I’ve been tasked with an interesting problem: encourage the Creative department to migrate away from their current project tracking tool and into Jira. For those of you unfamiliar with Jira, it is a bug tracking tool with a bunch of toys and goodies built in to help keep track of everything from hours to subversion check-in number. From a developer’s point of view, there are more neat things than you could shake a stick at. From an outsider’s perspective, it is a big, complicated and confusing system with more secrets and challenges than one could ever imagine.
Years ago, I built a project tracking system for the Creative department at my current company which they use for everything. More projects come and go through the Creative project queue than I had planned on, but it has held together reasonably well. That said, the Engineering director would like to get everyone in the company on the same set of software in order to streamline maintenance efforts.
In theory, this unification makes lots of good sense. Less money will be spent maintaining disparate software and more will be spent on keeping things tidy, making for a smooth experience for all involved. Continue Reading »
Today, at the time of this writing, Google posted a blog stating they were dropping support for old browsers. They stated:
The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.
I made a case to move in the same direction at my company less than a month ago. I reviewed the visitor statistics and discovered less than 10% of all visitors to our sites use Internet Explorer. Months ago, Digg posted a blog asking whether they should block Internet Explorer 6 from viewing the site. Their statistics represented similar numbers to our own. Continue Reading »
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent out a tweet asking what the ‘x’ was in Ux. I shot back a pithy “Ux is User Experience.” In a small way, the question got my mind rolling. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was considering who does and doesn’t know anything about user experience and why that might be.
Today I landed on a slideshow put together by a gentleman at Microsoft all about Ux and why it’s important. This is particularly poignant as Microsoft developed a reputation for building applications that weren’t always pretty, or clear, but essentially got the job done. Continue Reading »