In Response to Ryan Carson
September 13th, 2010 § 2
A yank in the UK who runs a four-days-per-week web agency, has upwards of 26k Twitter followers, and hangs (at least virtually) with other big names like Veen, Heilman, and Snook, it seems Ryan Carson gets his work and is passionate about bringing it to others. He also recently caused a stir with a tweet and accompanying blog post in which he posited that "UX Professional is a bullshit job title" and that only two people – a web designer and a web developer – were needed to create a web site or app. I think UX Pros have their place. The piece I honed in on, however, was the single developer contention. Web site? Sure. But are we reasonably expecting developers to build modern and performant web apps end to end right when new devices and web standards are adding further (albeit exciting) complexity to the task? I don’t know…
UX Week Sound Bites 2010
August 30th, 2010 § 1
For the second year running I’ve spent four late summer days at Adaptive Path’s UX Week in San Francisco. The 2009 edition saw me diligently posting day-by-day notes and accounts. This year I simply relay quotes and sources while steering clear of attribution. The conference was again killer, the perspectives at the same time refreshing and affirming, the challenges plenty and increasing, the inspiration ubiquitous and palpable. Thank you Merholz and co. for another unqualified success.
Another Corporate Writeup:
JS Master Class with Hoy and Fuchs, Austria and Elsewhere, 06.16.2010
July 31st, 2010 § 0
Thomas Fuchs is author of the script.aculo.us user interface JavaScript library, a member of the Prototype core team and a Ruby on Rails core alumnus. As he puts it, ‘You’re using my work every day, even if you’re not aware of it!’ His wife Amy Hoy is a designer, author, and JS programmer in her own right. Together they team to offer a full-day’s training on advanced JS development and deployment techniques that they deliver via chat and videoconferencing software from Vienna, Austria.
A Corporate Writeup:
Edward Tufte, Denver, 06.11.2010
June 30th, 2010 § 0
Edward Tufte is Yale University Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science. Through his work in these domains and the four books he has published on the display and consumption of data, Tufte has come to be best–recognized as a master of infographic and visual interface design. In his perennial one-day course on Presenting Data and Information, he teaches his view on effective visual communication through examples drawn from across eras and media.
Emperor off Torreys
June 10th, 2010 § 3
6:30 trailhead
3,300 ft up
14,270 ft high
45-degree commit
2,800-ft ski down
6 feet (2 in tele boots) across 5 stream crossings
3 beers on the way back home
90 degrees in Denver
IFrame Solutions
May 3rd, 2010 § 1
IFrames get a bad rap. In the early days their cross-browser support was spotty and even now, incorporating them in mission-critical deployments requires a good reason and a considered approach. But there are good reasons. And given a perfect storm of capabilities and limitations, an iframe can serve as the avenue to a seamless experience where user interaction would otherwise be punctuated by popups, scrollbars, or host switches.
Bourbon, Burgers, Nylon and Beansprouts
April 20th, 2010 § 0
Even at the time it debuted during my ostensible underage years I remember being impressed by the brilliance of Jim Beam’s ‘You always come back to basics’ ad campaign. The original, which ran in the October 1989 issue of 16 national magazines, depicted a progression of America’s preferred foodstuff over 5 decades. A series of 7 photos included 1955’s hamburger, then a hero sandwich in 1975 and bean sprouts in pita bread for 1983 before returning to the hamburger as the go-to of 1990. Subsequent variations played the same trick with boxer shorts, record albums, salt and pepper shakers…
On Letting it Emerge
April 13th, 2010 § 2
One of the harder things I do in my corporate design gig is to try and maintain some wiggle room within UI and interaction projects. More often than not these put front end pieces to market that grow from months of diligently scheduled meetings involving business analysts, marketers, bankers, front and back end programmers, and strict dates. The UI process expectation is one of exhaustive requirements definition, then prototyping and signoff, then code. And I don’t think the model is an exception for big organizations with in-house teams.
Find your Gultch
March 30th, 2010 § 3
March was hard. A year of planning and development of the bank’s new online presence culminated in a couple of weeks, then a few even more intense days whose outcome basically wrote the verdict on the entire effort (we got mostly good marks). At the same time as mission-critical client-side corporate rollouts consumed my days, I found myself burning the candle’s other end on backend php scripting by night. I started smoking, grew some stubble. Said hi to my family in passing…
Cooks
February 26th, 2010 § 2
I near the end of my tenure as Project Lead for the biggest corporate web site design project I’ve ever been a part of. We’re going to hit our date (no small miracle given that it was based on a 5000 hour estimate 6 months ago), but that’s not to say there haven’t been major challenges along the way. Foremost among these has been that of incorporating the vision, desires, feedback, and concerns of all the parties involved. Not until I constructed the list of these, however, did I realize the achievement it is to have arrived at a modern, focused, performant, and coherent site. Here’s to the cooks in the kitchen: