MAX 2005: XD sessions

Experience Design defines the Web as we know it or at least for the XD Team at Macromedia. When I attended Macromedia MAX 2005 last week I was having trouble finding items of interest past networking and hold’em. The only subject worth an audience in my opinion was the XD Sessions and the Mike Sundermeyer portion of the keynote. Yes Flex 2, AS 3, Flash Player 8.5 and E4X were all great and that is why we can all learn about them on labs.macromedia.com so we can spend more time on the relevant items.

Overall what XD was demonstrating was nothing new but the great thing about all of the sessions, was the many focus areas XD covered. It centers around one of the few fundamental principles in life, Experience.

Your trip to the grocery store, your cruise vacation, your home life and your job all circle around the Experience. It is the same for the Web especially when it hits key areas like shopping (reviews, comparison & buying), e-mail, managing your finances, reading the news, searching and even blogging.

The experience of each dictates your mood in many ways and therefore will affect your decisions, emotions and the length of time of the experience. In any light it is still a matter of efficiently moving from A to B and the experience during that session.

By streamlining an experience to be centralized around activity and adaptive to the user, the results of this change should show an increase in adoption, activity and successful A to B sessions.

XD definitely seems to be on this path and are also driving their customers in this direction with their proof of concepts. Now if we can just get them out to one the BayCHI events and expose these similar theories.