Recently I have been taking a course provided by the W3C on mobile best practices designed to give the participant the best ways in which to design for mobile.
Topics covered are things such as graceful enhancement and graceful failure, designing specifically to allow access on various mobile browsers and adding enhancements to the site to improve user experience on the desktop browser or to allow them to fail gracefully so as still accessible on the mobile platform.
Doing this has inspired me to design a mobile specific version of my own website. Now while I would (ideally) like to create a version that is designed for all mobile platforms, I think I will start with just the iPhone.
Step one is already complete! Which is to say I have set up www.craigmdennis.com/iPhone/. Really tricky stuff… Read more…
The project log has seemingly disappeared due to doing too much work and simply forgetting to update it each day. This could be problematic in documenting progress but there is still a huge amount of sketches and scribbles, some of which are dated.
Since the last blog post there has been instructions to become more ‘visual’ and to look at how to best present the concept to engage people and really get the points across. There is a really great video about presentations here which gave a number of insights into what to do as well as what not to. It is little surprise that the presentation of the video is very good and engaging. On the back of that some books have been ordered to try and really push the presentation skills to be the best they can be. ‘Made To Stick’ by Chip & Dan Heath and ‘The Back of the Napkin’ by Dan Roam.
The concept itself has been through ‘what it does’ phase and has progressed to the more visual and more enjoyable phase of UI development. They are yet to be tested, that is the next phase, but the elements have been influenced by some existing elements that can be found in leading applications so hopefully they will only need some tweaking.
The best way so far to convey what the project does was to write an FAQ as it would appear on a website. This allowed real questions that could be asked by people will lower levels of technical knowledge to be anwsered in a way that alleviates their concern and also enlightens others to the purpose of the project. Whether this will be included in the final report is yet to be determined but it is entirely possible.
The project yet to gain a name but the working title should contain the words ‘content aware’ as the main feature is dependant on what information is displayed on pages. Perhaps an acronym like C.A.R.S – Content Aware Relational Suggestions.
This is a shot of the development of the UI and UX.
More images to follow. Read more…
The final major project has taken second place to the current collaborative project 0 Wallpaper but it is about time for an explanation of what it is about.
The theme is data organisation and navigation which has been focussed to digital media and so far has been limited to the online environment.
For the presentation today the media selected was images and portrayed as ‘the life of a photo’ and a side-by-side case study was conducted for Picasa, Flickr and Facebook with regard to uploading and editing.
Post-it notes show what features each site has so common themes could be established. This also allows for a contrast between them detailing the differences.
The feedback from the presentation suggested that the focus needed to be more broad and look at profiles of users of the systems such as a Flickr Pro user. This will refine what it is the project aims to look at.
The answer then is to profile a Flickr pro user and their ‘life of a photo’. What do they use Flickr? How do they use Flickr? This is the approach that needs to asserted before the project can enter fully into detailed analysis such as what was presented today.
There is a new blog in town!
For the collaborative major project this term, a new blog has been set up hosted by those kind people at Wordpress.com.
It will contain most of the information relating to the project progression.
http://0wallpaper.wordpress.com
