Archive for category WDS09

Designing Social Interfaces

New Social Media is always Awkward!

5 principals of social interfaces:

  1. Find out what then users are doing then make that part of your infrustructure.
  2. Talk to the users like a person. There are people in the system so talk to them with respect.
    • never blame the user i error messages
    • refer to the user as ‘you’
    • Dont joke around! (They may not get it)
  3. Play well with others
    • Embrace open standards
    • Share data outside the bounds of your application
  4. Learn from games
    • Young people learn from games
    • Games are social
    • Use playful discovery
  5. Respect Ethical Dimension
    • Take responsibility when introducing people to each other
    • Dont spazm or decieve

Self:

* Give people a way to be identified
* Give them a page to call their own
* Enable user to build their reputation

Activities:

* Group people into Activity Groups
* Give people somethying to do in the real world
* Give people way to communicate with each other
* Give people ways to make new Acivities
* People need to share

Community:

* Users need a way to find and connect to eachother
* They will need a way to report abuse by other users
* Bridge to real life events

Big thanks to MediaJunkie for this presentation

http://mediajunkie.com/2009/designing-social-interfaces-at-web-directions-south-2009/

Buy the Book

http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/

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Designing for Corporate Clients

When Designing for corporate clients or managers, its good to see it from both points of views:

Clients:
* Clients think its ‘fun’ designing
* Clients adjust their approach on the capability of the designer
* Clients dont want designers that are too presious and attached

Designers:
* Try and resist educating the client
* You have to earn the clients trust
* Presenmt your designs incrementally, just to make sure your on track early
* Only show one design to the client when presenting, with a solid case why
* When presenting explain how the design fills the brief points first then desighn points later
* When given feedback and changes, try a figure out why they want the changes and try and do it in a better way

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Speed Matters

Guidlines for speeding up page delivery

* Profile the way your page loads to determine bottle necks, tools include,
** http://www.charlesproxy.com/
** http://getfirebug.com/

* Optimize all Images, smush (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/)

* Use Sprites

* Combine CSS into one file, same with JS.

* Move JS to the bottom of the page if you can.

* Use Expires Header, this minimises 304 requests, http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

*YUI compress JS & CSS, http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

* Split assets over other domains (max 3):
eg:  images.example.com (for images),  scripts.example.com (JS & CSS)

* Load the important page content first then lazy load additional assets last

Resourses:

http://stevesouders.com/

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