Category Archives: UX

articles with content relating to User Experience design, development, concepts and theories

Responsive Prototyping

Recently Axure Co Founder and Product Manager Victor Hsu, posted in the forums that version 7 is going to be delayed so that they can spend more time with new features for responsive prototyping. Unless the application is going to be a complete rewrite of ode and concepts I can’t see how this will ever work. I like many people driven by employers and clients to use Axure for create ‘wireframes’ have on several occasions made mobile and desktop versions of a prototype in Axure with limited degrees of success. The overal problem with a tool like Axure when it is put into the modern (although not that modern if you enjoy the rants of Jeremy Keith this week who reminded us that many people have always worked with fluid layouts, is that Axure is fixed width at its core.

When I first used Axure back in 2007, it gave my team and I an opportunity to reduce the time wasted writing detailed functional specifications and designing detailed screens for an application that already had a defined layout. It gave us the ability to focus on features and not to concern ourselves with the application chrome.

For us; a development team consisting of database/system admins, php developers, front-end developers and systems testers, it saved us huge amounts of time.

Providing we wrote detailed notes on widgets and pages, worked with variables and state changes with panels we were able to maintain a virtual copy of the live application in Axure that could be validated with the product owner, give the dev team the necessary information to write and build the new branch of the app and meant that our tester didn’t have to write as much for her test scripts because there was something to validate against.

And this is where I would like to leave Axure. It is a fantastic tool for prototyping applications. Semantics aside we all know there is a clear difference between what the general public may call a website, and an application. Websites are the things we lose hours on looking at cats and reading drivvel, applications are the things that you put something in and you get something out.

I don’t know what is going to be in Axure 7, but they have some competition on the horizon from the big boys namely Adobe.

This week I got to see the preview for Adobe Edge Reflow. Although Reflow is being promoted as a responsive web design tool, I see some major opportunities here for creating prototypes by the audience that Axure is aimed at – people are are not able to write code.

During the demonstration, Piotr Walczyszyn walked through creating a simple site layout; header, footer content blocks, using the graphical interface that allows you to drag divs across a column grid system which you can set up specifying number of grids, gutter size and what the total width wil be in percentages.

The interesting part of Reflow is when you start to look at what happens when you resize the canvas. Using some drag controls you can expand/contract the canvas until something starts to look rubbish and then add a breakpoint. From here you can adjust the elements on your layout repeating ad infinitum.

Just from the demo it is clear that you can visually put together acceptable site concepts. I do however have some gripes with Reflow.

During the demo, Piotr regularly switched between using pixels to set maximum sizes and percentages. For example, when setting a breakpoint for a background image after a certain width he set the max-width of the image using pixels, this was after the introduction explaining about flexible images as described ages ago by Richard Rutter.

Classic Adobe code bloat. Edge Reflow uses HTML5 Boilerplate at its foundation for your creations. A good start yes, but as with the majority of these starting frameworks it is known for having a lot of shit in it you’re unlikely to ever use. The example html file created during the demo saw all the tell tale signs of html generated by an Adobe product. Every single div on the page had a derogatory id tag. box1,box2,box3,box4,img1,img2,img3,img and so on and so on. if that wasn’t bad enough, every image was given the class image. Stating the bloody obvious?

All your CSS is added to a reflow.css file and is normalised with boilerplate – not that it can be making an huge wins because as with the html the reflow.css is huge and contains a great deal of repetition (it has to when #box1,#box2, #box99999999999 are most likely going to be identical.

Finally, and I am sure this is just going to be in beta…… the generated code only works in Chrome. in fact, they have even gone to the lengths of putting a disclaimer into your page code for you so that on body load if the browser is not Chrome, it will instead show an annoying text block:

Preview HTML generated by Reflow is meant to be viewed in Google Chrome and may not display correctly in other browsers.

Now I wonder why they’ve done that?

Even with all of this said, I don’t think you should discredit the possibilities for Adobe Edge Reflow which is now in the preview on Cloud and you can download it now. It could become a great tool for responsive site prototyping and quickly learning where issues in the layout are going to arise without the need for knowing the code behind it.

 

Digital Marketing & Web Analytics from Darren Ware

I worked with +Darren Ware for just over a year on some pretty chunky projects as well as some work for startups and small e-commerce teams. His Marketing and Analytics work is astounding, the information that he produces is deep. His insight into what was happening on existing websites acted as the right hand in any of the strategy and planning we put forward for redesigns helping us define the difference between what was fact and what was fluff.

