It was great to see the demo of the Atlas/Cappuccino tools by 280North. They appear to be an excellent platform for building rich, interactive, browser based interfaces using standard technologies. Definitely looks like a leap in the right direction when it comes to bringing the tooling for front end web development up on to a par with what developers of desktop applications are used to. We are now itching for an excuse to use Atlas and/or Cappuccino!

A number of session by presenters such as Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame and Chris Abad of the twitter game Spy Master covered various non-technical aspects of launching a new website/application – how to decide on features, marketing etc. As a developer, the overwhelming take home from this was to keep your system simple. Work out what your core feature set is, and focus on improving it. Make changes, see how they change things – keep those that work, remove those that don’t. Don’t be tempted to add other features. Evidence shows that adding features generally won’t get you new users, but improving your core functionality will. A consequence of this is that you need to be measuring key performance indicators to inform these decisions, but also listen to your users (far too few people do this), they know what they want most of the time, and its frequently not what you think they want.

Aza Raskin of Mozilla gave a presentation on how we will browse and use the web in the future. Much of this focused around the ubiquity project a demo of which can be downloaded and used today. It adds an extra pane to firefox that gives a new way to interact with the web – type commands, tell it what you want to do, rather than clicking buttons.

The command line was where computing started, and is still widely used – we look after all of our servers by typing things into black boxes! But for the average user, things have moved on, you get a nice interface, buttons to click, menus and so forth. Mozilla have questioned whether this is the best way – there are only so many buttons and menus you can fit on your screen and have the browser (or other application) remain usable – try installing a few firefox extensions and you’ll get the idea. Mozilla are proposing, via ubiquity, that a command driven interface may better serve our needs on the web in the future. But don’t worry, its not something you need to be a geek to do, its different from the command line of old, it uses normal english. For example, in the presentation, some chinese text was selected in a web page, and the command “translate this” was entered – the text was translated to english automatically. If you are interested in seeing more, you can download ubiquity via the link above and can also see video demos.

As a final note, the Guardian covered some of the ways they are embracing new technologies and the social web to augment their print offering they are trying to put themselves in a good position as people move away from printed media – much of which is groundbreaking and should be supported. A great example is http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk – which is a web application that allows users to assist in the review of documents relating to MP’s expenses claims, a task which would be unapproachably huge if not done in a collaborative way like this – there are nearly half a million pages!

The focus of the discussion was that us designers and developers have a terrible habit of hiding away what we’re doing until ready to present a final product to the client; which invariably doesn’t suit their needs, a much more successful and proven approach being that of a user-centric design process, getting the client and their users involved in the development of websites and applications. By getting involved with the client and their business/organisation we provide ourselves with a means of better understanding the aims and objectives of the client and what they want to achieve from working with us.

But is that enough we ask? whilst understand the needs of a client and having them involved in the various stages of a design process is paramount; equally important is understand the needs of the users; the people who are going to be using the website or application. Usability studies have been proven to have a large impact on the success of a design process, by testing designs on a selection of real prospective users it allows for us to see where there are flaws in applications and test various solutions of them.

Paul also mentioned how he is frequently having issues with clients reducing designers to mere ‘pixel pushers’. The solution? to focus on problems, not solutions, rather than telling the designer you want a text colour changed or something moved, tell them what you want to achieve; be that giving the design more room to breathe or simply to increase attention to specific areas of a web page, they may have a better way to do it; and by telling the designer the solution rather than the problem it’s suppressing and wasting their creative capabilities.

If you are looking for web design in bristol visit our website – www.wiredmedia.co.uk

CSS3 is a big topic at the moment with many designers liking what they see, but concluding that as long as IE6 and the like are supported by the manufacturers, it’s somewhat redundant for usage in commercial environments purely because only a small percentage of users ever being able to see the features. Elliot’s point of view however is to ask why this should this stop us? Little extras like text-shadow are so easy to add with a mere single line of CSS and act as a nice touch for the few that can see them; with no negative implications for legacy browser users.

Another example could be when selecting the last element in an element array, such as the last list item of an unordered list; legacy methods would involve perhaps writing a ‘last’ class into that element with the server-side language in use; but why bother when the new selectors can allow you to select this in such a more semantic and simple way? Yes this would mean legacy browser users wouldn’t see the difference; but what would that mean? an extra undesired border on the final element? probably, but does it make the system unusable? no; but it does speed up the web design process and mean we don’t have to throw unnecessary logic into the view of our MVC systems.

If you are looking for web design in bristol visit our website – www.wiredmedia.co.uk