Posted: April 15th, 2009 | Author: msh | Filed under: Client Side, Strategy, The Craft | Tags: design, informationarchitecture, phases, uxd | No Comments »
It’s easy to think of a web site in terms of the teams who participate in the project: content, design, information architecture, hardware, platform, application development. But it’s the user who ties all the parts together: the user experience is the end-product of a web application.
This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 23rd, 2009 | Author: msh | Filed under: The Craft | Tags: drupal, prototyping | 1 Comment »
There is a vast matrix that exists in my mind (there are also other, emptier spaces of such magnitude that we dare not approach). The matrix maps functional requirements, content structures, and media assets against out-of-the-box Drupal functionality, popular and flexible modules, and theming methodologies.
This matrix exists in a Platonic form where all of the requirements and conditions map neatly to available functionality and structures. It’s only when I populate it with the real-world facts of a project that gaps emerge. Those gaps identify the responsibilities and data structures that we’ll need to delegate to our own modules. Once we group these by logical or functional affinity, we have our module strategy.
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Posted: January 7th, 2009 | Author: msh | Filed under: The Craft | Tags: bugs, design, flash, informationarchitecture, jquery | 2 Comments »
Update, April 2009: Change.gov seems to have changed their video player size, so the working example in this entry no longer has a strict correlation between the video player and the image replacement. The principle still holds, though, and it would be an easy fix to create a new replacement image using the naming conventions below. — msh
Happy 2009! OK, back to work.
Note to developers and designers: you still can’t layer HTML over Flash, and you still need to design around it. Sad, but true. For instance, this page on change.gov has the classic problem: a Flash video player at the top of the page, and a menu that draws a layer on rollover. The two are not friends.
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