Web 2.0: The Fall and Rise of the User Experience

The Web has enabled pervasive global information sharing, commerce, and communications on a scale thought to be impossible only ten years ago. At the same time, the Web dealt a setback in the user interface experience of networked applications. Only now are Web standards and technologies emerging that can bring us back to the rich and robust user experiences that were developed in the desktop client/server era before the Web came along. Wayne Hom presents examples of great, rich client Web user interfaces and discusses the enabling tools, technologies, and methodologies for today’s popular Web 2.0 approaches. Wayne discusses the not-so-obvious pitfalls of the new technologies and concludes with a look at user interface opportunities beyond the current Web 2.0 state-of-the-art to see what may be possible in the future.

• User experiences on the Web versus older technologies
• New Web 2.0 methods and tools that help the user experience
• Beyond Web 2.0