IxDA

Sarah Allen

The Cinematic User Experience

Web applications now rival desktop applications in the level of interactivity and responsiveness. While these applications live in a web page, the "page" metaphor is no longer adequate to describe the full experience. Neither does the traditional desktop world of windows and widgets lend much inspiration to meet these new design challenges.

In this talk, I suggest how cinematic techniques can be applied to a new generation of web applications. Merely adding flashy graphics and gratuitous animation is not compelling. However, we can take advantage of these new capabilities to create more effective web applications. The "cinematic user experience" describes an interactive experience in which animation, motion, and visual continuity are used to enhance usability. This talk will explore themes from cinema that can be effectively applied in web application design.

Bio

Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen, Director of Application Development at Laszlo Systems, leads the development of Laszlo Webtop, an extensible on-line desktop for multiple rich Internet applications. She has also been instrumental in contributing to OpenLaszlo, the leading open source platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 applications. Her first work in the area of Internet software was on Macromedia's Shockwave team in 1995.

She led the development of the Shockwave Multiuser Server, and later the Flash Media Server, introducing streaming video and multi-party communication in Flash Player 6. She has developed software tools for multimedia, digital video, and graphic arts at Adobe, Aldus, and The Company of Science and Art (After Effects). Sarah graduated from Brown University with degrees in Computer Science and Visual Art. She was named one of the top 25 women of the web by SF Wow (San Francisco Women of the Web) in 1998.

Video

Download this talk: [MP3] [iPod Video]

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