Jul
18
So, I've done it again. I've redesigned my site....
AGAIN. The last redesign was only 5 months ago, but I must admit
that design was just a stepping stone to this one. If you
recall, I wanted something less busy, as I thought the
previous design was starting to get a bit too crazy, and I
was adding stuff to it just for the sake of adding stuff to
it. With the last design, I got rid of all the unnecessary
garbage, and I must admit, I really liked it. I've
continued with that idea in this new design, but I've added
a bit more. The "more" in this case, however, was not added
for the sake of adding. I really thought it through, and
only added "more" cause I thought "more" was necessary.
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»
May
21
From start to finish,
this by far has been one of my most enjoyable projects. It
took a few drafts before I started to feel confident in my
design, when finally, it all came together. I must say, I'm
really pleased with the end result.
Working with Matt was a pleasure. He was very receptive
to my ideas from the very beginning. In our first meeting,
he came prepared, and gave me all his thoughts and ideas of
what the site should contain. Based on this information,
and the fact that this was a site for an attorney, I wanted
to convey a strong sense of professionalism, with a minimum
amount of images, and a sizable amount of textual content.
This was not at all a problem for Matt. He was able to come
up with some excellent quality content that made it easy to
incorporate into the final draft.
For this site, I used XHTML, CSS, Magpie RSS, sIFR (for all
headers), and a minimal amount of JavaScript and PHP.
Have a Look: www.mattalbrechtlaw.co
m
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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