Webdesigninformer.com

Andy Budd Go to the source

I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term. Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences, membership organisations and college courses. User experience designers therefore have a distinct set of skills and practices that form the core of their profession. That being said, user experience designers don’t own these practices any more than developers own the ability to code up wireframes. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year’s back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations. Rather than clients worrying whether your team would deliver something useful, you’d work together to define the smallest thing you could release and it still be a success. You would then guarantee that the client would meet their core business needs, and everything else you manage to deliver in that time was a bonus. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you’re no longer sure whether the project can be completed on target? In these situations what do you do? Some designers will push back on the client, claiming that these changes were never in the agreed brief and that they had only budgeted for 2 or 3 rounds of design. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

It’s amazing how good industrial design can turn something mundane into a highly desirable product. I wonder what other dull, household objects would benefit from similar treatment? … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Food Allergy Walk for Jonas Gruber : John Gruber and I have known each other for years, first teaming up on a project for Joyent way back when, and communicating regularly since then. We share something in common: a son who has a serious medical condition. Jonas has a life-threatening dairy allergy, as described by his mother: Jonas had a food challenge, where an allergic child is given measured doses of his allergen in a hospital setting. Jonas started the challenge with an eighth of a teaspoon of milk, administered by a nurse. Within five minutes of the dose, he said, ‘I feel weird, Mama’. And then things got crazy…… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

There’s no doubt that employing a mobile first , responsive design approach to a new project is a wonderful way forward for many sites. I think the most exciting thing about seeing these best practices develop over the last few years is that it finally feels like web design. Finally. That we’re not designing sheets of paper that happen to be on screen. So yes, for new projects under the right circumstances a responsive plan is often the ideal… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Apple to Reduce Fifth Avenue Cube to 15 Glass Panes : Currently there are 90 panes in Apple’s iconic Fifth Avenue store . Core77’s take on the consolidation of the panes is fitting for Apple and its admirers alike: There’s no hard business reason to replace the Cube. It wasn’t falling down, tourists weren’t looking at it dismissively, and it won’t lead to an immediate increase in profits. Apple is replacing it for no reason other than that they found they could push the boundaries of glass and have chosen to manifest that innovation. That’s what we love, and soon—date TBD—that’s what Cube-goers will get to see… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Vimeo PRO : Yesterday Vimeo unveiled its PRO account for businesses . They’ve had a long-standing policy against commercial videos on the site, though many have slipped past the radar if they were creative or artistic enough. Now they welcome business accounts, but with a catch: Vimeo PRO lives as a separate service — invisible to the Vimeo.com world…. Vimeo PRO accounts do not have access to the Vimeo community by default, meaning PRO accounts’ activity and videos will not show up on Vimeo.com, and they do not have the ability to like or comment. We’ve taken this step to keep commercial content hidden and maintain the current Community Guidelines. Commercial videos are housed in customizable portfolio pages, and the Vimeo player can be fully customized to your liking (including company logo)… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Back in November 2010, David Cameron announced plans to turn the Olympic Village in East London into a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley. These type of Grand Plans are great at generating headlines and creating a legacy for all those involved, but how likely are they to succeed? Are we going to inherit a shiny new creative centre in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympics, or will it become just another mediocre science park like the ones clinging to the sides of the M4? It would seem that successive governments have tried to align themselves with the dream of Silicon Valley, with little success. Back in the late 70s and early 80s I grew up in a town called Bracknell which was supposed to be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Yesterday was the biggest launch I’ve yet to be a part of. Not big as in size , but big as in importance, being a major milestone, etc. We launched Dribbble Pro after months of hard work: a suite of extra features for just $19 bucks a year. I couldn’t be prouder of our little team. Rich and our fearless intern, Bruce , have worked their butts off to get this working… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

The Real Lesson of Cisco’s Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle : Michael Mace, partly refuting the assumption all of us made after yesterday’s “RIP Flip” announcement : Most online analysis of the announcement doesn’t really explain what happened. The consensus is that Flip was doomed by competition with smartphones, but that says more about the mindset of the tech media than it does about Cisco’s actual decisions. I think the reality is that Cisco just doesn’t know how to manage a consumer business…. Cisco is an outstanding company, and an excellent place to work. But it screams respectable enterprise hardware supplier. To someone from a funky consumer company, going there would feel like having your heart ripped out and replaced with a brick… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

