I ran a day long workshop at Future of Web Design called “Interface Design Bootcamp“. In the workshop we learned how to conceptualize an app to connect people at an event like the Future of Web Design Conference using design personas and sketchboards. Ryan Carson sat in on my workshop and wrote a nice post on Think Vitamin about the sketchboarding process.
The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.
I snapped a few pics from the conference to document the fun we were having with the new sketchbooks. You can view all of the workshop photos on Flickr.
I’m a big fan of prototyping over wireframing because there’s just so much of an interface you can miss if you don’t actually use it as you design it. I typically use simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for higher fidelity prototypes, and for lower fidelity stuff I use Keynote.
InVision offers a clever new way to create prototypes quickly. Design individual screens in your favorite app like Photoshop or Omnigraffle, then upload the entire batch to InVision to add hot spots to create functional workflows. It’s simple, and really fast to use.
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Links and resource came fast and furious in my talk at An Event Apart Boston. To make your life easier, I’ve assembled all of the resources I mentioned into a handy little list. Feel free to share this with your colleagues.
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I recently conducted a day long “Interface Design Bootcamp” workshop in New York at the Future of Web Design. We covered a lot of territory including user research, personas, wireframes, sketchboards, prototypes, and usability testing. There are so many useful resources freely available on the Web that make the job of a user experience designer easier. Here are a few of the UX resources discussed and the slides from the workshop.
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Last week, I had my ass handed to me by what seemed like a failing hard drive, but turned out to be a dead hard drive controller in my MacBook Pro. Luckily I had backups, but a near data loss experience can put the fear of God into you, and compels a closer consideration about how your data is managed. I ended up putting a new 240 GB SSD into a different MacBook Pro, replacing my old 500 GB hard drive that was reaching its limits of storage. If you do the math there, you’ll recognize that I was left in a quandary as to how I would store and manage my gigs and gigs of music, movies, and photos.
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I’m co-presenting with Leslie Jensen-Inman and Glenda Sims a workshop called “Dive Into the Modern Web” today at Web Directions US in Atlanta, GA. This workshop will help educators and self-guided learners get up to speed with the changing landscape of the modern Web.
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There’s a fair bit of tedium and redundancy that goes into the set up of a new site. Most web designers start with the same tasks like reseting all default margins, padding, and other values to a common baseline for cross-browser support, you define your layout, wrestle with type, maybe even set up a print style sheet. We often find ourselves repeating what we’ve already done many times over on other projects. Blueprint, a recently released CSS framework created by Norwegian student Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, seeks to eliminate this common tedium by providing a concise set of style sheets that make setup and design quick and easy.
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Whether you are looking for high quality free fonts, indespensible CSS techniques, tutorials on development topics ranging from Ajax to XHTML, you will find the ultimate resource to nearly every facet of web design at Smashing Magazine. The breadth and depth of resources this site offers is staggering. They choose a topic, then find everything on the web that is worth reading about it. It’s not the indiscriminate list of everything, its the list of everything useful.
Another site that is equally as useful to any web designer is Web Design From Scratch. This site touches on each major topic of the planning, design, and development process of a professional web site, offering clear explanations and real world examples that make each point clear.
I ran across a very useful collection of compressed versions of popular JavaScript libraries today, including Scriptaculous, and Prototype. The Prototype library compresses down from 70k to 30k, which is pretty impressive. I’m becoming more persuaded daily that MooTools is a better option, though, as it offers you the ability to pick and choose which pieces of the library you wish to download, and offers compression on your custom built package resulting in vastly smaller file sizes than the Scriptaculous/Prototype combo.
If you want to compress your own JavaScript or CSS, there are a host of utilities out there for just this task. See comments on this blog post for a laundry list of options.
Most people run their web sites on one of the many inexpensive shared hosting servers running a LAMP environment. If you are like me, you probably have a number of domain names registered, perhaps all parked on the same server pointing to the same site. It would be great to split things up, though, to point one domain to a particular site on your server, and other domains to their own site. Apache lets you do this using a special .htaccess file, which configures the server software on the fly. You can set up unique sites in their own directory on your server, and then direct Apache to point requests for a particular domain to that folder. Let’s assume the domain you want to redirect is called “somedomain.com”, and the folder on your server where the site files reside is called “somedomain”. Create a plain text file with a text editor and add the following to it:
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} somedomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !somedomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ somedomain/$1 [L]
If you are on a Mac or Linux machine, you will need to save the file as something like htaccess.txt so the operating system does not hide the file (.htaccess is a special name the operating system recognizes, and will try to interpret the commands within). Upload the file to the root directory on your server (sometimes called, htdocs, public_html, or www among other names). Rename it .htaccess, then try accessing somedomain.com in a browser. It should direct your request to the files within the somedomain folder transparently, giving the effect of multiple domains with their own site running on the same shared hosting environment.
