Posted by John Sobol on March 28th, 2008 
1 Comment
Almost exactly a year ago we started working on a complete redesign of
www.canlearn.ca, Canada’s education portal. As an indicator of how high a priority is placed on this website by the Canadian government, over 7 million dollars was spent advertising it last year! (The second largest government campaign after Armed Forces recruiting.) Unfortunately, the subject of this campaign was - to put it mildly - an abomination of a website when we arrived on the scene. But we got busy with an in-depth audit, radically restructured architecture, and eventually a complete redesign - and now, many months later - presto! The site has just launched, and the client is thrilled. So, want an education? Go check it out…
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on February 13th, 2008 4 Comments
Always looking for the right candidate. 76design is looking for a full-time web developer with a minimum of 3 years professional experience to join our talented team. We need a smart and responsible individual who is ready to be a key contributor to several exciting new projects. Our ideal candidate is equally comfortable talking to computers and to people. He or she is proficient in multiple programming languages but is also deeply engaged with the social aspects of web culture.
Our ideal candidate knows what’s happening today and what’s coming down the pipe tomorrow, and can’t wait to get there. He or she is driven to achieve but is also comfortable working in a collaborative environment, and is bursting with ideas and skills, just like we are.
The core technical skills we need are expertise in:
Knowledge of one or more of the following is also necessary:
- ASP.net, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, SEO, podcasting, advanced web metrics
If you think you’ve got what it takes to join our team, tell us now! Email your CV and a cover letter to: jobs@76design.com
Posted by Steve Palmer on January 31st, 2008 No comments
9:00 AM - Opening keynote by Indi Young, a founding partner of Adaptive Path, talking about some ideas from her upcoming book Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior in a presentation called Innovation is Overrated. A good chunk of the presentation (and apparently because it’s a big part of her book) was dissecting these “mental models” that she’s created during her time as a consultant. These mental models are really, really neat because they bridge the gap between the kind of raw, dispersed data you get from a focus group or survey by helping you to organize things into logical groups based on users’ “mental states” and then pairing each of those states with some kind of action or strategy that can be taken to address any opportunities. If that’s just way too vague a description, a super simple example might be looking at the behaviours involved in going to a movie. The entire model would describe the process from start to finish but at some point while making the decision you would consider where the movie is playing (how far away the theatre is, if there’s parking, and maybe if are there restaurants close by). The logical response for somebody making a website for a theatre chain would be to provide maps of the local area with details about parking and food. That’s an ultra simple example that would represent just a tiny part of a complete mental model. Really interesting stuff to consider when organizing content for a site in a manner that is clear and intuitive. I’m sure Indi’s book will be a really useful reference. Ok, next session I’ll keep the blurb shorter… I promise.
10:45 AM - Cameron Adams presenting “The Future of Web-based Interfaces”. Admittedly a bit of a grandiose title, but it was a good presentation. The bulk of it being about the advent of all these different web-based devices that users are going to use to experience the web and how the interfaces should be adapting to each device and user as much as possible. That’s Cameron’s take on it, and it’s hard to argue with his point of view. Two approaches were examined: user-driven and developer-driven. User-driven interfaces take advantage of things like widgets, customizable content, and stylable pages. Yes, a lot of these techniques are already being used on many sites but as Cameron pointed out the execution usually falls short of providing a really seamless user experience. No doubt that this will improve with time. The second approach, developer-driven interfaces, employ “back-end” technology to provide users with a layout that is optimized for their device (by detecting screen resolution, for example) and one that has the capability to “learn” from a user’s behaviour to tailor the layout and content to their personal needs. Again, there are examples of this already in the wild but they’re half-implementations and mediocre at best. Next ones will be much briefer…
11:45 AM - “Information Visualization as a Medium” by Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen. Totally inspiring session where Eric showed off several projects he’s done built to present data in creative and innovative ways. If you don’t know who Stamen is, they’re the folks behind all of the visualization projects on Digg Labs. In addition to that work, Eric also demoed a few of the more noteworthy projects they’d worked on.
1:45 PM - Conference co-founders John Allsopp and Dave Shea tag-teamed a presentation looking at the proliferation of the web and how it will impact the work we as web designers and developers do. Today the average user can get onto the web from many devices other than a traditional computer and as a result they’re accessing it in totally different contexts with much different expectations. All of these require some attention to be paid to what the user expects to get out of their online experience — technology, while enabling these new experiences, also presents challenges to those of us who create the content as new limitations force us to re-think familiar practices: unsophisticated typography and very few system fonts, low screen resolution, and different user inputs that aren’t a mouse. While a lot of the onus is on the browser makers to develop some standards across devices, it’s also up to designers and developers to be mindful of our audience and consider tools like device-specific stylesheets to handle layouts that might not work well on non-desktop devices.
2:45 PM - Digg creative director and silverorange partner Daniel Burka walks the audience through some of the finer points of the evolution of Digg’s design over the last 3 years. Daniel did a great job of breaking down the little decisions that went into Digg’s original UI and how he’s improved since then with help from loads of feedback from the site’s loyal users. He also gave us a quick tour of the Pownce UI, sharing how it initially started out (with a name of Sencha) and was ultimately improved over a few iterations before it was launched. Really neat and helpful as a designer to see solutions to problems dissected in such detail.
4:15 PM - Matt Webb from Schulze & Webb gave the closing keynote… kind of a high-level commentary on the shortcomings of the web and how it could be improved in a very general sense. Matt was a good speaker with pretty creative slides but admittedly my brain was rather full of stuff at this point and I didn’t really soak in much of what he had to say.
All in all a good conference… nice to meet some new people and learn a few new tricks.
Posted by Steve Palmer on January 30th, 2008 No comments
After a really great day-long workshop on CSS by Andy Clarke on Monday, I’m sitting in the Hyatt in Vancouver today for day 1 of Web Directions North conference.
8:45 AM - Arrived at the Hyatt after a treacherous commute downtown. Vancouver has been absolutely crippled this week by about 10 cm of flaky “white stuff” (as one newspaper here called it) that has fallen from the sky and blanketed the city. Being from Ottawa, I told them it was called “snow” and that you can basically walk and drive right through it, but just go a bit slower than usual. Panic has caused a lot of people to do just the opposite and drive twice as fast as they do on dry roads.
9 AM - Opening keynote by the legendary Jeffrey Zeldman, who I’ve seen attending other conferences but never heard speak before. I’d been enjoying his dry and cynical sense of humour on Twitter for a few months already so I knew he’d be entertaining. He provided a nice recap of his decade-long efforts to champion web standards by bringing together the web developer community to influence the major browsers to get their sh*t together. ‘Twas a nice trip down memory lane to remember the time when CSS was in its infancy, font tags were rampant, Netscape 4 was the de facto browser and IE was the underdog. He touched on the IE8 controversy too, which I’m sure will come up a few more times over the next 2 days.
10:30 AM - One Starbucks house blend consumed and feeling more awake. Saw a talk by Josh Williams, the “serial entrepreneur” behind Firewheel Design, Blinksale and IconBuffet who shared his experiences maturing as a designer — from working at an agency to freelancing to building up his own small firm to building an application to completely abandoning client work and funding his own projects using the success of things like IconBuffet and Blinksale. As much as it was about his own career path, Josh offered some great advice that I think applies to all designers: find a niche, identify your natural aptitudes as a designer and seek out opportunities that fit with those aptitudes. Have a path planned out for your career, but know that “Happy Accidents” (as Josh described them) will inevitably de-rail your plan and send you in another direction. Embrace these transitions.
