Tricklin

When I first found out that our company was going to switch over to the SCRUM agile development methodology, I was extremely skeptical. After being with the company for 5 years as a web designer, I had already been a part of two major application overhauls. Both of which took months and months to design. Now, we were planning on implementing a methodology that crammed a set of tasks to be done by a team of designers, developers, QA engineers, and analysts into 30 days worth of work. Since day one, I wasn't sure how we'd be able to incorporate design and usability into this type of process. There were a number of questions I had:

• How many days out of the 30 can be dedicated to design and usability testing?
• How can you possibly design a usable interface in such a short time frame?
• How can you execute usability tests in such a short time frame?
• How can you make modifications based on the UAT results in such a short time frame?

As you can see, a pattern was developing here: "How can (fill in the blank) be accomplished in such a short timeframe?" When I approached anyone with these questions, the responses were not good. The reason: usability design wasn't necessarily thought about when this methodology was created.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know, I know. I'll probably be crucified for even uttering the word "myspace" in here, but I wanted to write this to say that there is a way to make your myspace page look somewhat presentable, and I can prove it. Making it look presentable is not without it's complications and limitations, however, the ability to do so exists.

Let me first start by saying, that I in no way came up with the code necessary to do this. All the hard work was done by Mike Davidson of mikeindustries.com . Mr. Davidson actually took the time to figure out how to make the crappy back-end code of myspace work for you:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, passed away yesterday. My initial experience with Vonnegut was in high school, when I was forced to read 'Slaughter House Five' for a class called 'Novels Satire'. I must admit, that it wasn't until my second time reading the novel that I really fell in love with his writing style. Since then, I've read a large number of his works including: 'Slaughter House Five', 'Timequake', 'Breakfast of Champions', 'Mother Night', 'Cat's Cradle', and am currently enjoying 'Bluebeard'.

It's weird to think that there will be no more new books to read from him. So long Mr. Vonnegut. So it goes.