In his talk at the Lift conference last year Kevin Slavin talks about the emergent patterns in trading algorithms , the bots that buy and sell with one another occasionally resulting in events beyond our comprehension . It’s a great, slightly dark talk and I highly recommend you watch the video. This is the same territory that Daniel Suarez explored in his book Daemon . The book is (science) fiction but as Suarez explains in his Long Now seminar , the reality is that much of our day to day lives is already governed by algorithms. In fact, the more important the question—e.g. “Will my mortgage be approved?”—the more likely that the decision will not be made by a human being… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

Like most designers and developers we’ve come to the conclusion that big design up front doesn’t work. Six month requirement gathering exercises which result in thousand page specifications don’t work. In the time it has taken to produce these requirements the business landscape has almost certainly changed. So new requirements appear and designers and developers are forced to battle scope creep and keep these documents alive while at the same time trying to build something that is ever shifting and changing. So instead we’ve seen a move to agile development and an almost zealot backlash against detailed planning of any kind. However just because big design up front doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean we should ditch design planning altogether… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

At Clearleft we’re an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPI s increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter. Thankfully we’ve only seen this happen on 4 occasions in our 6 year history. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom: 30-Second Rule for App Success : Speaking of Instagram, this is some sharp thinking by Kevin Systrom on pairing down features for the initial stages of an app: [Instagram] has come a long way since its first iteration, a feature-laden app called Burbn that lacked a simple value proposition. To founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, simplifying the product — paring it down into an app that enables users to share beautiful photographs quickly — was the smartest business decision his team made - and a strategy other developers should take to heart. ‘Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product in to the market, it’s a marketing problem,’ Systrom tells Fast Company. ‘You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.’ … Still, there were benefits to its see-what-sticks approach: The team realized its users were gung-ho about Burbn’s photo-sharing capabilities and filters. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

I’ve decided to slap a Creative Commons license on the entire darn Chalkwork Family and make them completely free for personal use, starting right now. I’ve been considering doing this for quite a while. These icons represent a lot of hard work for me between 2006 and 2009, so you can imagine I’ve thought through the implications of making them available for free download without a pay barrier: will people use them commercially and not pay? Will they abuse the license terms? … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

In 1884 Thomas Marks opened his first market stall in Leeds. Over the next few years he opened 20 other stalls around the UK. In 1894, Thomas Spencer invested in the business and retail chain Marks & Spencer was born. From it’s humble beginnings M&S —as it was colloquially called—became one of the UK’ s biggest success stories and was the first retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over £1 billion. Companies like WH Smith, Woolworth’s and AMSTRAD all started the same way, so it would seem that in order to make it big, you should start small. Can the same thing be said of the Web… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

An MBA? “Don’t Bother.” : Philip Delves Broughton, Harvard MBA, writing for The Economist: The return on investment on an MBA has gone the way of Greek public debt. If you have a decent job in your mid- to late- 20s, unless you have the backing of a corporate sponsor, leaving it to get an MBA is a higher risk than ever. If you are getting good business experience already, the best strategy is to keep on getting it, thereby making yourself ever more useful rather than groping for the evanescent brass rings of business school. That last line cannot be overstated. I know personally a few individuals with MBAs from prestigious schools who are either seeking work or are underemployed. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

How Influencers Manage Their Email : Responses from Caterina Fake, Ben Blumenfeld, Andrew Warner, Julie Zhuo, and myself. Here’s mine: I loathe email. Unfortunately it’s still the primary means of most business communication over 140 characters. I used to try and keep my inbox below 50 items as regularly as possible. Now I get to email when I can, even if that means a swelling inbox. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

On Wearing the iPod Nano as a Watch : John Gruber, referring to an article by Nilay Patel : Relevant today because I just got my TikTok band for the Nano , as my reward for backing the wildly-successful Kickstarter project . The TikTok is everything I could have hoped for: the Nano fits perfectly and the wristband is supple and comfortable. But for the reasons outlined by Patel above, the current Nano just isn’t ideal for use as a full-time wristwatch. Not promising for me, as I believe my TikTok is sitting in my business UPS mailbox as I write this. The good news? … Read the rest here