Darren is now offering businesses of any size his services as a consultant to anyone in the South East of England including Kent, Sussex, London and Essex. His results really have been integral to the success of a number of organisations I have worked with on projects over the last year and he was even kind enough to help me set up some sensible analytics and goals for this blog and my main site byandyparker.com

For more on Darren’s servies, visit http://www.darrenware.com/digital-marketing-analytics-consulting/

Paperless Gig Technology is STILL practical

In a report on BBC Newsbeat this week, Amelia Butterly claims that “Paperless tickets could help combat touts but many venues still do not have the capabilities to support them, say independent music promoters.”

The argument from Anton Lockwood, Director of DHP Group which owns a number of UK venues including Rock City, and Rescue Rooms in Nottingham states that “It only works where the cost of introducing the system can be spread over high ticket prices.”

in the last year I have been to plenty of shows at larger venues the majority of which are using barcode scanning terminals for checking tickets on the door. I can imagine that these custom built handheld ticket readers are indeed expensive to implement  but that’s because these handhelds are being produced and manufactured by the large ticket companies namely, SEE, and TIcket Master. So who is to blame for this high cost to entry for paperless tickets, well to no surprise the companies who make money from printing physical tickets because they charge the client more for printing which has to be factored into the overheads for the promoter and thus ticket prices are higher. This is why I get so annoyed by these same companies because they have the balls to charge you extra for postage (it is not averaging £2.50 per ticket to be posted), and if you do pay for e-tickets when they’re available they find another means of increasing the cost of the ticket when of course in theory the overhead has reduced.

Well let’s just take a small (very small) step back here and think about that last claim. Is there a reduction in cost just because it is online? No not really, there still needs to be a system to produce your e-ticket, it still needs to be maintained, supported and tested. But Surely, a reliable system ensures a reduced risk of error and still should be considerably smaller. One of the positives for paperless billing and paperless tickets has been the fact that the cost of printing is passed onto the client.

There are several payment services and banks right now developing and testing alternative payment techonologies to reduce the cost of entry for small business to accept card payments and to do away with the card terminal. This is being met with huge success rates. How is it being done? By building web apps that are capable of running on any mobile device with a connection to the internet. What does that mean? It means whatever you have in your hand if you’re working on the door could be checking, those tickets and getting people into the venues, infront of the bands and having a great time.

In another section of the article a nameless Spokesperson from Ticketmaster said that paperless tickets are an artist led and it’s up to the musician and then cites Robbie Williams show at the O2. This is a great example of ignorance in the industry. If this clown from Ticketmaster honestly believes Robbie Williams himself has ever said to his manager ‘oh are we doing paper tickets this tour’ then Mr Ticketmaster Employee has no idea how the business works.

Yes there are exceptions. The holier than thou’s of the industry, the Radiohead’s and Trent Reznor’s who are trying to take control of what happens to fans at shows, but anyone who has read any of the reports from either camp will know the problems they faced in doing so, mainly by cutting out the Ticket Operator they were faced with disgruntled venues and also had to buy the tickets back and resell them, all to avoid touts. Trent Reznor on NIN Summer Tour 2009

But it is a double edged sword for venues and promoters. I know first hand how hard it is to sell out a show when you’re reliant on telephone bookings, and physical tickets being available in independent retail shops in your local area. The Forum in Tunbridge Wells celebrates 20 years of live music in 2013. From 1999-2002 I worked as a booker at the venue, we had good shows and bad shows like any other and were very much reliant then on a message board on the website to generate interest and ticket sales from the shops. We printed our own tickets, had 3 shops that you could buy from and would over subscribe our telephone reservations list (we couldn’t take payment by phone) because we would have an average drop off of 60% people not turning up. Every Friday and Saturday night was a gamble. We could never afford to use a service like SEE, Ticketmaster, or Wayahead back then because their rates would mean our average ticket price of £4/5 would have to double and we knew people wouldn’t pay that.

Now, the Forum uses MusicGlue, a service which has been created to do away with the big players in ticketing. These smaller services are what will change the face of paperless ticketing. As soon as they start to think about mobile application development seriously, venues around the country could be beeping you at the door.

If you could learn anything what would it be?

Last month, Jenn Lukas of Happy Cog presented at dConstruct. She conducted a bit of audience participation and asked everyone to tell the person to their left what they would learn if they could learn anything.

I attended with my colleagues at Lightmaker, Paul Swain and Andy Brough. It was quite interesting to hear their responses along with my own and wanted to share with you what those were.

Andy Parker = Backflip off a wall (something I have wanted to do since the first time I saw Bruce Lee do it when I was about 9)
Paul Swain = CSS
Andy Brough = Household electrical so he can rewire his new house.