FOWD presentations, part 2

April 17th, 2008

I was surprised at how big this conference is – according to a JavaScript that counts rows in the attendee list there’s 879 people in this hall.

Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules

by Larissa Meek

A representative of the big agencies world (works for AgencyNet) Larissa delivered a nice checklist of what you need to think about when working with a big client. What I missed is possible solutions for this but this would probably require a dialogue and a day or two. The thing is, and it seems to be the theme here, that everything depends – on the projects, the client, the team,…

Photoshop battle

Jon Hicks, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jina Bolton, Hannah Donovan with commentary from Andy Clarke

The contenders were split into two teams – men and women. Women started the Photoshop battle and while the guys were chatting created the beginning of the final picture. After two iterations a weird image of Andy Clarke was the result. The chat was interesting and the result of the battle was hilarious.

Print and the web

Elliot Jay Stocks

A nice session about how web design relates to other stuff we know – print design, drama – and what the main meaning of design is. While print design has different limitation and different dynamics it’s a valid source of inspiration and technique copying for web designers – it should be the only one though.

From Design to Deployment

by Jon Hicks

Displaying how to change a design into a deployed page on the case of Cheesophile we got a few great tips from Jon. A technique I haven’t used before but I will try from now on is basic.css that is loaded in all browsers and sets the content for older browsers. What you do here is only add some color, maybe try to size fonts and of course add the background image that notifies the user that they’re using an older browser. An interesting proposition is also to allow users to tab to the “skip to …” menu – even though it’s hidden you could show it when people use tab to navigate through the page using the :focus modified in CSS. Another neat idea is to use some sort of framework for development and when you’re finished just go and set specific CSS rules to semantic class names.

Another thing Jon mentioned is how different font sizes are for different fonts – I had this problem a while ago when I was first starting to use the Vista ClearType fonts that are much smaller than your regular Arial font. So I created a script that would determine what font a certain tag is using and add a class name to that element so you could target that font directly. It’s a JavaScript enhancement so it’s not a perfect solution but it will help 90% of the people using XP without the new fonts. The thing is I never really finished that script so it’s not online yet – I’ll find it when I come back and put it online so the typophiles can use it to give a better experience with different typefaces on different platforms.

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FOWD presentations, part 1

April 17th, 2008

The first three presentations were great.

Finding Inspiration For Design

by Patrick McNiel

There are many ways of getting inspiration, what you need to know is that it’s an ongoing process. And the weirdest thing is that it comes from various places – so look for inspiration not only in your field but in other fields, adjacent or not. When looking for inspiration in your field use cataloging publications, so you can see how other people solve similar problems – for websites you can use Design Meltdown. You need to remember though – don’t copy!

User Experience vs Brand Experience

by Andy Clarke and Steve Pearce

The thing is that good experience is actually merging the two, not have them as opponents. If you think of these as opponents you’ll only get one thing when both are needed to create a good experience. This will hurt your client and your reputation so it’s important that you try to find the right point where you get the best from both worlds. You need to know that experience is like an iceberg – you only see a part of it (the part that branding wants to change) while most of it is below the line. And that’s the part that people will talk about when it’s good or bad.

While there are many ways to design stuff, some completely methodological, there is another way – genius design, where the designer does a design based on their experiences and try to think what the best way for a user to interact is. This kind of design doesn’t need (want) to be analyzed – either it’s right or wrong. They don’t need to be safe to be usable – you can do amazing and weird stuff, your experience as a designer will tell you how far you can go. If you fail that’s only a way to learn where that line is.

Designing the User Experience Curve

by Andy Budd

A great talk about how people experience stuff and what stays with them. With a lot of examples and great slides I can’t put my finger on a single thing that he said that really stood out – the whole talk was great so you really need to find a way to listen to it, the slides aren’t going to cut it. The keywords – first impression, usability, personalization and customization, attention to detail, feedback, fun, experience.

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FOWD conference

April 17th, 2008

MacBook ProImage via WikipediaI’m at the conference and going to conferences without a Mac is obviously a weird thing to do – everybody else has one. The irony being that I’m sitting in the Microsoft lounge and there’s a bunch of people sitting on Microsoft Expression and Silverlight beanbags using Apple computers.

The first thing to disappoint me was that they got my name wrong. I know I have a “weird” (non Latin1) letter in my surname but I thought that Unicode / UTF-8 managed to spread enough for it not to be a problem. Currently my name is “Mrdjenovi_” – yey.

The next thing was that we only got an Adobe plastic bag with a brochure of what’s going on in it. If we got a real bag with a bunch of stuff most of us would have to carry two bags around. But then again the invitation did say that we only need to bring ourselves. If I came with nothing on me I’d be pretty screwed.

Fortunately I found the cloak room and an O’Reilly stand. I left my coat and I now own Ambient Findability.

