot of pre-action-lookup (like if Google Suggest returned search results, not just search terms) might make your application less scalable and require a lot more hardware to support.

Patterns: Inline Editing, In-Context Tools, Drag and Drop.

Principle - Cross Borders Reluctantly If you don’t have to take the user to a whole new page, don’t. Rethink flows - base the flow on the user model, not a page model. Rethink paging - could you use scrolling or a carousel instead?

Patterns: Hover Details, On-Demand Scrolling, In-Context Expand, Inline Assistance, Lightweight Popups, Lightbox.

Principle - Give Live Feedback Let the user preview the result of their action where possible. Provide things like field validation, inline previews (like a clothing store that lets you see what a piece of clothing might look like on you prior to you purchasing it), and so on. Try to prevent errors before they happen. If you refresh data on the page, be careful it’s not distracting or annoying. When an action takes place, let the user know what happened.

Patterns: Live Suggest, Auto Complete, Periodic Refresh, Busy Indicators.

Principle - Offer an Invitation Let the interface be discoverable by inviting the user to take relevant actions. Bridge the new with the old - use hyperlinks (a commonly understood indicator of action) provide a route to discovery, for example. Keep actions out of it - if you take actions as the user explores the interface, it makes them reluctant to search out new functionality. Unfortunately, there’s no easy/single solution to this.

Patterns: Hover Invitation, Tour Invitation, Drop Invitation, Tooltip

• Hover + Cursor Invitation.

Principle - Show Transitions Show a user what happened (like when an item is deleted) by using transitions. For example, if an item is removed from a list, fade the deleted item out and shrink the list in an animated fashion to show the item being visually removed.

Patterns: Self-Healing Transition, Slide Transition, Active Spotlight.

Anyway, some great pointers. Definitely gives me some ideas for ways to solve some of the UI problems we face every day at work.