Author: Robin

Categories
presentations

Prototyping

My first pre-conference session! It was very interesting with LOTS of great information. My notes, as the information came at me, are below. Enjoy ’em!

Marc Drummond
Web Technologies Coordinator
City of Minnetonka

What tools can I learn?
When should I use each tool?
How do I use each tool?

Prototyping = an approximation of an actual design
Lo-Fi vs. Hi-Fi

Tools:

* Paper
* Wireframes
* Gray-Box
* Photoshop Comps
* PowerPoint
* XHTML & CSS
* Interactive prototypes

Discussion of what prototyping we’ve done turned into a discussion of designing for resolution. 15% still use 600×800 and these are gov’t sites, so there were lots of opinions.

Content first!
Challenges in getting content – content brief gives deadlines/responsibilities – discussion of getting content from busy people. Embarrassment/shame works…
Page Description Diagram – focus on content/hierarchy
Exercise – create a Page Description Diagram with Creative/Content brief provided

Developing Layout Concepts
Info design first! Layout second.
Elements of layouts:

* container
* identity block
* primary/secondary navigation
* other navigation
* content
* footer
* whitespace!

Purpose of navigation
Purpose of design = make them look at something specific
Discussion of grid theory/golden ratio
Thumbnail sketches – make ’em early & often
Exercise – create at least 10 thumbnails (I got 6 done)

Break – they have Red Bull as well as all different kinds of soda on the break tables. So typical of web/coders…

Paper Prototyping
great for usability testing
Lots of info on testing – paper prototyping as the base, writing a script for the test, (in response to question) creating “tests” for the site, recruiting testers, testing team design (facilitator, user, “computer”, note-taker), take time between sessions to process – but don’t make changes between sessions, review results, make changes, test again
Example of paper prototyping using volunteers for us to see a working example – handy!! Discussion followed on the advantages/disadvantages to the process.

Wireframes = page skeletons used as storyboards
Tools – Visio, OmniGraffle, etc. to create wireframes
Notate – project name, page name, version number, last rev date, author, copyright on template for the site
What should be wireframed
Challenges of wireframing

Grey Boxing
Adobe Fireworks CS3 examples – learned about layer comps & how to use them – cool stuff!

Design issues
Color picking/psychology of color
Color Tech (brightness, RGB vs. CMYK, etc.)
Color picking advice

Illustrator examples – coolest tool in existence = Live Color – recolors your prototype VERY easily, and lets you save any of the schemes you create with it. I’m going to have to play more with Illustrator.

Creating effective communication – quick tips on design decisions to make your communication effective…
Typographical considerations – lots of considerations – spacing, justification, sizes, punctuation, test fonts at typetester.maratz.com
Design effects (lines, gradients, etc.) to help draw attention to content and make ’em pretty, make images with people face your content to draw the eye, choosing images, etc.

Interactive Prototypes – XHTML/CSS
clickable wireframe
good for complex scripting testing
Reusable – maybe, can be timewaster…
Use a good browser to develop in, test in nasty browsers next

Demo of prototyping in Fireworks – continued from before, added information to the grey boxes he made earlier, showed how to quickly create multi-page prototypes in FW, showed how to link from master page to pages he just created. Very cool stuff – I had no idea… Once this is done, exporting all the pages as basic web pages is easy. Too cool…

More Fireworks tricks – use Common Library to make buttons and other “doo-dads” without any real work – great for quickly working up forms and such.

Finally – review of prototyping process

  • Content
  • Thumbnails
  • Grey Box
  • Advance design
  • Interactive prototype
  • test, test, test (all through the process)
Categories
travel

Chillin’ in St. Charles

Today was my driving day – I went from Jefferson City to the suburbs of Chicago on 2/3 tank of gas. I love my car. Anyway, I left this morning and got in at 4ish, registered, got settled and decided to go exploring. Since it’s a bit rainy (not quite Noah’s Ark rainy, but close…), I confined myself to exploring inside, though the outside of the Pheasant Run Resort & Spa looks pretty damn amazing. Can’t wait for the storms to pass so I can wander! The inside is nice, too – with an indoor recreation of Bourbon Street (complete with a Ben & Jerry’s shop!!!) and lots of little shops and cool little nooks. While I was exploring, I stopped and registered for the conference and got the best bag of swag I’ve received for a conference yet. It included a lovely NAGW (National Association of Government Webmasters) polo shirt, a 2G thumb drive and my ticket to Zanies Comedy Club on Friday night to see Kevin Nealon. Score!! My speaker's gift
I then took off for dinner (IHOP – close and cheap…) and came back to go through the paperwork in my bag. I made sure I know what I’m doing for the next few days – tomorrow is pre-conference day where I will be learning about prototyping techniques in the morning and PHP5 in the afternoon – and checked my email/friendfeed/etc.
I’m going to call home now and say goodnight to the kid and the boyfriend and then settle in for some TV. I thought I might check out one of the lounges, but I’m seriously tired and have to be up and at my pre-conference session at 8am tomorrow! I’ll blog about what I’m learning as I learn it!

