13 September, 2009
in Design.
E-commerce mavens (and benevolent employers) Snow Valley were lovely enough to send a couple of us along to dConstruct 09 down in Brighton last week. This was a good thing, as dConstruct was a quality conference with lots of food for thought.
Hopefully slides or videos of the talks will be put up soon. I’d particularly like to revisit the talks of Adam Greenfield, August De Los Reyes (from Microsoft’s Surface team) and Russell Davies (who I enjoy reading in Wired UK these days). Those presentations were especially entertaining and insightful.
The general theme was “designing for tomorrow”, and what really came through was the idea of taking what we have learned from building online experiences and applying those approaches and user behaviours to the physical world and the urban landscape. Or as Davies put it, going from representing the world on the web to representing the web in the world. I’m totally on that wavelength, and have been keen on the idea of doing creative projects of a more tangible, physical nature. It’s all about the “post-digital”.
Good to catch up with some web peeps and have a few drinkies too - good times. I’d put it up there with SxSW Interactive as far as interest and inspiraton goes, so definitely money well spent.
15 March, 2009
in Design.
Now that the dust has settled on the launch of TurnTubelist a bit, not to mention Mr Speaker’s awesome continual improvements, I thought I’d share some thoughts about a few possible next steps, at least as far as user experience goes. If you haven’t had a play, go there now.
None of these are set in stone, it’s more of a rough to-do list for improving TurnTubelist’s user interface:
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Improve playlist and playlist management
The playlist controls (loading, info, delete) that appear on hover are a bit weak. Going to rejig the interactions there, they’re just a bit finicky to use and not obvious enough at the moment.
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Simplify playlist publishing
The new publishing functionality is pretty cool, but the positioning needs tweaking.
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Increase video size
We want to do more stuff with video later, but at the moment, it’s not the focus. BUT that doesn’t mean we should necessarily limit the video players to such a small size. If at all possible, we want to make them larger so you can use TurnTubelist as a cool way to watch your favourite YouTube vids.
- Improve messaging
We want to improve the way message dialogues are presented when the app needs to tell the user something, such as an alert or error. There are still the odd Javascript alerts appearing too (…eek!)
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Make forms better (and bigger!)
Tiny forms aren’t generally a lot of fun, so we want to find a place to put forms in such a way that lets us make them bigger.
In general, we want to use the available viewport space more effectively. I’m planning to use funky overlays that use the whole viewport, rather than being constrained to small containers and such.
User feedback has been really helpful, and the ease of which users can submit feedback is also something I want to improve. Always interested to hear people’s thoughts, so feel free to leave us comments using the feedback form on TurnTubelist, or of course here.
24 January, 2009
in General and Blogging.
Not much happening here lately. Busy times (as usual) but also spending more time microblogging on Twitter. Took a while to figure out its usefulness, but after giving it a good go for a few months now I’m getting the gist of what it’s all about. Seeing as people always ask what the attraction is, I thought I’d share some thoughts on it:
Continue reading ‘Why Twitter?’
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