11:45 AM - Kimberly Elan’s presentation on the “Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography”. Kimberly, a professor at Ringling College in Sarasota, Florida, talked about typography on the web and how mis-using it can have disastrous results. She shared the “typography pledge” she requires her students to take — kind of a Hippocratic oath for designers — to not squish letters, to not stack letters, to properly hyphenate, to not outline type, and to not commit a few other blasphemous mistakes when dealing with type. Using a couple of examples of terrible sites she showed how respecting some basic typography and design rules can vastly improve the usability and clarity of a page. One nugget she shared when referring to successful sites like Pentagram and TED was the concept of designing in such a way that there is “repetition, rhythm and anticipation”. This makes for intuitive design.
12:45 PM - Lunch… mmmm — roast beef.
1:45 PM - Ottawa boy Jonathan Snook gave a presentation on Ajax frameworks. Jonathan is one smart guy that knows Javascript really well. If you’ve seen his blog, you know it’s a great resource of code tidbits and tips. To demonstrate his superior knowledge of JS, Jonathan gave a brief overview and comparison of some of the most popular frameworks: Prototype, jQuery, YUI, ExtJS (which I’d never seen… but is damn cool), Dojo and Mootools… to name a few.
2:45 PM - Continuing on the same thread that Kimberly introduced before lunch, Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering, tells us what makes a design “intuitive” (while pointing out that designs can’t be intuitive, but it’s the people that intuit something from a design). Using several great real-world examples where seemingly simple design choices can easily confuse users, Jared effectively demonstrated that “intuitiveness” only becomes an issue when users have to learn how to use your interface. To really make a design intuitive, it should effectively eliminate the gap between the user’s current knowledge (what they already know about whatever task they have to complete) and the required target knowledge (what they need to know to complete the task). Unfortunately I had to miss Brian Oberkirch’s presentation at the same time… awww nuts!
4:15 PM - Closing presentation from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker on getting the most out of Gmail. Little did I know, Gina put together the Better Gmail Firefox extension from the cream of the crop Gmail GreaseMonkey user scripts. I’ve been using Better Gmail for awhile but had no idea where it came from. For anybody using Firefox that has no idea what GreaseMonkey is… just go get it. Adds a lot of neat features and extra functionality to Gmail.
5:00 PM - End of day 1… back for day 2 tomorrow!
Posted by Dom Coballe on December 19th, 2007 3 Comments
If you’re anything like me, you have no memory when it comes to songs, artists and their lyrics. Those synapses just aren’t firing anymore. I ask myself about 3 times a day this question, “What’s was that tune, by those guys…”. Now I estimate those moments of self-inquiry will be reduced to a measly 2 or 3 times a week.
On November 8, a new site, a new service and a new best web buddy was launched. Songza, is billing itself as the ‘the music search engine and internet jukebox. It allows you to find songs, share them and create your own playlists. It has already climbed my personal charts of top 5 websites,
Beyond the service being really stupid cool, its interface is so basic that I was able to get my mom to search for her fav Vietnamese pop songs. Guess who just become favourite son number 1? Designed by Humanized, who have carved out a little nook for themselves in the User-Interface Design game. The UI is beyond friendly, is almost downright family.
After passing it around the office, a smart cookie deduced that it is stripping audio content from other online entities like Youtube. This would maneuver around those pesky legal hurdles nicely, and also explain why only a handful of songs show up as results for any specific search. If it ain’t already online, it won’t be on Songza. Makes sense don’t it? This will undoubtedly replace the exercise of people searching for Google results with their own name. Happy searching everybody!
Posted by Steve Palmer on December 7th, 2007 3 Comments
I just noticed today for the first time that when I got an email from Facebook to let me know I received a message it actually included the message itself instead of a cryptic link to go read it. I know this is something small, but it was such a pet peeve of mine that the notification emails always forced you to click a link to go back inside Facebook’s walled garden to see the content. It seemed like such an annoyance in the otherwise solid user experience Facebook provides.
On Facebook mobile (an app they developed themselves) I’ve always been able to get the actual message delivered to my phone so I’m glad they finally upgraded their emails to do the same.
