Case Studies

Learn from those who have gone before as they share success stories and lessons learned: The Ajax Experience features case studies from large-scale projects to help guide your choices in your next Ajax-based development project.

View all Case Studies or click a title below to read its abstract.

 

Experience Design & Rapid Prototyping – From Concept to Pitch

with Max Zabramny, Manager, Interface Engineering, Organic, Inc.

The Web is getting richer and more interactive. We all know this. Yet, many organizations still use the same approach to Web development that they used five to ten years ago - a time when Google or Adobe AIR weren’t even part of most developers’ (or designers’ for that matter) vocabularies. Times have changed, and the new type of applications that we will build in the next five years will require engineers and designers to know more about each other’s worlds. Experience Design and Rapid Prototyping provide a way to explore solutions quickly and iteratively.

In this session, we look at the concept of Experience Design, the idea of mixing Engineering with Creative to achieve a better end product. We look at a recent pitch by Organic, Inc. for Martha Stewart and review how the team was able to get developers and designers in one room - speaking the same language - to come up with an original concept that ended up winning the work. We look at photos of the blackboard sketches and discuss the Persona-based and Scenario-based approach that the team has become famous for. Finally, we explore the methods used by the team as they dispersed into their respective disciplines to accomplish the task of putting together a working prototype in 2 weeks.

Return to the office with a solid understanding of:

  • How to get across the discipline and language barriers of your peers;  
  • How to use Experience Design and Rapid Prototyping to develop creative and useable ideas;
  • A step-by-step approach to a successful design and development process for the whole team.

 

Fun UI: Lessons Learned From Building a Consumer-Oriented Media Product

with Neil Mix, Senior Software Engineer, Pandora.com

How does one create an intuitive, engaging user experience in a Web browser? A question with an ever-elusive answer, this talk provides insight from the trenches of a successful project for Pandora.com, a popular Internet radio station with an engaging user interface. Explore the ins-and-outs and ups-and-downs of building the music player. See where design intersected with (and diverged from) engineering, what it took to polish the chrome, and how to structure a team to succeed in fine-tuning a user experience.

In this session you learn:

  • The challenges and solutions associated with creating next-generation browser-based user interfaces;
  • Where design and engineering fit in;
  • How to organize a team to create a successful user experience.

 

jQuery on Rails (The Real Ones)

with Jonathan Sharp, Sr. Project Engineer, Owner, Out West Media

This session looks at how a large Class 1 transportation company leveraged jQuery to develop a client-side framework for building 80+ internal and customer-facing applications, using a variety of backend frameworks, such as Wicket, Struts, JSF, ColdFusion and raw servlets. This project streamlined the workflow from UI prototype through application implementation, increasing developer productivity regardless of which framework was utilized. The presentation explores the techniques utilized such as DOM transformations, and presents best practices and lessons learned along with code demonstrations. The talk examines how to develop and enterprise solution for leveraging a diverse server-side framework portfolio and deliver a consistent experience to end users.

In this session, you find out how to:

  • Develop an enterprise solution for leveraging a diverse server-side framework portfolio;
  • Deliver a consistent experience to end users with a client-side solution;
  • Avoid consolidating your development environment to one framework;
  • Understand how jQuery fits into an enterprise development environment;
  • Determine the cross browser/cross framework development issues to consider.