In our book and often in our talks we discuss a technique for thinking through and documenting detailed interactions in a user experience. Just arrange the interesting moments in a grid. List the “actors” (user interface elements) vertically and the events horizontally. The cells in the grid become the interesting moments.

With the classic example from the of drag and drop there are at least 96 interesting moments (6 actors X 16 events = 96 interesting moments).

About a month back I gave a talk at Zurb, a northern California design firm, in which I discussed this technique. On Friday I was pleasantly surprised to see they had already taken the idea and used it in a new product they announced last week — BounceApp — which was featured on TechCrunch.

Check out their article on 110 Interactions for Editing Annotations on Bounceapp.com.

Nice application of the grid.

Lou Rosenfeld interviewed me on the topic “Bringing Design to Life: What Every Designer Should Know About Interface Engineering”. This is a really interesting subject and gets to the heart of how to get engineering and design teams to work together better.

The interview gives you some of the points I will cover in my upcoming webinar on the same topic (Feb. 26th, 10AM PST/1PM EST).

Also there is a short video presentation (about 7 minutes) that provides a sneak peek into the webinar presentation.

Use code RMWBNR for a 20% discount off your ticket purchase.

I presented Designing Web Interfaces on the O’Reilly Webcast today. Almost 1400 people signed up and the actual attendance hit 862. We set the record for an O’Reilly webcast And we had overwhelmingly positive responses to the talk. If you liked the talk & the material then I think you will enjoy the book.

If you did not hear the webcast, check out the slideshare presentation below. It will give you the best flavor for what our book is about (keep in mind much more is in the book with lots more details and guidelines).

The audio will be available in a week or so. Look for a post here when I get the audio to share.

**UPDATE. The actual video & audio of the screencast can be seen on YouTube. Watch it in high resolution.

On Tues, Feb. 3rd I will be presenting a short talk on Designing Web Interfaces as a webcast for O’Reilly. This talk is free and space is limited (and filling up fast), so if you are interested sign up now.

And a reminder on a completely different (brand new) talk I will be giving on Feb. 26th: Bringing Design to Life: What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering. This talk comes out of my longtime experience bouncing between the design & engineering worlds and in particular lessons learned at Yahoo! and Netflix. This 60-minute webinar is initially available as a live class, and then is made available in a DRM-free recorded, edited format. By avoiding the travel required in attending a physical seminar or conference, you save money and reduce your impact on the environment. You are free to watch the webinar with colleagues in a conference room, making for an even better value. The cost is only $129.

Details here:

• O’Reilly Webcast – Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction. Feb. 3rd (18:00 GMT / 1pm EST / 10am PST)
• Rosenfeld Media Webinar – Bringing Design to Life: What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering. Feb. 26th (18:00 GMT / 1pm EST / 10am PST)