Oh – I almost forgot – as I was registering, I gave my name and the lady behind the desk started laughing and said “oh yes, the webgoddess!”. I had completely not realized that my job title would be published on the list of attendees page on the website and was way amused to see it there. Apparently she was too. I was blushing like a schoolgirl by the time I left the booth…

Categories
Web 2.0

Playing

I should be writing, working on a presentation or editing something, but I’m not. Instead, I’m playing with my two latest toys in an attempt to feel like I’ve accomplished something today (the Envisionware install was trying, to say the least… though it wasn’t really Envisionware’s fault, we piled too much onto the “to-do” list along with it). First, I got an account with Updating.me (http://www.updating.me) using the beta code BetaToUpdateMe (that will work until they shut the doors on it – no guarantees for the length of time that will be!) and then, thinking that a Ubiquity command would be just the thing to make Updating.me really, really useful, started hacking at some Javascript.
34 minutes (according to my FriendFeed posts) after I started whining about wanting to see a command for Ubiquity that would update my Updating.me account, I had it written, posted and tested. It worked! Except for the small fact that the Updating.me folks haven’t actually released their API yet, so it doesn’t actually update anything. They posted on their blog, however, on the 28th of August that an API would be coming soon, so all I have to do is change a single line in the script to point to their API “hook” and the script will be actually useful.
In case you are as impatient as I am, you can get the command (after you install Ubiquity, of course) at http://www.intertecdesigns.com/updatingme.html. If Ubiquity is installed, a drop-down bar will pop out of the top of your browser and ask you if you want to subscribe. Do be sure to subscribe to updates so that as soon as I make that little API hook change, you will get the full benefit of a working command to update multiple social sites with one single command.
Sweet!!

Categories
presentations

It’s Official: Mashup Privacy Protocol OAuth Is Fair Game – ReadWriteWeb

An announcement of OAuth’s official status was posted today on ReadWrite Web – It’s Official: Mashup Privacy Protocol OAuth Is Fair Game. The article does an excellent job of describing OAuth (including a cute little live demo of it in action) and it mentions the similarities and differences between OAuth and OpenID. I’ve mentioned previously that one of the problems with OpenID’s implementation is that it is not very usable. OAuth will correct that by allowing you to use an already existing account with some of the web’s big players (Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Twitter, to name a few). It also includes, by design, the ability to port your profile or just about any other data over to the new service. You have control over what you share in a pretty fine-grained way, too, so if you want to share some of your data from a service provider (such as Google) with a OAuth consumer (such as Twitter), you can. Just by creating a profile in Google, you can port that profile all over the web – provided that the service you want to use is an OAuth consumer.
Between the profile capabilities of OpenID and the native data portability of OAuth, we should be seeing some really interesting services crop up that will allow us to really write once, use often!

Categories
MRRL

Exchange to Google Apps Transition

I haven’t written a whole lot about our recent experience in moving from Exchange 2003 to Google Apps because I ended up writing it up for a guest post on Michael Stephens’ blog, Tame The Web. I’m not going to re-write it here, but I would like to add a few notes about the experience from more of a distance, time-wise, at least.
As I said in the post on TTW, this was an amazingly smooth transition – from my staff’s standpoint. The vast majority of them came in on Monday, opened their browser, followed the directions from the 8 training sessions I provided and checked their email before starting their day’s work. Since I wrote that post, however, we’ve continued using the system and made some changes. I have uploaded many contact files (pretty easy – just saved the contacts from Outlook as a .csv file, and imported them into Gmail) without any major issues. We’ve also switched from an open-source, kinda clunky calendar system to manage our desk hours to the Google Calendar. Our mrrl@mrrl.org address hosts all of the desk calendars and I shared them with the managers responsible for each desk. Once they entered the information and got them all up and running, I embedded each calendar into a web page on our Intranet and made them available for subscriptions if individual staff members wanted to add the desk calendar information to their own, personal calendar. The Circulation manager asked me if it was possible to share the calendar with her entire staff – I explained that this would put every shift on every staff member’s calendar and she said that was what they wanted. Since that is what they wanted, that is what I helped her do – share out the calendar with all of her staff so that they could see who was working the desk from their own calendars.
Responses from the staff have been overwhelmingly positive. I did have one staff member tell me that she was born too late, she didn’t like all this technology and she was having a hard time with the change. Despite having said that, however, she has been using it without any help from me (except to show her how to mute conversations – something she thinks might make all this change worth it…) successfully and is adapting well to the system. Other staff members have been stopping me over the course of the last week or two to tell me how much they like the new email. I’ve gotten many thanks from folks who really disliked Outlook and all the spam it let through!
All has not been wine and roses, however. The first Friday afternoon after the changeover, Gmail went down completely. Hosted and personal accounts were unreachable for almost 2 hours. All that cheerleading I’d done for how much we’d love our new email and the last couple of hours of the first week saw us down for the count. One of our staff members was having problems with accessing the secure Gmail option using Safari on her Mac, and in the course of looking for the answer, I found out that a hacking toolkit for Gmail accounts was being released. I set up the domain, that night, to require SSL security for all Google Apps that we use! I sent out an email warning folks that it may slow down their email and to let me know if they have problems. No one has, so far, but it did fix the issue with Safari… She just goes to the non-secure site, which comes up for her with no problems, then as she logs in, it redirects her to the secure site automatically. Problem solved!!
The changeover was, from my end, a lot of work and a lot of training, but from my staff’s perspective everything went quite well and most of them are more than pleased with the transition!

