Using video to communicate interaction?
October 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Late last night, I got a wild hair stuck in my brain. Those of you who have experienced the phenomenon of wild hairs know that they must be tamed before your brain will allow you to move on to anything else.
My wild hair was around using video to communicate interaction, and doing it on the cheap. Meaning: I didn’t want to have to go buy anything to try to make my little experimental dream a reality. So, running through a quick inventory of tools at my disposal, I settled on trying a combination of Visio and iMovie (I know, I’m mixing computing platforms like a crazy person) to see if I could rough something out.
(You’re probably wondering why Visio. Two reasons: 1) I <3 Visio. And 2) most of my work products were created in Visio, so I wouldn’t have to spend time creating something new, I could leverage existing artifacts for my experiment. The point after all was to do something for no cost…and time is money, my friends.)
So, I grabbed some past project work, dumbed down the UI a bit, got rid of the branding elements, and began my first foray into anything resembling motion work since the last time I fired up Macromedia Director in 1999. The result, while rough, is promising enough for me to want to spend some time experimenting and refining enough to throw this into my personal UX toolbox.
You can watch the video below. I’ll warn you up front that it’s a little jumpy, a little too fast in places, and the text can be hard to read. But I’m ok with that for a first effort that I didn’t spend much time fussing over.
Same girl. Same game. New place.
October 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
What is UX Clinic?
Well, first off, it’s my work blog–the place where I yammer, rant, and occasionally pontificate on all things UX. Be warned, I have a mouth on me. You will undoubtedly run across some language here. If you’re easily offended, I ain’t the UX gal for you.
I hope it will also become the home of a little project I’ve got brewing in the back of my head. I’ll be testing out that concept soon, and with any luck, the UX Clinic will be throwing open the doors to patients in need in the coming weeks. But more on that after it’s had a chance to percolate in my brain a bit more.
All of the content that’s here now used to live elsewhere. As a consequence, you’ll probably see some strange formatting and encounter some broken links. For that, I offer my sincerest apologies, but really…there’s only so many hours in a day, and a girl can’t spend all of them in front of her laptop (even if she really, really wants to). I’ll be cleaning things up as I have time. Your patience is very much appreciated. (See what I did there? I’m not asking for your patience, I’m just expecting it. I’m so demanding…)
Oh, Agile…
March 5th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Some random thoughts on Agile, from an IA perspective.
Before jumping into this post, I’ll say that I’ve now been involved in about seven projects that have attempted to employ an Agile development methodology. And I’ll also say that most of them have not been successful. These were projects with different groups, at several different companies, with different goals and different user audiences. So, yes, I have watched Agile fail time after time, in many contexts, and that certainly colors my views on it as a way to approach product design and development. (Hint: It’s probably just dandy for development, but it friggin’ blows for design.)
Recently, I was asked a question: Are Agile and IA at all compatible?
My answer:
Agile and IA are not really compatible, no. But that shouldn’t be surprising since Agile is a development methodology, not a design methodology. IA can be more compatible with Agile when you’re talking about software or applications. But when dealing with web sites, particularly sites that are mostly about content or marketing, they don’t really fit well together at all.
It can be made to work a little more easily when you’re adding onto an existing product, but if you’re starting from the ground up you can’t necessarily just build tiny pieces of something and hope you’ll be able to find a way to string them all together in a cohesive way later. You need some notion of what the greater picture is going to be, so you know what direction to shape things. That’s typically what an IA needs to be concerned with, but Agile is fundamentally opposed to that.
For it to have a hope of working at all, IA has to get in front in the Agile method. IA has to start first. You can’t fire the gun on your first sprint and expect IA or design to take off at the same time as dev. What ends up happening in that case is that the developers sit around waiting for IA and/or design to deliver something they can start working on.
Either you have to put IA (and design, to some extent) on its own track and start them well ahead of development, or you have to start your sprints with only IA activities and bring development on in later sprints. (Note: You can somewhat compensate for design lag by having a combo UI designer/developer, but finding a good one of those is *much* easier said than done. The same is not true for IA, because that’s a much more “big picture” discipline.)
