What she meant was that as a community product it was important that we didn’t lose the authenticity of the product in an effort to upgrade the look and feel. Usability was separate from shine. A creator or fan needed to feel like their “fingerprints” could be left on the site. That the site is different for their participation. Incrementing a view count, commenting to a creator, “liking” a video, leaving a response. All of these features were meant to increase the feeling of accessibility and engagement. Allow folks to feel “I WAS HERE AND I MATTER.”
.. I think often of Gaga’s words when using Snapchat (OMG that’s a weird statement to write). Not because Snapchat looks “shitty” but because of the purpose it serves in framing the user content. First, the relatively starkness of the UI (framing the screen, mostly white icons, little text) allows the content to be front and center — as both a creator and viewer. Disposability of the content plus ability to write on pictures, etc all leads to intentionally ‘less than perfect’ composition — no filters, no editing. My fingerprints feel all over the content.
Social Sharing buttons: Why isn’t there a free tier in Clever Cloud
Do you know that hosting is one of the nastiest business out there? Hardware, bandwidth suck up huge amounts of money and energy. But some hosting companies want to give it for free, forever. And people keep asking me “do you have a free plan?”
Stop Making Things Pretty And Start Designing
Print Design is Like a Symphony: structure, experience the same by everyone
Web Design is Like Jazz: basic structure but adapted, not experienced the same because you are designing for future content
Developers give feedback to the designers about what might work better
For Agile Development, You need to be able to:
- communicate
- collaborate
- iterate
Design a grey-framed-wireframe: interactive but not fully developed
There is a WordPress theme to generate style tiles: Create a Style Guide
Developer works on a White-theme prototype (no style)
xkcd : University Website
Ven Diagram: Things on the University Website vs Things People are Looking for