Categories
presentations travel Web 2.0 Writing

Speaking and Writing and Working, oh my!

I don’t think I’ve completely updated my Presentations & Publications page with all of this yet, but if I do it here, I can just copy & paste later, right? This is my schedule for the next couple of months – if you are going to be around any of these places, look me up and say hi!

Sept 8-12 –National Association of Government Webmasters Conference – speaking on Sept. 11th on Web 3.0, but will be there for the whole conference.
Sept 17th – MaintainIT Webinar on making Public Computers 2.0-ready
October 1-3 – Missouri Library Association Conference – speaking on the 1st on Collaboration 2.0 (2:45-3:30) and Library Learning 2.1 (3:45-4:30) – but will be there for the whole conference, introducing speakers and going to business meetings….
October 19-22nd – Internet Librarian – since I somehow forgot to send in a speaking proposal, I won’t be speaking here – just attending!
Nov/Dec – Computers In Libraries – Article on how to use social media/2.0 tools to collaborate.

That’s it – so far! Hope to see you around at one of these places!!

Categories
presentations

Libraries mentioned at Digital Web

I link to the occasional article from Digital Web, when they post something web-design related that I want to point my loyal readers toward. Today, however, I’m linking to Digital Web not because of a web design article, but because of a library-related article. The library angle?

I’ll discuss ways to navigate some of the clutter of older card catalogs (now ‘updated’ to the web); services like interlibrary loan that get you stuff from almost anywhere; some of the specialized database-driven applications you can’t affordably access from the outside world; and a host of other tools and issues you have probably never considered. In the end, you will come out a more agile designer and developer.

It’s basically about how to use your local library’s resources to save some cash and get some great material that just isn’t available anywhere else. It’s geared mostly to academic libraries (the author is a librarian at a university, so that makes sense) and it’s brutally honest about the challenges of navigating most library websites, but it is a great outreach effort to other disciplines to get more people into our libraries.
This is sort of what I’m trying to do by presenting at the NAGW conference this year, as a matter of fact. I deliberately chose a non-library conference to present my Web 3.0 stuff at because I wanted to share what libraries have to offer with non-librarians. No point in preaching to the choir, there… I’ll probably do a revised version of this presentation at library conferences, too, but the tone/direction will be different. It will be more of a “how to make your stuff EASY to use”, not “how to use what your local library has to offer” sort of thing.

Categories
presentations Web 2.0

Becoming 2.0

Bobbi and I finished up our 4-day workshop on all things Web 2.0 on Friday. I was surprised at how tired I got after each day of teaching, but it was also strangely invigorating, too. The students in the class were really engaged and willing to learn, although there was a lot of complaints about too-full-heads, I think they got some good information out of it and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do when they get back to their home libraries and get some time to put this stuff into practice!

Becoming 2.0 class hard at work
Becoming 2.0 class hard at work

Categories
presentations

What do you want?

I’m doing a bit of “audience testing” – if you all could request specific information in a book about collaboration 2.0 – anything at all – what would you like to see? I’m not promising I’ll include everything (it’s more of a booklet than a book so space is limited…), but I’d love to hear what you all are interested in and what would make you think this is a non-pass-upable bit of reading!

Categories
presentations

Rut bustin’ at the library

You all might know that I’m the Information Technology Manager for the Missouri River Regional Library. This means that I work behind the scenes a lot, making sure that computers are working, networked bits are flowing and that everyone has the technology they need to do their jobs. I also spend some time working on the PCC desk, our public computer service point, but that’s about the only interaction I get with patrons. Until today. We are pretty seriously short staffed, so when an email went out asking for help in the circulation department, I volunteered for a 2 hour shift. I have to say that I’m really glad I did.
I’ve worked circulation before – for a few minutes at a time and about 4 times over the past 10 years – so it’s been rare and short. Getting 2 solid hours to see the kinds of questions they get, the sort of needs they have and to actually talk to patrons who are using the technology I provide is pretty cool. I’m also doing a bit of dual-training. The Circ manager is working with me and is being incredibly patient as she’s training me, but she’s also picking my brain about various tricks she would like to use with our new Gmail interface to mail, so I’m training her on the use of our new email system, too! This is something I may try to do far more often – it’s been a great way to get me out of my all-computers-all-the-time rut (though I’ve been working on my Web 2.0 presentation in between patrons…) and into the main life of the library!

Relation Browser
Timeline
0 Recommended Articles:
0 Recommended Articles: