Future of Web Apps 2006 - Carl Sjogreen
September 18th, 2006
Carl Sjogreen and “How we built Google Calendar”
6 insights for your next web app
1. Easy is the most important feature “Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible” Alex Kay, Disney Fellow and VP of R&D, Walt Disney Company
2. Know your real competition Know what your competition does well. The Google Calendar team sees their main competition as… the paper calendar. Yep, Google is actually taking aim at eliminating the need for paper calendars.
3. Visual Design Matters Visual Design = Usability + Visual Joy “Great design is that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws.” Joel on Software
4. Build products for people who don’t want to use them Make it painless for people to start using your product without fully switching to a new way of doing things.
5. Time Your Launch Properly “Launch early and often, but not too early (the first time)”
6. Driving Usage Touchpoints that extend beyond your app * “Add stuff” from my site * “Publish stuff” to my site * “Tell a friend” invitations and sharing Social reinformcement is key for validation
7. Relentlessly remove account signups This is a good one – make it brainlessly easy to get started using your web app. Don’t ask for account signup until it’s ABSOLUTELY necessary.
Hmm… That seemed like more than 6.
September 20th, 2006 at 07:29 AM Sounds like a good session, but can somebody please tell me why their monthly calendar view is laid out with divs for the days, but tables for the layout? It's completely opposite. The calendar itself is tabular data, and the layout should just be floated divs. Tisk tisk.
September 20th, 2006 at 07:34 AM That is strange. It gets pretty whacked out if you turn off stylesheets in Firefox. If they had used tables to lay out the month, then it would work even without stylesheets. My guess is that it has something to do with element ids and all the fancy AJAX they use.