WRIT 5112

Thought I'd share another article about responsive web design:

The Holy Grail of college websites might be here

I've been doing this for years on the FreeDOS web site, but I never knew it had a "name" until I took this class. Now that we've been discussing it in the course, I see references to RWD everywhere.

Greg Laugero writes in CIO Magazine about usability and the user experience (UX): How to Create Digital Products That Customers Love.

His article touches on many of the points that we've been discussing in class. A few quotes:

Today, CIOs are getting involved in building products for external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle for many big IT shops. I see many companies that still believe that pairing a business analyst with overloaded business stakeholders will yield compelling digital products. Instead, the result is typically a laundry list of confused and confusing "business requirements" that yields a system that costs a lot and fails to excite (or even meet the expectations of) customers.

Good user experience (UX) designers have been tackling this problem for the last decade. To be clear, I don't mean doing more usability testing to make systems more "intuitive." ...

I mean embracing the strategic value of UX design. UX strategists focus on creating passionate users (engagement), getting them to come back again and again (repeat visits) and making products fun (gamification is all the rage). A strategically oriented UX designer is a complex problem-solver who can blend business objectives, technology capabilities and a rich understanding of users into innovative and compelling digital products and services. ...

A savvy UX designer will take a different approach to gathering requirements for a new project, or can breathe new life into an underperforming one. The strategic UX designer will get out of the office and talk to customers. For example, she may create a "user journey" that shows how your PC-based channel is not available to users when they need it. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a mobile app?

She may create personas and scenarios that go deeper than marketing-driven demographics and segmentation to shed light on customer goals and motivations that are missed by your channel. Perhaps there's an opportunity to use game mechanics to improve engagement?

This is only tangentially related to topics we've discussed in class, but this item from assertTrue discusses the end user impact to splash screens. Basically, the author suggests that the splash screen (i.e. the loading screen, when you start Photoshop, or Office, etc.) just makes things feel slower.

http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/02/splash-screens-sloth.html

As a programmer, I recognize there's a trade-off here. The proposed solution isn't really workable (show a screenshot that looks like the application, then cache mouse gestures to make it seem like the application is doing something.) However, I'm sure there are other solutions that would work better.

For example, the K Desktop Environment on Linux has a style guide that asks developers to put splash screens inside the program window. That way, the splash screen doesn't block your view of other windows that you could use while the other application is starting.

In researching background material for Information Design, I came across this interesting interview in Wired: Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong by Garth Sundem (2012). He interviews Robert A. Bjork, Distinguished Professor in Cognitive Psychology, UCLA. (And he got his BA from U of M, so that's nice.)

Some interesting snippets from the article:

• "People tend to try to learn in blocks," Bjork said. "Mastering one thing before moving on to the next."
• Instead of doing that Bjork recommends interleaving. (To learn tennis, mix in a range of skills like serving, backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork.)
• Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you're trying to learn tennis, you'd want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork - not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.
• The spacing effect: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you'll have learned after this second study session.
• Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn.

Ann shared this link from A List Apart: An important time for design

I loved this quote in the article:

The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. It's offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.

~ Ben Pieratt, Svpply

Later, the article has this snippet, which I think sums up things pretty well:

It's time for the design community to follow in developers' footsteps and fundamentally realign its focus. We need to think about products over posters and people over page views. We need this to happen at every level: in design schools, in design writing, and in the things we celebrate online and in person. We have a new purpose: elevate design and help change the world.

Here's another article I found while looking up more information about wayfinding. It's an interesting part of ID, how to transform information into a form that can be easily understood by everyone - but where you often only get a glance while driving by at 100kph.

The road sign as design classic

I found an interesting video on Slate, about the information signs at Penn Station. For the nation's busiest train hub, they don't make it very easy to find your way around. A great piece on information design applied to wayfinding:

Lost in Penn Station

Hi there! I often like to capture my thoughts and interesting ideas in a blog. I find the act of choosing the right blog item, the most appropriate topic, and how to frame it actually helps me to build a deeper understanding of the concept. I suppose it's sort of a reflection, just a bit more public.

This blog will collect my notes and interesting links related to a class I'm taking through the University of Minnesota: WRIT 5112.

If you've just discovered my blog, welcome! But I'll warn that if you're not in 5112, or studying information design (ID) then this blog may not be very interesting to you. But feel free to look around.