Last week I had the opportunity to attend Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps San Francisco 2006. The two day conference featured a good mix of speakers from the industry sharing their insight on the direction web apps are going and how they’re building web apps today. While a lot of the business discussion doesn’t necessarily translate to the university world, it was still good to hear.
I’ve come up with a list of key ideas that I took away from the conference.
- Before you start a web application, do your research throughly
- Take your time to design your application; users trust well designed sites
- Plan for maintenance and clearly communicate to your users when you need to go offline
- Spend the time to focus on copy-writing the text in your web app
- Make it easy for users to get information in and out of your web app
- Stay away from “me too” features that don’t make sense in your apps context (e.g. adding tags to everything)
- If you’re trying to create social software (e.g. wiki’s) make sure you understand the motivations and rewards for each of your users
I would also recommend D. Keith Robinson’s write-up on Blue Falvor about 10 things from the Future of Web Apps on what he learned.
You can also check out some of the best Flickr photos from FoWA SF06.