Fresh

Although I was sadly not able enough to attend An Event Apart Seattle this year, I was able to live vicariously through those that did attend, using a handy dandy Twitter feed tool created for the event: A Feed Apart. Clicking on the “Sessions” tab gives you all the Tweets tagged with “aea” that were sent out during each of the event’s sessions – which gives you a pretty good idea of what the highlights were.  One session that seemed particularly interesting to me was “Mobile First!”, presented by Luke Wroblewski. During the session Luke W. convinced attendees of the importance of designing the mobile version of a site or app FIRST, before the “desktop” version.

How did he do that? I’ve decided to pick out some highlight Tweets from the session sent out by audience members, and then try to compile more information and resources to those points. Conveniently, Luke W. also wrote a blog post on this same topic last year, so I have a good place to start from. So even though I wasn’t there in person, I’m hoping to be able to come up with a good overview of his topic.  So let’s go!

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When I was down in Miami for a recent conference, I had the good fortune of staying a few extra days to visit my grandparents in Southern Florida. Despite being in their late eighties, my grandparents are full of life and still have their wits about them. And, after being married for almost 65 years, they’re still completely in love. They’re incessant bickering over the years is legendary, and is one of the most hilarious things to experience.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that my grandma pretty much runs the show. Upon my arrival I usually have a small list of chores to help them out with. On the list this year were the usual suspects: dusting light bulbs on the ladder, lifting heavy stuff, a lot of Windexing…and replace the computer!

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Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. (more…)

This panel at SXSW was really interesting for a couple reasons. Jared Spool from UIE is such an engaging presenter! He had us all laughing; I was thoroughly engrossed the whole time. Also, the panel was really awesome because it challenged a few ideas that I generally don’t think twice about.

One of the primary points from the panel was that there is no evidence that user centered design has ever worked. I was really surprised to hear this! One of the anecdotes that he used was based on Apple and Microsoft. Spool claimed that apple hardly does any usability tests, while Microsoft does them constantly. (and we all know whose designs are better!) He didn’t have any numbers behind this, so I’m not sure of the validity. But really interesting none-the-less!

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After an inspiring trip to Austin for SXSW, I’m finally getting a chance to look back at all of the notes and ideas from throughout the week. One of the standout panels for me, was the talk entitled “Design for the Wisdom of Crowds”. The speaker, Derek Powazek began his talk by referencing several social experiments such as the one conducted by Francis Galton, in which a crowd was asked to guess the weight of the cow. Everyone guessed wrong, but the average of the guesses was very close. Similar results were found when applying this to a change jar. So the question he poses is: How can we, as the creators of the web, allow for this wisdom to take place in our communities online? In his panel he discussed some simple ways to think about tweaking interfaces to facilitate better user experiences online.

Some basic rules for making this happen.

1. Diversity - Organize a group of diverse individuals with a wide range of opinions

2. Independence – Encourage the group to contribute for their own selfish reasons

3. Decentralization - There’s nobody in charge

4. Aggregation - Tallying the results and doing something with it

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I love horizontal-oriented/scrolling sites. When well done, they feel so intuitive to navigate. It’s akin to reading a book. I like the change of pace that it offers, too; we’re so conditioned to seeing vertically oriented sites, it’s nice to see something unexpected. The examples I am about to show are all fashion oriented (some full e-commerce experiences).

1. Pull and Bear (thanks FWA!)
Navigate into the “showroom” section of Pull and Bear to see a lovely example of navigating horizontally. I usually find music to be way too distracting, but for some reason it works for me here.

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