On August 10th there is going to be a very cool BayCHI panel, down at ye old Xerox Parc research center. David Temkin (from Laszlo), Mike Sundermeyer (from Macromedia), Iain Lamb and Ethan Diamond from Oddpost, and Jim Hobart (from Classic Systems Solutions) are going to be talking about RIAs and how they impact usability.
Author: jonathanboutelle
What if the designer gets hit by a truck?: wrangling digital design artifacts
On a design team, one major challenge is simply keeping track of the design artifacts generated by your designers. Whether you’re taking digital photos of a whiteboard or crafting ray-traced buttons in PhotoShop, a few weeks of visual design work can generate hundreds of files, making it difficult to keep track of what the current design is, let alone track progress and changes that have been made, or make sure that critical work isn’t lost.
User Mental Models of Persistence in RIAs
First A Little History
Rich Internet Applications are widely believed to be the new paradigm for application development. This is the most exciting thing since all the desktop applications had to be ported over to the web 5 years ago. THAT was the most exciting thing since all the client server applications were ported to the desktop 10 years ago. The technology industry reverses its opinion about whether computing power should be centralized or distributed every five years or so, seemingly as regular as the tides or the seasons.
I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours: enhancing communication between designers and engineers
Are engineers from Mars, and designers from Venus? Communication between the two groups is famously fraught with difficulty: they speak different vocabularies, often have different cultural values, and may not even have a tremendous amount of respect for each other’s chosen profession! However, simply being literate in each other’s design deliverables can go a long way towards bridging the gap between these two groups. Engineers can read interaction design deliverables: it is now up to designers to become literate in technical design deliverables.
Ode to a dumb server
RIA development is a funny thing. A smarter client means that your server code is no longer all about handling display logic. Instead, you’re in charge of feeding data (typically XML documents) to the client whenever it asks for some, and handling any database updates (typically XML documents again) that might be needed.
Shameless self-promotion
Here’s a link to an article that I wrote for boxes and arrrows. It won’t cure cancer or anything, but it might help you avoid the dreaded “political death spiral” pattern that design projects often get trapped in.
Crossing the Chasm: When should companies invest in usability?
Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing The Chasm” is widely considered to be the bible of Silicon Valley. What insights does the model proposed by the book have to offer usability practitioners? In particular, at what stages in life cycle of a product will decision makers influenced by the model be willing to invest in usability?
Flex for the masses? Is Flash Remoting a dead man walking?
I drove out to Emeryville to see Mike Sundermeyer (VP of Product Design at Macromedia) give a talk about Flex at eBig (the East Bay IT Group). The talk was good: while I didn’t learn much new about how to use Flex, but I definitely have more of a sense of where the product is going than I had before.
Plumbing ain’t fun, but it pays the bills…
In my last post, I whipped up a very rudimentary form UI using Flash 2004 Pro. Now I’m gonna hook up the form skeleton to some ActionScript code. A zip file containing my FLA and Actionscript file is available for download here.
Flash Forms for Smarties
This post shows how to whip up a form-based application in flash. It’s written for programmers, not for designers: the goal is to get the flash form layout work done as quickly and painlessly as possible.
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