Zemified

Posted in apple, companies, events, fowd, fowdlondon08, microsoft, software, vista | 2 Comments »

Going to London

April 16th, 2008

So I’m going to London. I’m currently waiting to get boarded at Ljubljana Airport (Letališče Jožeta Pučnika Ljubljana). I’ve uploaded some pictures to my marela account.

Reflection self portrait

The reason I’m going is the Future of Web Design conference in London. It’s going to be my first Carsonified event and I hope it’ll be as good as the previous events were or better.

I’ll try to post something while I’m there even though I have no idea what the wireless situation is going to be – I know that my hotel only has wireless in public areas and that there’s supposed to be free Wi-fi at the conference.

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Video is the new AJAX

April 14th, 2008

TVImage via WikipediaRecently there’s been a lot of video news sites popping up here in Slovenia. In addition to TV networks almost every newspaper site now has a video section. I understand that these sites need to evolve and that media is changing. Every year we see statistics changing telling us we read more on the web and less newspapers. Even TV is losing ground. The media business is changing and in this ever changing world the easiest and the cheapest solution is to follow what others are doing. Unfortunately this also means that you do things without thinking them over thoroughly.

When you do that you have a problem – you’re thinking that you’re giving readers what they really want but in turn you’re giving them what you want. Or what you think they want – either way you’re not on the right track. That made me think of the ways I watch video online and the ways I want to watch it.

Podcasts

Most video I watch is actually not on the internet – it gets downloaded (almost) automatically into iTunes. I don’t watch the podcasts everyday even though some podcasts are daily news reports.

So local media companies are adding podcast feeds to their video content and hoping that people watch them[1]. Newsflash – podcasts are not a technical issue. Most people don’t even know what feeds are (another story), why do you think that they know what podcasts are?

The solution here is quite simple – for a quick start of course. Make real podcasts, use the news you’re making or providing on your site already. This way you can leverage your existing content while providing something that people might actually watch. Focus on local news[2] and target the younger audience, with daily episodes not exceeding 4 minutes in length. A very important thing is choosing the presenter – they need to reflect your your goals and suite your target content and audience. This means that your average TV anchormen won’t work – check the most popular podcasts to get the feeling what you’re looking for, keywords probably being humorous, personal, friendly.

Such podcasts have a few possible ways of monetizing themselves. One possibility is to add commercials (add them at the end, not the beginning), you might have weekly or monthly sponsors that you display in the background or even at the beginning of the show (not more that one screenshot). Since you can differentiate your subscribers from random web users you can adjust advertising to get most from both worlds. Be creative!

TV shows

Fortunately both local TV networks now have ways of watching locally produced shows I’ve missed. I do that quite often[3] since I can’t really fit some of them into my already busy schedule. When I’m watching such a show on the internet that’s probably the only thing I’m doing at that specific time and means that the computer is actually acting as if it was a TV.

Since I can move the slider you can’t push ads to me as you would on TV. That doesn’t mean you can’t have ads in such shows, you just need to think about them differently. What I do often is pause the video to check my email, browse around or just wait for the show to download – perfect time for placing ads. When I come back there’ll be an ad waiting, I’ll click next and continue watching the show.

The idea is not mine – when I was in the Netherlands a few years ago I went to the movies – in the middle of the movie there was a commercial which announced a brief break during the movie. I don’t remember the commercials going on while the break lasted (we all left the theater) but they were on again when we started coming back.

A great option with watching TV shows would also be to allow me to set the shows in my profile – that way I could see when something will be on TV and when I can watch it online. If I have a few shows to check you should allow me to add them to a playlist much as I would in iTunes or on my iPod. And I wouldn’t mind ads in between – if I’m watching a show that has already preloaded you could preload an ad into memory and play it while you start buffering the next show in my playlist – I’d have to wait anyway. You could also create a podcast that would push the shows I added or subscribed to.

Video news

This is the one that most media providers do currently and get it wrong most of the time. When reading news on the internet I’ll have many tabs open since what I’m doing is browsing. This means I’ll start at the homepage and then click on random news there, maybe click a category I’m really interested in, when news open I might click some related news and so on. This “trip” is rather random and fast.

Since I’m in browsing mode I’m more likely to only skim the information on the news page. This means that when I come to a page that only provides a video I’ll have nothing to skim and will close that tab immediately. I won’t see the ad in front of the video and I won’t see the video. In a month I might discover that I’m not getting quality information and move on to another site that will let me skim what I want to skim and fully concentrate on what I want to see.

Video as add-on

One solution to this problem is to use the video to convey information that text can’t. For example if you’re talking about a football match you might add video of the best move or all the goals scored. Another possibility would be that you’re pushing news on Britney and you add video of the incident. This way I can skim the news, figure if I want to see the video and check it if it interests me enough.

Video as primary content

When you think the only way to present content is video (I don’t think that ever happens but some do) you could use the idea already mentioned – profiles and sort-of bookmarks. I first saw this implemented on the International Herald Tribune website for text only articles – while browsing and skimming for interesting news you add what you want to read to your profile. At the end you can sit back and read what you saved or in this case check your own news show. Hey, you could even add social features to this with sharing of such shows (technically speaking playlists) with friends,… This also makes ads less invasive since you can add them less often then on every video I watch.

