#NBCNews Digital Group UX Team: Lessons and Benefits Using EmberJS

• Name : Lance Harper
• Twitter : @royallance
• Github : @lanceharper

##Abstract

As a member of the UX R&D team for NBCNews Digital Group (nbcnews.com, today.com, msnbc.com among others), we are always looking for ways to improve the experiences for users visiting our websites across devices. Recently, we have focused our attention on SPAs using EmberJS to attempt to mimic the benefits of native devices while offering the ubiquity, functionality, and shareability of the web. I'd like to discuss our experiences with this framework, including benefits and frustrations.

These include:

• Responsive capabilities utilizing JS for rendering experiences (images, ads, etc.) catered to device resolution that go beyond CSS media queries using EmberJS.
• Learning curve with Ember's magic (KVO, bindings, Ember's naming conventions)
• Development workflow leveraging Grunt and NodeJS to allow for rapid feedback for developers and designers along with the benefits of a development workflow that allows for back-end platform agnosticism, CasperJS acceptance testing, CI, and auto-deployment
• Leveraging EmberJS to drive the requirements for the API needed to power the app and developing a living specification for backend devs.
• SEO considerations
• Rendering strategies for heterogenous data
• Pre-fetching data to limit round trips to optimize performance
• Benefits and liabilities compared with BackboneJS

##Speaker Bio

I'm a UX Developer for NBC News Digital Group working for the R&D team in Seattle, WA who believes in the power and future of the web. I like to build things that people want to use.