Mind-blowingly great post from Firefox’s lead designer (now a dead link) Aza Raskin on the power of prototyping as communication, why you need to start with design and how to communicate ideas visually since it’s all about influencing people. Like, wow… And very topical for my team at the moment (which does not have a designer or front-end engineer). And it definitely re-affirms Agile as a process.
To Design is to inspire participation.
I have to admit to being in awe of people who can both code and whip up a kick ass looking design. Particularly one that looks good and has good user experience. While I can code backends, I’d say my design skills are pretty paltry, particularly when it comes to doing things like lightbox overlays, fades, zoom in overlays and other jQuery goodness. But I’m not proud about it. It’s something I’m kinda embarrassed about (and have a stack of reading material to deal with - that I’ll get through one day).
The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.
Every hurdle a user has to hop through to get to the meat of what they’re trying to do on your site is another opportunity for them to opt out.
Lazy registration, where you get the minimum possible (dead link to webjackalope) from your users and get more information form them as time goes on, is where it’s at (in fact, increasingly technologies like OpenID and OAuth might even make lazy registration redundant).
Great article on the anthroplogy inspired design and implementation of the Joel Spolsky ’s free social question and answer site Stack Overflow< which allows highly technical questions to be asked by its users and answered by its community.
Some great anthropological insights for all social software in the video but read the article as well. Love their nine building blocks of social engineering.
Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.
We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.
As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.
Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.
Bit of a tardy post, but considering the time of year and the fact that we should be thinking about the less fortunate at this time of year, definitely topical…
A really fantastic and financially responsible organization, Architecture for Humanity
recently announced its finalists for the Siyathemba project (dead link) whose aim is to battle AIDS in Africa with a low cost, combined sports facility and healthcare project. The finalists are linkied from the front page.
Much like every other child of my generation that grew up in this hemisphere, Sesame Street was unbelievable formative. Not just educationally, but also in terms of constructing a worldview for an entire generation of a friendly, helpful and interesting universe (rather than the one Fox News seems to be constructing based on hyper-competitive, fearful, violence that rewards stupidity and bigotry).
So, I’m reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell at the moment, which is absolutely fascinating and insightful in its characterization of word of mouth epidemics, fads, and other social “flash fire” phenomenon. I cottoned on to it in doing background reading on the DeanSpace software and the Dean campaign phenomenon in the run-up to the last democratic candidate nomination.
Highly informative, useful and beautifully designed Pushing Your Limits presentation by Doug Bowman for the Sydney 2004 Web Essentials conference.
Basically, tells you why and how you should design with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. If you don’t know, Cascading Style Sheets, while it won’t save you and is not a solution for every interface problem you have, is this simple, almost boring technology which allows you to separate the presentation of your site from the actual data in it. Fantastic for design and allows almost effortless changing of site design.