after pitchcamp and yossi vardi at this year‘s edition of web2.0expo berlin, moo, user interfaces and user action through design conclude the best of show sessions.
let's start with number three:
3)moo
stefan magdalinksi, cto of moo allowed open insights into the challenges of building moo. two years after starting, with a team of 30, they are shipping to around 187 countries worldwide.
starting their business just before amazon web services surfaced, they build their own infrastructure. to transfer their infrastructure now to s3 would be to complex and thanks to the fact, that storage costs decrease faster then their data growth, costs are kept under control. they use virtually hosted squid caching proxies for $100 per month to speed up u.s. site access.
„ajax is great, but breaks ability to test“ according to mr. magdalinksi. in order to maintain to keep their website up and running when introducing new funcionalites, the developed around 400 rollout test, using watir.
business wi
se, they share 15 percent of their revenue with they affiliates. marketing analysis is mostly done by looking at actual user behavior. user feedback is currently managed by a mix of self made solutions of salesforce. and while the implementation of salesforece took just two hours and only costs a few hundred dollars a year. the „web 0,5“ style interface slows down customer service.delivering physical products to the customers is the core challenge of moo. an overall of two percent of shipments get lost on the post. surprisingly canada hast the most unreliable postal system overall. developing the plastic cardholders proved to be one of the big challenges: designed in europe, produced in china, the first shipping of card holders did not meet the quality requirements. coordinating all the production process proved to be more time consuming then expected.
best of show number 4 goes to:
4) mobile user interfaces
creating specialized mobile user interfaces, presented by brian suda, maxed out the capacity of the room.
phrasing the term „fat free sites“ for mobile web sites, he showed why list views can be 2-3 times more efficient in terms of number clicks necessary then drop down menues.
that power user „fat free“ interfaces prefer to have everything on one screen, in order to reduce search times.
this leads to the last best of show session of this year's web2.0 expo berlin.
5) user action
„User: Action!
Leading Users to Action Through Design“ of solana crawford brought not only a driving speaker but a welcomed step away from the tech driven sessions.her key messages were a) to know your goals - your audience - the action you want users to take on your site and b) realize the power of coulors - shapes - screen layouts.
User: Action! Leading Users to Action Through Design: a presentation by Solana Crawford at O\'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference ,Berlin 2008
so much from this year's web2.0 expo berlin. a experience hopefully to be repeated next year.
