Mark DiMarco
Mark DiMarco — Mark DiMarco is a Lead UI Engineer at Bazaarvoice in Austin, TX. He spends his free time working on DataMaps, attempting to master the art of brewing coffee, and taking photos with his favorite piece of technology (a Nikon D600).
Even something as simple as a dropdown menu or a bar graph can introduce usability problems. From a slide out menu disappearing when a user's mouse moves a few pixels too far, to requiring NASA-like levels of precision to mouse over the right element, there are algorithms already implemented in Javascript to help us overcome these problems. If an algorithm is defined as "a step-by-step procedure for calculations", let's visually break down those steps for 2 different non-trivial algorithms and explore how these algorithms are applied to some standard & everyday user interface patterns. We'll first look at an algorithm for predicting a user's intentions by calculating mouse speed and direction, and then tackle determining hit state for hundreds of non-uniformed, variably sized and placed UI elements.