The Mix fun starts: Atlas for Designers

I sat down with some folks from the Live Local team and the Atlas team to talk about the session at Mix06 that we are giving together. "Designing a Better User Experience with AJAX" (title is tentative).

Here is our current thinking, very much subject to change, as we are early days here.

The goal of the session is to connect with the web application designers and have a conversation about what makes a great "next web" application. Then talk about how the new ASP.NET Atlas project makes is easy to build those applications.

We thought we'd start off by looking at some good (and possibly bad) examples of "next web" applications. We'll have the folks from local.live.com there, so we'll show the latest stuff from there and more importantly we will talk about the reasons WHY we created the experience we did. For example go to Live Local and do a search. Notice the pane on the left hand side immediately responds by clearing and printing "loading..." this gives the user some visible feedback that something is happening. Then as the web service call comes back we populate the drop downs with the right data. To get this kind of experience you need to do some significant client side JScript code and of course Atlas makes this very easy.. even declarative (that is.. no code needed). I'll be working one that demo of this soon.

We have a list of a few other experience tips like that that we are flushing out now. The idea for the talk would be to walk though each one.

What do you think? Does that sounds like a good session? Do you have tips for this kind of webapp you want to share?