Sep 05

Paper Prototyping vs. Balsamiq Mockups

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Our process of designing mockups directly influences the quality of our finished design. Great design isn’t just in pixels and colors, it is also in the interaction design. We can’t design graphically until we have designed and tested wireframes.

Paper Prototyping with Paper and Marker

My design tools are primitive. They include a stack of paper, a Sharpie marker, and a wastebasket. Sketching wireframes on paper is very fast. It takes only a few seconds, and the result is always disposable. Drawing and trashing concepts is the interaction designers way of brainstorming for ideas. Continue →

Aug 25

Review: Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework

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About 6 months ago a good friend of mine, Jason Gilmore, came to visit and brought along his new book Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework.  He’s the author of the already bestselling Beginning PHP and MySQL on the Apress label.

His new book doesn’t disappoint.  It’s an easy read and has easy to follow examples.  At around 300 pages, it’s easily digested.

The book is a great introduction to the Zend Framework and walks you through building simple database applications, Facebook applications, applications which integrate with web services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Maps and others.

You can buy the book from his website, or Amazon.com.

Apr 09

Simple user interfaces are not always easier to use

Earlier this week I spoke at the Cleveland Web Standards Association on the importance of thinking before building.   The talk included a walkthrough of my UX design procedure, and why I feel it is a superior way of designing for interaction.

I’m frequently asked how to make interfaces simpler, as if we all already have pristine, usable interfaces  buried inside of our current cluttered interfaces.  Removing elements from your interface makes them simpler and easier to understand… right?  Wrong.

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Feb 25

Ignite Cleveland 2009

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This coming weekend on February 28th, Josh Walsh will be speaking at Ignite Cleveland.   The event will be hosted at Lean Dog Software, a good friend of D-I who has their office on a barge overlooking a submarine… pretty cool venue.

What Is Ignite?

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Could you keep up? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.
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Feb 18

Photoshop Kung-Fu: Evenly spaced columns and rows

When mocking up a web design or creative of some kind I often find myself dividing areas into equal spaced rows or columns.   This is a simple task when dividing into 2 parts, since your guides snap to the center of a selected object.  Dividing into 3’s is a little more difficult.  Dividing into 4’s isn’t too bad since you can just divide by 2, then subsequently split the divisions by 2.  There’s got to be a better way, and alas… there is.

Note: This applies to Photoshop CS2.  There may be a more prominent way to do this in newer versions.

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Feb 17

Why You Should Outsource Usability Testing

Small companies  should consider outsourcing their usability testing instead of doing it in-house.  On the surface, it makes perfect sense to have a designer/developer who has a deep understanding of the project be in charge of usability testing, but in fact this can cause serious problems.

A developer will always look at the product you are testing from the inside out.  They have internalized the entire product and know it inside and out.  This has negative connotations on the evaluation of a test.

It may be appealing to delegate usability testing to a graphic designer on the project, but this also has issues.  Artists minds are naturally focuses on aesthetics and many usability problems arise from confusing visual elements.

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Jan 30

50 Tips To A User Friendly Website

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Here is a list of 50 things that I keep in mind on every website that I build.  Some of these are secrets I have acquired from the best designers in the world, and some of them are standard every day practices.  Either way, these tips will improve your visitors experience on your website.

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Jan 13

Goals for 2009

2009 is going to be an exciting year for D-I, and will largely build on the successes of 2008.

Last year we started our transition from a consulting company into a product company, culminating in the release of our flagship product Simpli5 in September.  We also launched a free web service for generating barcodes called Barcodes4.me.  Our development framework Sandstone continued to evolve and grow stronger.  We moved completely to GIT.

2009 brings a new product, an online university where you can signup as a teacher and get paid when students take your class.  Most importantly, 2009 will focus on getting more eyes looking at us and more hands on our products.

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Dec 08

How to build a Gantt Chart with the Google Charts API

The Google Charts API is an excellent way to add high quality charting to your web application.  We first started working with the API as part of the Simpli5 dashboard development, and were quite impressed with its functionality and ease of use.  Wrapper classes were developed and added to our Sandstone Application Framework to make the addition charts to Simpli5 and other applications as simple as possible.

An application we are developing for a client requires some graphic representation of progress along a timeline of multiple steps.  A Gantt Chart is the obvious best solution, but alas that is not a chart type available from the Google API.  However, a Gantt chart is really just a special type of bar chart, and bar charts are available in the API.  So the question was, how can we make the standard Google bar chart display as a Gantt?

The Google Charting API Developer’s Guide does an excellent job documenting the “how” side of things, so to avoid repeating a lot of stuff from there, we’ll just focus on the “what” of building a Gantt chart with Google.

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