3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, California

Schedule
7:30-8:30 pm–Developing a Great User Interface—a Netflix Case Study
8:30-9:30 pm–How Do People Use Search Engines? Using Multiple Kinds of Data to Understand What People Do When Searching
Location
PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA
Directions

BayCHI Contact
Rashmi Sinha
[email protected]

BayCHI program meetings are free and open to the public.

BayCHI may publish audio or video recordings or photographs of BayCHI program meetings. BayCHI does not permit recording or photography by attendees.



Developing a Great User Interface—a Netflix Case Study
Sean Kane, Netflix
Trackback URL: http://www.baychi.org/trackback/1259 (?)

Netflix, the world's leading online DVD rental service, has a long history of delivering one of the most simple and elegant user experiences on the web. It has proven essential to provide a highly personalized web experience to millions of Netflix members. Netflix invented the now ubiquitous 5-Star Rating widget interaction that is used across the web today. The continued use of Ajax and other rich web technologies has been core to the Netflix experience ever since.

This presentation will detail many of the innovative Netflix website features and how they came to be a part of the user experience. Following a handful of features, this will take you through the company culture, development process—from concept to user-testing, to website-testing and out to launch. Learn about which design patterns have resonated well with users (and why) and which ones were left on the cutting room floor.

Sean Kane is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, where he leads a team of developers to create the Ajax-rich web experience for Netflix. Sean's responsibility for the Netflix UI framework has included developing several of the Ajax interactions and features on the Netflix web site, in addition to guiding the UI framework architecture. During Sean's time at Netflix, the website has been rated by independent researchers as number one in the world for customer satisfaction for two consecutive years.

Before joining Netflix in 2002, Sean was the Lead UI Engineer, architecting the JSP framework for the Kleiner-Perkins startup Bigvine.com; one of the first B2B marketplaces on the web. In 2001, Sean was the Web Engineering Manager at AllBusiness.com, and back in 1998, a web developer at AltaVista doing DHTML feature development.

How Do People Use Search Engines? Using Multiple Kinds of Data to Understand What People Do When Searching
Daniel Russell, Google
Trackback URL: http://www.baychi.org/trackback/1260 (?)

Web search engines have a huge interest in understanding what users are trying to do. To a certain degree, this means discerning the intent of a search in the queries and patterns of behavior. Daniel Russell will talk about what is currently done to understand what users have in mind, giving examples of queries, user sessions and the use of multiple data sources. He'll discuss some of the techniques used to analyze the data and outline the size and scope of the problem, and focus on the problem of combining data in the small (field studies, usability studies) with data in the large (log data analysis of millions of interactions), illustrating how we can improve our understanding of users by combining the best insights from both ends of the spectrum, balancing user data requirements with the inherent strengths and biases each technique brings to the table.

Daniel M. Russell is a senior research scientist at Google. Most recently, Dan was a senior scientist and senior manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He is best known for his work on establishing the basis of sensemaking theory while at Xerox PARC and developing IBM's Blueboard system (a large groupware display system). In addition to IBM and PARC, Dan has also worked in Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and taught at both Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. He enjoys word play, music, and long distance running, becoming disgruntled when all three can't be in one day.

Official Website: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20061212/

Added by rabble on November 15, 2006

Comments

rashmisinha

I won't be able to make this program (even though I put it together!) as my trip to Delhi got extended. If you do blog it, can you post a link here?

Thanks!