An Event Apart: Better User Experience Through Microformats

by August 20, 2008

Tantek Celik’s Better User Experience Through Microformats presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco outlined the benefits of and existing applications of microformats.

  • How can we make better user experiences for users: less pain, faster, empowering, make people happy
  • Operator (Firefox plug-in) locates all microformats on a Web page and provides relevant actions in the browser toolbar.
  • Hcard provides structured information about a contact
  • Hcal provides structured information about an event
  • Search engines are indexing microformats. Specifically Yahoo’s Search Monkey which locates 1.2 billion hcards
  • hListing can be used to post job listings. Will then be indexed by search engines.
  • Most widely supported profile format on the Web. There are more hcard users than users of any one site (Facebook)
  • Hcards could be used to enable single field sign-in. Just tell me the location of your hcard.
  • Beware of third party authorization systems: phishing problems with roundtrip, enrollment authorization problems
  • Anti-pattern: do not enter passwords on other sites. Leverage contact information APIs instead of asking for username & password. We are teaching users to get phished