Week 05

02-25-2015

Iteration
HTML and CSS

Introduction

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the first four weeks. Week five is about bringing it all together and building something great. I don't know if you realize it, but you have been working on Project One this whole time. This week you will put the finishing touches on your ToDo list and as a colleague of mine says, "make it pretty". You know all of the nuts and bolts and have a functioning ToDo list already, this week, make it look nice. You will demo your functioning ToDo list (i.e. Project One) to me on 03-04-2015 (whenever we have our 1:1 set).

Interaction Design: Iteration

I am not a car guy. However, this post about the Porsche 911 shows the value of something really important: iteration. Doing something over and over again until it’s perfect.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3426-the-porsche-911-an-ode-to-iteration

The value of iteration cannot be emphasized enough. In design, rarely is your first direction the right one. It’s annoying, but it’s important to iterate. To give you a sense of Artie's work and iteration, take a look at two process books Artie put together while working on his MFA. They outline his process for two projects. Note how much iteration went into each.

narrativeAndProcessBook_ApliaText.pdf

narrativeAndProcessBook_customCourseware.pdf

What do you do with feedback? Well, it’d be simple to go in one of two ways: accept it all or deny it all. This binary way of thinking is a common mistake for folks crafting digital products. Remember back to why you have personas, you can’t create something that makes everyone happy. That includes making making me happy. In the end, you need to take the feedback you’ve been given and filter it through your personas. Pushing back on feedback rather than blindly taking it all in is a sign of maturity in a designer. Would the items you’ve heard make sense to each of them? Would it help, hurt or is it neutral to your personas? Only the ones that are helpful should be considered.

A good way of processing this is to make a simple list. List all the feedback you’ve received. Go through it and rate 1-5 how helpful each item is to each persona. 1=hurtful, 3=neutral, 5=helpful. Write a note each to each item to justify your decision on that feedback. In a design agency, you’d bring this list with you to when you physically discuss the items with the stakeholder who requested the change. Rather than approach it as a “no” on things you don’t think should be done, you should approach this as an opportunity to dive deeper into what they’re asking. In my experience, when saying “no”, I discovered that the problem the person was trying to solve needed to be solved, I just didn’t like how they wanted me to solve it. I’d often go back to my office and think about alternative solutions then propose them back to the stakeholder. In many instances, the solution we arrive with was a great one that really improved things.

To drive this home, read chapter six from the Getting Real book.

Project One - Phase Three: HTML and CSS

It’s tempting to jump in and build an entire project from scratch. You may also feel overwhelmed by the idea of actually doing everything you said you wanted to do for this project. Instead, start small. Start simple and slowly build out.

Many developers want to start with the nerdery. They want to start putting together the database and the PHP and whatnot. In general, avoid this temptation. Instead, if you start with the user’s view first, you’ll often discover things that need tweaking. Once you’re done with the user facing stuff, you can dive into the database and whatnot.

So, start with plain-Jane HTML and CSS. Handwrite what you’ll imagine would come from a database. Have it all hardcoded into the HTML. Then, once you’re happy with the user’s view, start breaking it apart and build out the components that need PHP and MySQL.

We have kind of done this backwards. What gives?! You needed to learn how to do the database stuff and you already have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. So here's the deal, you can (re)start your project from scratch with HTML and CSS and use the database stuff that you learned (copy/paste from your .php files that you created so far) or you can tweak your existing code to make it look pretty. Ultimately you need a functioning ToDo list that looks nice and does what the user expects it to do (achieves the goal, whatever goal you want it to achieve). I'm really looking mostly for a useable system that doesn't make me say "yuk".

Note that Project One is due 03-04-2015. Schedule your time knowing that we will return to our usual set of videos next week as you wrap up the project.

Assignment

:-)