Jesse James Garrett is a User Experience Designer based in San Francisco, California and co-founder of Adaptive Path strategy and design consulting firm. His diagram titled The Elements of User Experience launched his popularity in the web design community in early 2000, which was later published as a book. In a 2005 paper, Garrett coined the term

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

to describe the

asynchronous Asynchrony is the state of not being in synchronization. Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to: Electronics and computing * Asynchrony (computer programming), the occurrence of events independent of the main program flow, and ways to deal with ...

technology behind emerging services like

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

and Google Suggest, as well as the resulting user experience which made it possible to browse without interruption by eliminating the reloading of the whole page.

Biography

Jesse James Garrett co-founded Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy and design firm in 2001, and co-founded the

Information Architecture Institute The Information Architecture Institute (IA Institute or IAI) was a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. The organization, originally known as the Asilomar Institute for Information Archite ...

. His essays have appeared in ''New Architect'', ''Boxes and Arrows'', and ''Digital Web Magazine''. Jesse attended the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

. Garrett authored ''The Elements of User Experience'', a conceptual model of

user-centered design User-centered design (UCD) or user-driven development (UDD) is a framework of process (not restricted to interfaces or technologies) in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or proce ...

first published as a diagram in 2000 and later as a book in 2002. A second edition of the book was published in 2010. Although originally intended for use in

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

design, the Elements model has since been adopted in other fields such as software development and industrial design. He also created the first standardized

notation In linguistics and semiotics, a notation is a system of graphics or symbols, characters and abbreviated expressions, used (for example) in artistic and scientific disciplines to represent technical facts and quantities by convention. Therefore, ...

for interaction design, known as the Visual Vocabulary. AJAX logo by gengns

Garrett's works include ''ia/recon'', an essay on the evolution of the information architecture field, and ''The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams'', a conceptual model similar to Elements for team structures and processes. In his most well known endeavour, Garrett coined the term

in February 2005 to describe the information behind

asynchronous Javascript and XML Ajax (also AJAX ; short for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML") is a set of web development techniques that uses various web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send and retrie ...

. Although he was not the only one working on the development of this technology, Garrett thought of the term in the shower when he realized the need for a shorthand term to represent the suite of technologies he was proposing to a client. In 2008, Garrett designed the Aurora concept for a future

Web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

for the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open- ...

. Garrett's closing keynote at the 2009 Information Architecture Summit (IA Summit 2009), known as the "Memphis Plenary" created controversy and debate within the user experience community. Garrett's project "iWitness" was one of the winners of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's 2011 Knight News Challenge media innovation competition.

Awards

In May, 2006 Garrett was awarded
Wired Magazine's Rave Award
' in the field of technology.

Personal life

Garrett was born in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

, Canada,as he revealed in a talk at UXcamp Ottawa 2013 and grew up in Florida. He lived in Los Angeles for 5 years before moving to San Francisco in 1999. He was married to Rebecca Blood from 2001 - 2014 and they have one child together.

Bibliography

* The Elements of User Experience

References

External links

Personal homepageAdaptive PathInformation Architecture Institute''Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications''Interview with Jesse James Garrett
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garrett, Jesse James Information architects Interface designers Web developers Computer programmers Living people University of Florida alumni People from Ottawa Year of birth missing (living people)