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Technology

Requirements-Driven Software Development Must Die

Added on 26 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
Function follows feature follows user.

“The process by which most enterprise software is developed is fatally flawed. There are flaws in any software development process, but in the past 13 years I’ve seen one approach produce more bad software and blow more budgets than any other: requirements-driven software development. Thankfully, I’ve also had the opportunity to see the success of an alternative type of process, a process in which user experience design drives what gets developed. This type of process helps teams deliver good software on time and within their budgets.”

(Fred Beecher a.k.a. @fred_beecher ~ Evantage Consulting)

The CMS Is Broken

Added on 15 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
A nice practice case with a few exceptions to the rule.

“There are two explanations for the endemic publishing paralysis. Either no one has made a good CMS yet – perhaps putting words and pictures on pages is the limit of our engineering capacities – or the CMS is a broken concept.”

(Erik Hinton ~ TPM)

Where are the Mobile First Responsive Web Designs?

Added on 8 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Mobile first design is primarily about the starting point. After a site is complete, how can I tell whether or not the developer started from the mobile and built up to desktop or started from the desktop and whittled down to mobile? I didn’t want to have to tear apart over a hundred sites in the Mediaqueri.es gallery to find the handful of mobile first sites. I needed some way to narrow the number of sites I cared about to some sort of manageable number.”

(Jason Grigsby a.k.a. @grigs ~ Cloud Four)
courtesy of lukew

Responsive Web Design or Separate Mobile Site?

Added on 26 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Religion, nationalism, and sports-team rivalries? They can’t compare to the passion of a nerd’s technical conviction. And so kerfuffles result. Well-intentioned zeal leads to distracting dustups. Alas, complex problems rarely resolve themselves into neat black-and-white principles. The only principle that ever seems reliable is drearily unsatisfying: ‘it depends’. In the mobile world, we have the persistent and circular debate over whether the mobile web should be powered by the very same sites and webpages that render the desktop web.”

(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ Global Moxie)

An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays

Added on 4 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages. (…) Preserving our culture requires holding on the little things that define our history. It’s not a technical problem to preserve our culture and our story. But we need people to want to do so.” (LukeW)

More Meaningful Typography

Added on 3 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Designing with modular scales is one way to make more conscious, meaningful choices about measurement on the web. Modular scales work with – not against – responsive design and grids, provide a sensible alternative to basing our compositions on viewport limitations du jour, and help us achieve a visual harmony not found in compositions that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers. As we’ve seen in this article, though, modular scales are tools – not dogma. The important thing for our readers, our craft, and our culture is that we take responsibility for our design decisions. Because in so doing, we’ll make better ones.” (Tim Brown ~ A List Apart)

Content First

Added on 28 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“I’m perplexed by the reasoning that concludes that if a website is suffering from clear usability issues, the solution is to create a splinter site for some users while leaving everyone else to suffer on. Note that I’m not suggesting that everyone get the same experience – far from it. Thanks to progressive enhancement (and let’s face it, responsive design done right is a perfect example of progressive enhancement) we can serve up the content that people want and display it to the best ability of any particular device. That’s the key difference: start with the content, not the device.” (Jeremy Keith ~ Adactio)

Considerations for Mobile Design (Parts 1-3)

Added on 23 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The three parts of the series were split into the following segments: Part 1: Speed (The introduction to the series identified constraints in mobile design imposed by bandwidth, download and upload speeds.); Part 2: Dimensions (This section attempts to establish common limitations across groups of devices based on resolution and physical size. In addition, solutions for serving specific styles to groups of devices are offered, and analyzed.); Part 3: Behavior (Perhaps the least complete of the sections, this article attempts to show how users behave differently on handheld devices compared to desktops. At the same time, this area probably interests me most, but I believe much more testing will need to be done in regard to how gesture-based interfaces can be used in an acceptable way before the ideas explored here become more relevant.)” (David Leggett)

From DITA to VITA: Tracing Origins and Projecting the Future

Added on 2 February 2011 Peter Bogaards
“DITA would have you believe that you can single source your way into every possible deliverable. In reality, you’re just making potatoes in a few different ways (scalloped, mashed, boiled). You’re still giving the user potatoes. VITA is a multimodal approach, giving the user a full array of nutrition options, so to speak. It educates and informs by touching almost every sensory input.” (Tom Johnson)

Applying Lessons from UML to UX

Added on 22 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has developed from other object‑based analysis and design languages over a period of many years and provides software engineers with a visual language that describes the design of a system at multiple levels.” (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Chris Heilmann: Reasons to be cheerful

Added on 1 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Being someone who works for the web is having the best job in the world. There is really nothing that compares in terms of creativity, sharing and reach. Of course there are nagging issues but if we really take a look from afar at what we are doing there is a lot of fun to be had. In this session Chris Heilmann will show just how cool it is to be who we are and how to get joy out of our day to day jobs even when we think that everything is against us. We have the tools, we have the knowledge, we have the time. What we lack sometimes is the knowledge where to look, what to use and how to sell ourselves. Here you’ll hear all about it and you will find a lot of reasons to be cheerful.” (Fronteers 2010)

Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide

Added on 15 October 2010 Peter Bogaards
“A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage. This guide will provide design knowledge and fundamentals for this type of UI development. We highly recommend that developers adopt the Metro design style whenever possible. Although requirements may vary based on the application, paralleling this experience will create a more consistent, fluid UI experience from the custom and built-in application view.” (The Windows Phone Developers Blog)

Web Fonts at the Crossing

Added on 8 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Font designers are very still very much focused on print. By and large, the money is in catering to professional customers in the printing industries: Books, magazines, displays, etc. Prices usually move on a sliding scale based on the number of users. The fear is that once fonts are on the web, they will become a commodity, the current model will break, and a devaluation of fonts, in general, will occur.” (Richard Fink ~ A List Apart)

The How, What, and Why framework for Experience Design

Added on 2 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many companies have used the phrase “content is king” in recent years to talk about the importance of the material their sites ship. I heard this phrase first at Adobe Max a few years ago and have since noticed it in a number of places online. I think this is near to the mark but not quite there. In our framework here I’ve rephrased it as “The ‘why’ is king” because it puts the user at the center. Your content is pretty important to your site, but without users it’s kind of worthless. The reason your users are coming to your site is of preeminent importance – that should drive your content. Then your content can drive your presentation, etc. etc.” (R.J. Owen ~ Inside RIA)

Innovation at Google: The physics of data

Added on 31 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Today, we measure the size of the Web in exabytes and are uploading to it 15 times more data than we were 3 years ago. Technologies for sensing, storing, and sharing information are driving innovation in the tools available to help us understand our world in greater detail and accuracy than ever before. The implications of analyzing data on a massive scale transcend the tech industry, impacting the environmental sector, social justice issues, health and science research, and more. When coupled with astute technical insight, data is dynamic, accessible, and ultimately, creative.” (Marissa Mayer)