New Site up and running

Posted by Dan Eastwell Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:08:00 GMT

I've been working with the New Concept team at Channel 4 to help develop their new 'programmes' section.

Though it's barely a namecheck, here's a reference to a dropdown I've made:

To make it easier to hop between programmes, we’ve added a drop-down menu to the top-right of any video player that lists the shows currently in the 30-day window. This drop-down will be familiar to those of you who used the previous version of the Catch-Up player.

I've taken the design for a dropdown that needs to behave as a select html element, and I believe it pretty-much does. Although purists might baulk at what essentially is list of links behaving like a select, it fits in with the design in a way that a styled or native select wouldn't have.

Hopefully the behaviour either with a mouse or a keyboard is intuitive enough to make users leap in.

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My tweets - a worldle of my twitter words

Posted by Dan Eastwell Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:10:00 GMT

Wordle: Tweets

Created via tweetstats via wordle

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IE8 Background colors on :hover on child elements not showing

Posted by Dan Eastwell Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:35:00 GMT

A quick test of IE8 shows a 'bug' ( It may be correct behaviour, it's not clear from the spec), where if you have two floated elements (e.g. an a, containing a span), the background colour for the child element will not show on the hover state, if the background-color for the normal state is not specified.

See this test case for an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
  "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>IE8 Test page</title>
    <style>
        body{ font-family:sans-serif;}
        a{
            background-color:#ffcc00;
            color:#000;
            padding-left:10px;
            text-decoration:none;
            float:left;
        }
        a span{
            float:left;
        }
        a:hover{
            color:#fff;
            text-decoration:underline;
        }
        a:hover span{
            background-color:#000;
        }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <a href="#">
        <span>Text</span>
    </a>
  </body>
</html>

Specifying the background-color on the span in this example will cause the a:hover span background-color to show. Setting it to transparent will not.

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Example CSS Style Guide - Unit Testing for CSS?

Posted by Dan Eastwell Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

A quick example of a CSS style guide - I've been reading about unit testing for jQuery and wonder if an analagous approach could be used on a CSS system.

Probably not, but a style guide featuring every type of box, unit, module and typographic style on the site can quickly allow you to not only see if any changes you make have knock-on or regression errors, but allow you to see what your styles imply.

An example style guide

What do I mean? Well, if you have a particular form style, a style guide should have all form elements shown, even if they appear nowhere on your site - eventually, they will.

If you have a module style, what will it look like at different widths, and in combination with other similar boxes (even if you're building a fluid layout)? A style guide will help you find out and troubleshoot.

I've written about CSS systems analysis, and am happy to find a kindred spirit in Natalie Downe in her article, which covers not only CSS systems analysis, but also the concept of css style guides in any documentation handover.

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Hash tags for the Interesting 2008 Conference

Posted by Dan Eastwell Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:12:00 GMT

http://www.hashtags.org/tag/interesting2008/

This is an aggregation of everything on the web tagged '#interesting2008', which was the conference I went to the other day.

Now *that's* web 2.0. You can keep your astroturfed social networks...

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Usability Testing is more than Testing

Posted by Dan Eastwell Wed, 21 May 2008 12:15:00 GMT

Simple usability testing as advocated by Jakob Nielsen with five users showed that user testing did not need to be an expensive procedure; products such as Morae allow 'usability labs' to be constructed from two laptops and a webcam.

This has made Usability Testing as practical and almost exclusively necessary part of the building of any interface (e.g. a simple website) or application (e.g. a website with any form of interaction)

Usability practitioners advocate testing throughout the design process, and not just as an afterthought once an application is built - this can be a simple procedure, with the most trying part being organising your five participants, but regular testing days can return rewards beyond optimising an interface for ease of use.

Get feedback

You can fairly quickly get feedback not only on how or whether your site works, but also on your users' general experience of similar sites, or real-world alternatives. How do your users normally find sign-up procedures? Are they worthwhile? Do they have trouble with so many passwords? Do they like newsletters? Are they familiar with RSS? And so on...

Incremental testing on rollouts

37 signals paved the way with progressive rollouts and testing constantly through this process allows you to fine tune your application. The danger of course is knee-jerk redesigns every time a user misses a button.

Get Evangelists

People will have volunteered for your user testing, especially if you've advertised through Craiglists or Gumtree, and you reimburse people for their time. Your test subjects will probably see this as something of a fun day out and should by the end of it be in a good mood. People love being asked their opinion, and enjoy being part of the process.

