Apr
28
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.
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entry »
Apr
17
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:
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this entry »
Apr
12
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.