AJAX?

Some of you might know that I hate AJAX and I do for the same reason I hate video on the web currently. There’s a bunch of idiotssites shoving it down my throat in totally inappropriate ways and I really hate being molestedbothered this way. Technologies are here to solve problems and the only way they can do that is if people think what problems they solve better than others. That way we can read the news, watch the video, get an AJAXy[4] exeprience when and where we want to and where that specific technology solves our problems best.

  1. I’d really love to see the statistics on that. Anybody know where to get them? back
  2. We get world news in other podcasts or from other sources – keep it linked to what you know best. back
  3. More often on PopTV since I prefer their way of delivering content – via a fullscreen Flash interface – opposed to a small Windows Media / Real player on RTV Slovenija. back
  4. By the way – with all the AJAX around home pages of both local media houses reload automatically (which could really be an asynchronous request to retrieve the latest news) – one with a meta refresh tag and the other with inline JavaScript. back
Zemified

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Another year gone by

April 10th, 2008

A few days ago this blog celebrated its second birthday. It’s been a good year, with links to my article published by such notable authors as Luke Wroblewski and Ethan Marcotte – the same article was translated into Russian. The blog was also included in Planet Microformats.

I’ve written only 61 posts (down from 100 in the first year), gotten 134 comments (down from 155 in the first year) and more than 70.000 spam comments (up from 17.000). I have 56 subscribers according to FeedBurner, which is more than a 100% increase from 25 a year before.

Firefox is the dominant browser with 47%, Internet Explorer lost some market share and is down to 44% with Safari rising to 4% and Opera to 2.5%. Almost 90% of the visitors have Flash 9 installed, an additional 4.5% are stuck at Flash 8. Screens grew a bit with only 27% having 1024×768 or less (32% year before) and less than 2% 800×600 or less. Windows have a share of 85%, Mac OS 10%, Linux 4%.

Top content is still This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, Messing up the interface coming in at a distant second with merely a third of the visits.

Redesign

I’ve had a redesign planned since day 1, but as usual it took quite some time to get here. Since I’m not a design I couldn’t just create a fancy look with everything else left the same. The idea was to shake everything up and try to come out with a layout that would be worth redoing everything. When I posted about what a TV network / news page should have when being redone I was also setting my own targets.

Tableless layout

This goes without saying. All the pages should validate, although there might be some crap left.

Width

I increased the width to 850px with the addition of 140px to the left used only for design purpose, not content. The main content is only 410px wide which means you can easily read this blog on devices like the Nokia n800.

YSlow

Not really that relevant since the page only creates about 15 requests which might even decrease as I compact the JavaScript. There are a bunch of other requests made that are content related – images, Zemanta pixies, favicons…

Microformats

Every page is supposed to be valid hAtom and the About section is an hCard with adr and geo. Links to others are of course XFNed. The about page is planned to be an hResume.

There’s no need to talk about blog compatibility and screensaving for banners. I don’t use OpenID there are no log-ins.

Context sensitive

Markos recently pointed out the fact that not many pages on the internet make use of the possibility to change the page for different users and different context. This, of course, is not an easy job, especially if you’re doing heavy processing – doing this for each user might be a bit to heavy. It is something I think differentiates the internet from other media and should be used to provide a better user experience.

User based

Returning visitors of this page will get special treatment. Since they’re coming back they don’t need to see the About section and they will also not have banners displayed.

Referrer based

People coming from search engines will see their query parsed into words that will be colored for easier findability. They will be able to switch them on and off and be able to repeat the same query on the internal search with the last option available only if the referrer was an external search engine.

Location based

Even though many blog themes have the same sidebar for all the pages (as did the previous one I used) this doesn’t follow the normal architecture rules. The sidebar is normally context specific – in my case a regular user reading a blog post will currently see nothing in it (while others will see the About and the Ads.

Other candy

Grid and baseline

The page is set to a 7 unit grid, with units 60px wide with a 10px gutter in between. It’s also set to a baseline height of 18px that is respected throughout the page. Images and other non-text blocks on the page are corrected with JavaScript to a half of the unit (9px).

Links

The links bar will try to retrieve the favicon of the link – if it succeeds it will use it instead of the default icon.

Maps

If you click on the Google Maps link in the About section they will open as small inline maps with a link to open them in a new window.

Yet to be done

You might have noticed that post categories are nowhere to be found. I didn’t forget them I just found out that I’ve changed my categorizing pattern and had to rethink the display. I also wanted to add the Elsewhere section with links to or even content from other pages where pieces of me reside (Twitter, Flickr, Marela, Pownce, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us,…). Another thing missing is the Projects and Experiments sections, I’ll tackle these in a separate post sometime in the future…

Zemified

Posted in css, design, general, html, interface, javascript, microformats, redesign, standards, technology, thoughts | 5 Comments »

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