Regular testing will mean you have a constant stream of users who have not only seen your site, but have seen you and know you are keen to get things right. This will mean they're pretty likely to tell people about their fun day out and the nice people there. This can only be a good thing...

Contact with clients and creating superusers

In the same way a telephone call is better than an email, regular face-to-face meetings with your user base can lead to a positive reflection on your app/site.

Your users will be more forgiving of any future problems if they know that you're the kind of people who'll look into it, or probably are already.

Through showing people how your site works, possibly in much greater detail than they would find coming to it cold, you also get the equivalent of old school software 'training days', and a set of users who should end up knowing the workings of your site fairly well and, at best, are able to pass this knowledge on.

Regular testing, regular meetings

With all this in mind, it's probably worth conducting testing days even if you've got no significant changes to make to your site.

If you keep a database of past testees and those that you didn't have time for, you have the ability to keep in constant 'real-world' touch with your user-base.

User testing can be a very positive way of getting to know your end-users, and in a very focussed way - you have:

  • A database of possible testers
  • A database of people who know your site and can comment on future change
  • A set of site evangelists
  • Some possible future superusers

Your users:

  • Have a more positive view of your site and it's working
  • Become more likely to give you feedback normally
  • View you not just a faceless frustrationas, but as 'human'.

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Site interaction beyond the website

Posted by Dan Eastwell Fri, 16 May 2008 13:49:07 GMT

I can happily watch Vimeo videos such as the one illustrated below, within my feed reader, google reader

screenshot of vimeo interface within a feed reader

The great thing is, not only is can I watch the embedded flash movie, I also have the other site's interface within my reader, in that I can favourite the video. When I return to the vimeo site, my favourite has been added.

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User Centered Design Process

Posted by Dan Eastwell Tue, 13 May 2008 09:56:00 GMT

Here's a short presentation on User Centered Design with examples of user experience and information architecture I've worked on.

It's not definitive, but reflects the process I've used in the past - hopefully it might be of some use!

A roadmap of User Centered Design

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What is a Wireframe?

Posted by Dan Eastwell Sat, 10 May 2008 12:00:00 GMT

James: question for you

what is a wireframe?

Me: well, there, good question

a wireframe is essentially a prototype

it can take many forms

I will provide you with examples

sent at 2:55 pm on wednesday

A set of blueprints for a website made in excel will do for a wireframe

as will something jazzy like this prototype http://test2.danieleastwell.co.uk/scholastic/index.html

you will note the grey areas for unknown content etc and the fact it is mostly static.

however, you could do exactly the same thing with just layout css, rather than anything better

or you could do it all on paper

sent at 3:00 pm on wednesday

James: ah I see

so its a static html version of a dynamic site

Me: not necessarily

it could have no styling

or not be in html

James: so its quite a vague term then

Me: yeah, just like 'prototype'

it could be a set of visio or excel files

I like to prototype in html and css as I find it easy, but I find that I also need some design styleguides

the draw back to doing it that way is you get stuck in the 'how' and don't concentrate on the 'what it does'

I prefer paper.

it's a lot quicker and you don't mind making revisions

James: yeah I tend to plan stuff on paper

Me: you can also scan drawings in and plop them in html if you just need to change something on only one bit

sent at 3:06 pm on wednesday

Me: here's an example of a paper prototype

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppnRQD06ggY

actually, here's a much much better one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-A-9hGn0U

that's genius. you can tell exaclty what the application is going to do, without having to have it built

you could say they used simple video editing instead of html to wireframe it

I suppose also, though that that's a prototype - a wireframe is more formal and static and has details of what each part of the page contains and does

although some people call that a 'functional spec'

sent at 3:10 pm on wednesday

James: its some dude wandering around an office

ah I see

Me: are you watching the second one?

the 'ciao'?

you really get a feel for what the app will do.

James: yes

yeah pretty clever

Me: also, very simple. saves a lot of time in app development to get your protoypes right.

and in a very skewed way that vid is a 'wireframe' as it tells you 'what it does'

(not 'how it works' or 'what it will look like')

sent at 3:14 pm on wednesday

Me: I might put this chat on my blog. seems like a fairly useful bit of an introduction...

(to wireframing)

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"Something to blog about"

Posted by Dan Eastwell Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:53:00 GMT

being the modern world, anything that does go wrong automatically comes attached with the thought-bubble, "at least it's something to blog about."

from Flip-flop flyin'

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