Thank you for the nomination. We are feeling loved.

If you have a second, please vote for us!

The awards ceremony is at The Cellar on Thursday, December 11 at 6pm. There is quite the list of attendees, looks like it will be great fun! Methinks staying home and doing holiday baking will have to wait! Looking forward to seeing you all there. And best of luck to all the nominees!

Course Synopsis

In this course you will explore a number of tools and techniques that you can integrate into any website, intranet, or software development process to create a first-class user experience. You will be able to try many of the approaches illustrated in the seminar through a number of hands-on activities and exercises.

Every participant will leave the course with a wide array of user experience tools and techniques. In addition, we will provide a comprehensive set of course materials and templates — a valuable resource when using the described techniques in your own environment.

UE Done Right

The cost of the course is $799, but you can sign up with the Habañero client rate of $499, if you email me and mention you read about it on the blog.

Hope you can come, it will be a fun two days!

I’ve found the process we’ve been following very effective. We’ve iterated an prototype very quickly and with a very small resource cost. Some points I think are key to this being so successful:

• Quick meetings often. The team meets on a regular basis often to keep the momentum and excitement of the project flowing. This keeps our ideas fresh and interest strong.
• Manageable take-away homework. Each team member takes on a small task to complete prior to the next meeting. That way, no one team member is stuck with huge time consuming tasks. Also, it keeps the project moving foward even though we aren’t together working on it.
• Working meetings. At each meeting, we review the homework and revise it together, so the deliverables changed quickly and organically. Many points of perspective can be integrated at each stage of progress.
• Always a prototype. By keeping the mentality that the deliverable is always in beta, we don’t hang on to one solution. No one is too attached to the outcome, and we are able to let go of ideas quickly. Constant improvement is the mantra, and making mistakes is easier to accept.
• Something tactile as soon as possible. We visualize our ideas as soon as possible to see if they work. That way, impossible ideas are discovered sooner rather than later. Also, we have a constant feeling of accomplishment as we are moving ahead with our tool.

The team discussed these strengths of the progess, and we discovered we are adapting an agile method to our project. Pretty cool! Stay tuned, we will be finished our tool soon, and we will post about it here.

The Visual Design

The visual design was inspired by two directions: historical train design and newspaper typography. Newspaper design was a natural fit for RailCity, as it has a lot of news and announcement content that is being communicated. I see intranets as interactive corporate newsletters, so why not take cues from some of the great design conventions used in news sites and use them? I used a myriad of type sizes and settings, along with a mix of serif heading and sans serif type for maximum scanability. And of course the rich history of train design could not be ignored: the number one employee feedback was that they wanted to see the trains. There are all sorts of train artefacts at the CP head offices, and I gave hints of that culture in the background pattern, the logo, the breadcrumb styling and some of the modeling on the navigation.

Getting to Know SharePoint

The SharePoint platform introduced a whole other challenge. Due to the size and complexity of the project, we wanted to use as much of the out-of-the-box functionality as we could. I had to get up to speed with SharePoint, and I followed these guidelines:

• Use it I spent many hours in our MOSS sandbox creating team sites, adding web parts and noodling around. Understanding the user experience was key.
• Look at the built-in customization I took a look at the built in templates and styles that SharePoint offers, so I could understand how to change the look and feel.
• Understand the code behind the interface We took screenshots and overlayed coloured areas to represent CSS styling so we knew visually what areas were controlled by what code.
• Ask the developers questions I relied pretty heavily on my developers for their expertise and understanding of the product. If I wanted to change something, i asked questions first to avoid headaches later.
• Break the rules! Where there was room to move, we found it together.

Making the Design Work

We developed both publishing pages and collaboration pages, and you can see how the collaboration template mimics the publishing page design. It’s pretty cool what you can do with changing a few background images, typography and a little style. We wanted to have a relatively seamless experience between the two areas of the site, but we knew there would be differences due to the highly dynamic nature of collaboration pages.

V&A South Kensington is the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity. Discover 3000 years’ worth of amazing artefacts from many of the world’s richest cultures including ceramics, furniture, fashion, glass, jewellery, metalwork, photographs, sculpture, textiles and paintings.

I would have to agree. Londoners are so incredibly lucky to have a place where they can go to see some of the finest examples of design and craft. I wish I had a few more days so I could really explore each exhibit, so I had to choose the ones that most interested me: Jewellery, Sculpture and Textiles.

What is wonderful is that the website has many interactive pieces that explore the collections, such as Design a Textile. I used the kiosk in the gallery and now I have a fun memento to remind me of my visit. i am also inspired to try a few designs in Illustrator from what I learned about patterning in this fun little app. So nice!

Checkout the website that showcases their portfolios. I am pretty impressed with the progress they have made over the year, and it is cool to see which area each student has taken a personal interest.

I find teaching very gratifying, I have always enjoyed school and this is one way I can keep in touch with the spirit of learning, not to mention all the new emerging web experiences and technologies. Can’t wait for next semester to begin!

(I think I need to play a few more times!)

Getting to First Base

It wasn’t too long ago that I was fumbling around in the world of HTML and CSS, and I’m so happy to share my knowledge with a bunch of eager minds. It feels really good to give something back.

Pacific Blue Cross Travel Plans