Chiperoni ku Basel

Category: web

  • Content first

    Last Saturday I attended UX camp Switzerland. A very good event to learn about user experience, human-centered design, usability testing, MVP and prototyping tools.

    Talks I listened to:

    Stefanie Klekamp presented lots of background info on the Think Aloud usability testing method. Which I found useful. She explained the theories behind the method and also pointed to the research and shortcomings of the test. Shortcomings such as confirmation bias and evaluator effect. She briefly touched on Hawthorne effect, Rosenthal effect, primacy recency effect, hindsight bias. Practical tips for your next Think Aloud user test:

    1. Carry out a SWOT analysis of the website or app that you are testing beforehand.
    2. Take simple notes immediately.

    Overall conclusion: Think Aloud user tests are a good practical method to test websites and apps early and often.

    Next, I attended a talk by Tobias Günter called “Texter sind die besseren Designer” (in English: “Copywriters are the better designers”). His message was: We spend lots of time and resources on design and programming our web apps, but the content itself is often an afterthought. It’s reflected in the words we use: “Texte abfüllen”. Often there’s no content plan to begin with. Concept work is often based on “Lorem ipsum” dummy texts. If you consider the slogan “mobile first”, it should really be “content first”. Content is the reason people visit a website, or install an app in the first place. Often, content is not developed for mobile devices. Some copywriting guidelines to consider:

    • Keep it simple – only 1 thought per sentence
    • Add sub-headings
    • Add structure
    • Add some redundancy and repetitions
    • Add a focal point for images

    Some further tools mentioned to improve content development:

    1. Develop your content page as if there is no start page and no website hierarchy
    2. Develop your content as if there is no navigation, header, footer, sidebar
    3. Think of URLs as verbs
    4. Test your texts
    5. Develop your texts iteratively; continuously improve your content

    A good discussion followed. Every content page should be considered as being a landing page on its own. New developments include dynamic navigation entries depending on the content page I arrive at as a reader

    Some web agencies now carry out a content audit of existing and new content. I found a related presentation on Slideshare after the talk:

     

    Next, Samuel Frischknecht talked about minimum viable product (MVP) and presented some real-life client examples. He referred to a book called Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf. The lean process is

    1. Declare an assumption
    2. Create a MVP
    3. Run an experiment
    4. Collect feedback and carry out research

    The book looks interesting and maybe it will answer some of my open questions on Scrum and design.

     

    I attended more talks in the afternoon, but my ability to take notes decreased rapidly. I was tired.

    Conclusion:
    UXcamp was good. Many thanks to the organisers and sponsors. A good way to catch up on new developments and learn about a topic in one day.

    Disclaimer:
    All mistakes are my own. Please let me know if I got something really wrong. I’m here to learn. These notes help me to reflect and learn.

  • Scrum and Design

    At the day job, I am part of a Scrum development project. Within this context, I was searching for practical experience / best practices on how to manage the web design part of a web application.

    Before the project started, I asked some people for their advice and googled around. Just like the discussion at Stackoverflow on “How do you apply Scrum to the design part of web development?”, there seemed to be 2 streams of thought:

    1. Design screens as part of a sprint
    2. Design screens early on, ideally in the sprint before a function is developed

    After a couple of sprints (still in the newbie category), I recommend following the advice given in option 2: Start as early as possible working on your web app design and UI vision. Things like what kind of grid, what basic layout do you want to follow, and what the header and footer, as well as the basic navigation should look like. Design some of the main screens. At the same time, expect that interaction and design changes will occur.

    @persillie sent me this useful article. IMHO this is a very good quote on this topic:

    Resist the temptation to create the entire design upfront. The design should evolve based on the feedback you receive, and the details are created incrementally as part of the canvas grooming work.

  • Building websites with Jekyll, Github Pages

    This post has made me very curious. They use a different stack:

    Jekyll for page templates and static file generation
    HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
    GitHub Pages static HTTP server
    Supplemented with external APIs where necessary

    I guess, you can convert WordPress to static HTML. I found this description.

    Looking a little further, there’s this setup using Really Static.

    Why static HTML? HTML is secure and faster.

    Speed: Any web server, will serve html files a lot faster than PHP generated files.
    Security: If you are serving just static files, there is no way to hack your site.

    Here’s a thread on the same at Quora

    And using the WordPress static output plugin

    Nice to know I could offer a flat static HTML version of this site.

    I will have a longer look at Jekyll.

    BTW, one year ago I tweeted about something similar:

    Any experience? Opinions? Further resources to look at?