Coding Transparency: Development from Design Comps

Posted on May 20, 2010

Since I am an engineer first and a designer second in my job, more often than not the designs you see came from someone else’s comp. Being that I am a designer second, it means that I know just enough about design to be dangerous but not enough to be really effective over the long run.

When I say I am a designer second I mean I am, in fact, a design school dropout. I went, I learned just enough to “get it” and then I ended up dropping out. I did go back to school and I got a math degree, but that is a different story for a different day.

If there is anything I learned from design school, it was that everything in design is done for a reason. Mind you, this is when design is at its best. Every designer that is working to solve a problem and communicate with the viewer has incorporated elements and done things so a specific message comes through. Continue reading »

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Inclusive or Exclusive Web?

Posted on April 26, 2010

When you start working on a website or application, what is your goal? In the current state of the web, there are many ways you can carry your user but, in the end, you must choose web inclusive or web exclusive. Sites with rich APIs which interact with the world around them are web inclusive. Sites which focus internally, drawing little content from the outside web and, ultimately, giving nothing back are web exclusive.

The web is moving away from exclusivity. When the web started, documents were shared, whole, and people had to visit a particular site to view their content. It rarely came to you, typically requiring you went to it. This was the face of the web in the 1990′s. Autonomous operating sites maintained individually for the sake of the content maintained within. Continue reading »

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Usabilibloat or Websites Gone Wild

Posted on April 21, 2010

It’s always great when you have the opportunity to built a site from the ground up. You have opportunities to design things right the first time, and set standards in place for future users, designers and developers alike. These are the good times.

More often than not, sites are already built and deployed for the world to view. Moreover, there are probably unintentional standards in place which get in the way of your best efforts to do right by the site, the content and the user.

It can be said that, much like user experience is either good or bad, there is no such thing as no standard, there is merely a good or bad standard. Once a project is underway, if there are no standards to work from, they will create themselves.

Pretty soon you find yourself in the corner holding a roller and a can of paint with a confused look on your face. Continue reading »

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Thinking in Pieces: Modularity and Problem Solving

Posted on April 12, 2010

I am big on modularity. There are lots of problems on the web to fix and modularity applies to many of them. A couple of posts ago I talked about content and that it is all built on or made of objects. The benefits from working with objectified content is the ease of updating and the breadth and depth of content that can be added to the site.

Something really exciting that came from my previous post was that functions are objects. By this, I mean, site function does not live in a separate world, outside of the content object ecosystem. Functions should be and ARE integrated right into the website.

This is the beauty of the modern web. Since functions are merely objects which can be included in pages, they can be built, tested and deployed independently and then integrated seamlessly into the web application. Typically we think of this kind of function as a plug-in, though plug-ins are merely objects in their own right.

Hagan Rigers (@haganrivers) is currently part of the Web App Masters Tour. Without giving too much away about her talk, she discusses managing site (and application) navigation as a function. She breaks navigation out of the system and handles it as a separate function of the site, independent of the content. If we consider this approach, then we can see something really important:

Navigation is a function. Continue reading »

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Almost Pretty: URL Rewriting and Guessability

Posted on March 29, 2010

Through all of the usability, navigation, design, various user-related laws and a healthy handful of information and hierarchical tricks and skills, something that continues to elude designers and developers is pretty URLs. Mind you, SEO experts would balk at the idea that companies don’t think about using pretty URLs in order to drive search engine placement. There is something else to consider in the meanwhile:

The user.

Several articles I found talk about the SEO benefits of pretty URLs and whether it is very important to consider using them with a site as they don’t encourage a major boost anymore. “It’s ten years too late,” they say. It’s never too late, I say. Continue reading »

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Content: It’s All About Objects

Posted on March 25, 2010

When I wrote my first post about object-oriented content, I was thinking in a rather small scope. I said to myself, “I need content I can place where I need it, but I can edit once and update everything at the same time.” The answer seemed painfully clear: I need objects.

Something funny happened between then and now. I realized that content is already made up of objects. All at once, I discovered I was one with all of the content scattered across the web. It was a very zen moment I’m not sure I could recreate on my best day.

See, we are already working with content objects everywhere, but we just haven’t noticed. Take Twitter for instance. Twitter specializes in the content object. It’s a very small object, but it’s there all the same. Take, for instance, a tweet from my feed.

My one tweet is both content on its own and it is part of my feed which is also content. The same can be said for blog posts, RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, that picture of your cat and any other of a number of things scattered across the web. Continue reading »

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What Have I Done? (Redux)

Posted on March 22, 2010

A little earlier this month, I made a post to Posterous called “What Have I Done?” It was less a post about what I had done as what I was doing. Here we are, approaching the end of the month and I’ve just completed phase one of what I was doing.

In saying all that, I would like to oficially kick this post off with a bit of rejoice. CobbleSite version 1 is complete and ready for people to play with it. Let’s just call it a version though it’s not. Not really, anyway. This is exciting for me as I get to do more than simply blog about what I do, I get to show it.

All of this isn’t very useful if I don’t share a little about why I did it. I mean, what’s so special about just one more content management system if it’s built to be a variant on everything else that is already out there? There is, after all, one major difference: Continue reading »

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I Didn’t Expect THAT to Happen

Posted on March 3, 2010

How many times have you been on a website and said those very words? You click on a menu item, expecting to have content appear in much the same way everything else did. Then, BANG you get fifteen new browser windows and a host of chirping, talking and other disastrous actions.

Boy, I didn’t expect THAT to happen.

You’ve fallen prey to a violation of what I call page-behavior taxonomy. In short, page-behavior taxonomy is a set of rules that certain items must follow when they perform an action or page-behavior. Wikipedia does a reasonable job of telling the user what they should expect after they perform an action as each type of link looks a certain way. Continue reading »

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Degrading Behavior: Graceful Integration

Posted on February 26, 2010

There has been a lot of talk about graceful degradation. In the end it can become a lot of lip service. Often people talk a good talk, but when the site hits the web, let’s just say it isn’t too pretty.

Engineers and designers work together, or divided as the case may be, to create an experience that users with all of their faculties and a modern browser can enjoy. While this goes down, the rest of the world is left feeling a bit chilly.

What happens is, the design starts with the best of intentions and, then, the interactivity bug takes hold. What comes out is something that is almost usable when slightly degraded, but totally non-functional when degraded to the minimum. Continue reading »

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Website Overhaul 12-Step Program

Posted on February 22, 2010

Suppose you’ve been tasked with overhauling your company website. This has been the source of dread and panic for creative and engineering teams the world over.

Some people, in the panic and shuffle, opt for the fast-and-loose approach. They start throwing anything they can at the site, hoping something will stick. Anything means ANYTHING. All marketing ideas go in the bucket, then the executive mandates, the creative odds and ends, some engineering goodness and all of that. This almost always results in a disaster.

Others look to collect everything that people want and need, do a ton of marketing research and then follow that up with user testing. Though this may lead to a usable site, this method probably won’t generate a site that actually solves user needs. Continue reading »

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