Today I was wandering around the JavaOne pavilion and took pictures of booths that showed stuff xDesign team has been working on. So enjoy! BTW: the pictures are randomly ordered ;-)
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Because Sun is not the only one exhibitor in the pavilion, I also took some pictures of booths of other companies.
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by Jindra
Jeff Hoffman is the lead user experience designer for Java Standard Edition.
It's the second day of JavaOne, and I attended a talk by Ben Galbraith titled Creating a Compelling User Experience. The talk was very well attended and almost filled the 826 person room (and it happens to be the same room that Jindra and I will be presenting in on Friday).
Ben is an entertaining speaker and put together a very slick presentation and demo. He conveyed key items that a developer needs to consider when designing a compelling user experience for their app. The presentation was peppered with quotes from the greats of usability and user experience design, including Alan Cooper, Jef Raskin, Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen. A few of the points he made stick in my memory, so I'll share them with you:
He also made some very positive comments about the new Java browser plugin that is included with Java 6 Update 10, and JSR-296 -- the Swing Application Framework. These features enable Java developers to create more responsive applications both in the browser and on the desktop.
Stay tuned... More photos from the show will be posted soon!
As usual, JavaOne conference starts the second day in the week. The pictures below show a decoration you can see on streets, inside Moscone Center, as well as our friendly staff working at the registration desk.
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This day started with James Gosling's talk. Right after him Rich Green came on the stage with his Java + You talk in which he mentioned how important is community and collaboration. During his talk he also showed us a demo of a application written in JavaFX. In addition to this day, the pavilion was open for the first time. On our pod, we showed some cool stuff our team is working as well as gave away some gifts.
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by Jindra
Jeff Hoffman is the lead user experience designer for Java Standard Edition.
Jindra Dinga devotes his time to improving the deployment experience of Java for both developers and end users.
In a couple of weeks, my colleague Jindra and I will be presenting our process for creating a graphical user interface to the developers at JavaOne. In my last entry, I mentioned a set of user experience talks happening at this year's conference. Now I'd like to describe a bit more about how we developed our session and what's in it.
At last year's JavaOne, our merry little band of Java UE designers presented a very basic overview of user experience design best practices at a 9pm BOF. We dutifully put together a presentation with slides covering a variety of things, and cheerfully presented them to the much larger than we expected crowd. We were terribly nervous, but overall the experience was great and the questions were great too. Some months later the survey results came in and they weren't bad, but not great... Most of the comments were asking for more detail and more examples, so we started discussion about this year's presentation with that idea.
Based on the feedback, this year we are going to take a real example and walk through our process with it. Since we only have 50 minutes (and some of that time needs to be available for questions), we will try our best to reach the level of detail our audience desires. 
At the beginning of our presentation we will talk about why it is hard to create good GUIs and how important it is to understand the user's tasks and goals. Later on we take the existing command line process for configuring a network interface connection in Solaris (see Project Brussels) and make it over in to a GUI.
Jindra and I have spent years in the user experience field and we know that it's hard to follow an exact process for every project. We also know that making sure our designs work for our customers requires that we adhere to the principles of design, and we want to make sure that the developers out there understand how these principles apply to a real design problem.
If you're planning to be at JavaOne, sign up to come to our session (TS-4968). Also, if you'd like to say hello to some of the contributors to this blog, stop by the User Experience pod near the Spin-the-Wheel Game in Sun Booth at the JavaOne Pavilion.
Jeff Hoffman is the lead user experience designer for Java Standard Edition. He's been designing both consumer and developer oriented products since before the boom.
Springtime is in the air! The flowers are blooming and the trees are sprouting branches. Along with nature's beauty all around us, it's a sign that we're getting closer to a special time of year for Java developers...JavaOne!
I've been attending this show since 1999 and have always been amazed at the array of Java development related topics -- except for putting good user experience design practices to work for your applications. Sure, there are always wonderful discussions about adding fun visual effects like animations, reflections and transparency to help make your application stand out from the crowd. But developers have deeper questions -- like how to make an application work the way their users expect.
I'm very excited to report that the 2008 JavaOne show (May 6-9 at Moscone Center, San Francisco) will include at least four technical sessions focused on user experience. There are also a whole bunch of sessions on the latest fun stuff you can do with Java 2D and 3D Graphics, Swing, JavaFX Script and more. I'll be holding a session along with my xDesign colleague Jindra Dinga called Designing GUIs 101 (TS-4968) where we will use an end-to-end example to illustrate our straight forward, repeatable process for designing GUIs that meet the user's needs effectively and efficiently.
Our talk will cover the important phases of a good design process:
And how we apply these practices when we are designing a specific feature (based on a current command line interface) within a GUI desktop tool. I'll be writing more about our technical session in the weeks right before JavaOne.
To round out this "mini-track" of User Experience sessions, I've discovered three talks from folks who (like me) are interested in enhancing the user's experience with software and are spreading the word about how to make sure it is properly considered during development. They are:
Looking forward to seeing you at the show!
This blog copyright 2008 by xDesign
