Last week I had the chance to give a presentation at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate. I got a chance to listen to Alan Warms, founder of Appolicious, Phil Di Gulio, co-founder of WellcomeMat, Bruce Payne, Director of SEO at Tribune. If I had to sum up the conversation at the conference it would be mobile. With the advent of web enabled location aware phones, mobile applications have the potential to be more relevant to the user’s context than ever before. Almost every speaker talked about or mentioned mobile. The audience was even familiar with apps like Foursquare.

Alan Warms mentioned that on his site Appolicious, a mobile apps directory and review site, there were over a 1000 listings of mobile apps under real estate. Phil talked about his latest project Pegshot which was very exciting. To quote his site:

Pegshot is a photo/video service that enables friends & family to experience what’s happening where you are.

It lets you annotate your life based on location. For example, I can take a video of my lunch and post it to Pegshot. My friends can then see my video, complete with a Google Maps that annotates just where I was having lunch. It’s a service that basically rolls something like Twitter, twitpic, qik and maybe foursquare all in one integrated service.

Another topic that was mentioned by no less than 3 people, including myself was augmented reality. It was a topic that needed no explanation, since most people were familiar with it. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s starting to enter into people’s vernacular and gaining adoption. There are many apps on both the iPhone and Android platform that do AR. Yelp Monocle is a particularly cool one that integrates w/ Yelp reviews. By pointing your iPhone around, the screen will show what you see, overlayed w/ Yelp star ratings of the venues.

Speaking of the audience, even though most people were from the real estate industry, most were also very familiar with social media and services like Twitter. In fact more than half of the audience were on Twitter and a few were live tweeting.

I think the overarching theme that we see happening if we take a step back is that computing will no longer be tied to desk. People are able to access information everywhere now and with more mobile devices equipped with even more sophisticated sensors and technology, mobile computers will be able to serve peoples’ needs better by being aware of the context of the user. Also, people no longer need to interface with machines in the traditional keyboard entry way. New devices like the iPhone and Google Android all support some sort of touch capability. A new class of users are using the internet without ever having to go through a desktop computer.

Taking it a step further, apps like Siri combine context awareness and voice recognition.

In short, the field of mobile is super exciting to be in now. Speaking of mobile, yours truly will be participating in the hackathon at the Day of Mobile Conference in Chicago this weekend.

Build it and they will come? Build it and they will use it? How often do you go to a website and say I can’t figure out this thing or I can’t find what I need? Whether you are building a consumer or enterprise web application, you need it to be user friendly. In reality user friendliness is thought of as “pretty-ing it up”, something done after an application is already coded up. A wireframe or application skeleton gets thrown over to a graphic designer in hopes that they application will just work. However usability goes to the core of the product. It is how your users interact with your product.

The reason I love usability improvement is that often times a small change can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line. Often times, you do not even have to change the core features of your product to make something more usable. Something as trivial as color, size, position or verbage can often change and affect user behavior. As designers and developers of a product, we are often too close and too attached to what we make to see how something may not be obvious to an uninformed user.

“If only the user would do this.” “The user is doing it wrong.” “Why can’t they just see the button.” “It’s right in front of them.” These are the excuses we make to ourselves when first presented with the evidence that our product might not be all that user friendly. We write it off as the user’s fault. However the user is not at fault. Users are users. They will do what they do and you have no control over that. If users never read the directions and always start clicking around, then get rid of the directions and start offering in context help as they click around.

What happens when clients say I can’t afford usability design or research. I say you can’t afford not to have good usability on your website. What’s the point of having a nice looking website or application if people can’t figure it out and leave. The thing is, usability testing can be done on the cheap nowadays. If you have the stomach for it, just go to a coffee shop and ask people to try your software. You’ll be amazed and depressed to see all your design assumptions fall down like a house of straw. Very inexpensive software like Silverback lets you do usability testing on a budget. If you feel like outsourcing, check out UserTesting. You tell them what site to check out, pick out the number of testers, pick the demographics and they send you back a video file of the users screen as they go through your application, complete with a train of thought voice over from the user. Alternatively you can just try something like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Taking a real world analogy, I often frequent this restaurant in downtown Chicago that has a great salad bar. The only problem is that they put the dressing in front of the actual salad. If you are in a line, you come to the salad bar and get your greens. Then you have to awkwardly ask the stranger behind you to move because you have to reach back to the dressing. I pointed this out to the manager that the flow of this was all wrong and it was a major inconvenience to his patrons. He looked at me as if I was some sort of crackhead telling him how to do his job. Now I like the place enough to come back, but this decision to place the salad dressing in front of the salad inconveniences all the patrons that go to the salad bar. People move forward and invariably all have to cut backwards in line. Now I’m sure many websites, including my own have problems very similar to these, but without usability studies or testing, we’d never uncover them. This is why I think Usability is important.

The first Google Technology User Group meeting in Chicago kicked off on Friday July 10 at Google offices on 20 W Kinzie, Chicago. Although it was sponsored by Google, the meeting talks and discussions were not restricted to Google technologies. Everything from Google AppEngine, iPhone development, and Twitter apps were fair game. That said, Google technologies were definitely the main focus. Many talks showcased how easy it was to get a web app up and running using Google technology. A ragtag group of developers, students, entrepreneurs, and business folks totaling around 80 showed up. The event was organized by Uki Lucas from the Revere Group (right across Roundarch offices) and consisted of 9 talks. Here were the topics:

• GData, Guice, Google collections
  Gregory Kick (Google.com)
• Project hosting on Google Code
  Nathan Ingersoll (Google.com)
• GWT and Google AppEngine, Photo Carousel example Widget
  Jordan Beck (Revere Group)
• Facebook for Google Web Toolkit
  David Wolverton (Revere Group)
• Maven2 dependencies with Google Web Toolkit
  Trevor Skaife (Revere Group)
• Google Friend Connect for Google Web Toolkit
  David Wolverton (Revere Group)
• Building mobile applications with Android
  David Lo (Revere Group)
• Building application with iPhone
  Phil Wodarczyk (Revere Group)
• How to Build a Viral Twitter Application
  Pek Pongpaet (Roundarch)

All in all, I thought it went really well. People were really engaged and I’m already looking forward to the next one. No plans have been made as to when it will be but consensus was that it will probably be a quarterly event. It’s great to see a strong developer community interested in cloud services and sharing knowledge in general.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

The second Riapalooza will be held on Friday May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker 15th flr) from 9AM-5PM. It’s an unconference gathering of RIA (that’s Rich Internet Applications for you not in the know) professionals who are passionate about what they do.

There will be 6 exciting talks as well as ample opportunity to network. Here are the panel titles:

• RIAs Beyond The Mouse & Keyboard
• Top 10 Questions About RIA That You Never Had The Courage To Ask
• RIA Problems You Never Knew Existed
• Building Interactive Applications using UX Principles
• Empowering the Client-Side: Consuming Internet Services in RIA
• Social Media, RIA and Sustainability: A Website Development Case Study

Roundarch’s Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be giving the talk on RIA’s Beyond the Mouse & Keyboard. This talk will be the last talk at the end of the day so we’ll keep it short, fun and sweet so people can get to the beer at 5. Without giving away too much, we’ll talk about how RIAs and computer interaction in general is moving away from the keyboard and mouse interface as can be seen by the success of the iPhone and Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a couple of sneak peek videos of some of the stuff you’ll see at our talk.

Flash + Merapi + Lego Mindstorm =

Flash + Papervision3D + Augmented Reality Toolkit + Twitter =

So be sure to join us as we demo some really cool stuff.