10:56pm, Friday 23 July 2010

I love what Drupal can do, but I'll be the first to admit that it's not the easiest thing to use out of the box. I mean, I would be the first if other people hadn't admitted it before me. There's lots of great usability work being done for the upcoming Drupal 7, but that's not out yet.

One of the main issues is that the Drupal administration controls sprawl over multiple pages, and for a new user it can be rather daunting to be confronted with huge lists of things to do. Worse, you frequently have to wait for pages to load as you navigate the administration hierarchy, which is particularly off-putting if you aren't certain where you're going.

For Metamorphic sites, I've been developing an alternative approach to Drupal administration. Once users are logged in they get a fly-out menu with all their administrative controls, which allows them to select where they want to go without having to wait for any page refreshes. It's interesting how much smoother and easier this makes Drupal: you can browse around the menu to find what you're looking for without penalty. It's all built with common Drupal modules, and won't startle any other experienced Drupal developers, but often the right solution is to think hard about how to improve the tools you have.

10:33am, Tuesday 13 April 2010

I've talked with a few people recently about recent moves by Apple, and especially about the recent change to Apple's terms and conditions that blocks Adobe from compiling iPhone apps from Flash. Jason Snell has some excellent commentary at Macworld.

Apple doesn’t want apps that don’t feel like native iPhone apps on the iPhone. It doesn’t want Adobe to aid developers in creating a world where App X for iPhone and App X for Android are indistinguishable from one another. Apple doesn’t want to introduce new iPhone features and then watch as nobody takes advantage of them because Adobe hasn’t updated its development system yet. Or, worse, watches as Adobe refuses to adopt them because the other operating systems don’t support those features.

From a systems perspective, the iPhone is pretty straightforward. If you make a bullet-point list of features it doesn't seem that different from any of a number of other smartphones on the market. In fact, many pile on features that the iPhone doesn't have. On a feature-by-feature comparison, the iPhone shouldn't be dominating the market. But Apple isn't competing on quantity of features, they're shooting for quality of experience, and it's working for them. It's crucial to their business model that they never become a commodity hardware manufacturer.

But Adobe's approach would treat the iPhone as exactly that: one among a number of smartphones on which Flash can be deployed. If Adobe were successful at this, and a significant proportion of iPhone apps were cross-platform, they'd reduce the iPhone to a set of bullet-point features. Even worse, control of that list would rest with Adobe, not Apple. Apple's ability to provide a unique product would be undercut by Adobe's insistence that they support the same bunch of features everybody else does.

This isn't a theoretical situation for Apple – they've had these battles with Adobe on the Mac. Designers and other creative professionals are a significant proportion of Mac buyers, and many of them spend all their time working in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash. They're great programs, but they're also available for Windows, and Adobe doesn't have a great history of respecting Apple's user interface guidelines. When Apple introduces new ideas in Mac OS, they have to wait and see whether Adobe will support them or go their own way. The last thing they want is to give Adobe the kind of influence over the iPhone that they have over the Mac.

01:53pm, Friday 12 March 2010

Sometimes good design means accounting for people whose requirements are very different from your own. Sarah Dopp on web forms that don't make assumptions about gender.

The short version is that if you’re requiring users to select their gender from a drop-down menu that has two options in it, you’re alienating some people.

I think the SGOSelect form she links to is probably the best solution on offer. It defaults to a simple form for the 99% of users who have a simple answer to what gender they are, but also provides an advanced view for people who don't fit easily into traditional genders. The only thing I'd suggest is that the terms "Simple View" and "Advanced View" seem a little formal. How about "Traditional" and "It's more complicated than that".

It would be tempting to say that designing for a tiny fraction of users shouldn't be a priority, but I think this is an area where it pays off. Apart from the small number people who'll love you because you cared about something that's a constant annoyance for them, there will be a much larger group who don't need anything but the traditional options but will be impressed by your attention to detail.

03:43pm, Monday 15 February 2010
05:56pm, Tuesday 2 February 2010

Google says 1 March.

IE version six is a real pain for web developers. It was a fine browser in its time, but that time was almost a decade ago. In Internet Years thats... well, there have been several Ice Ages since then. However, about 20% of web users are still using it.

If you've got Google's clout, you can get away with requiring those 20% to upgrade. For the rest of us, 20% is a big enough chunk of our potential market that it's not so easy a decision to make. For my part, I'd love to stop supporting IE6, but I'm waiting for that 20% to fall below 5%. And it is falling. Partly because of big companies like Google drawing a line in the sand, and partly because WIndows 7 seems to be appealing enough to make many people upgrade from Windows XP (which came with IE6).

03:31pm, Saturday 16 January 2010

The Cobbler's children, as the saying goes, are unshod. Not because the Cobbler can't make shoes, but because he's busy making shoes for everyone else.

Likewise with my own web presence. I've been building websites professionally for clients for several years, but until now I haven't had a professional website: the web presence for Metamorphic has been hanging off my personal site at isaac.freeman.org.nz. And that site's running on the Wordpress content management system, which is a very fine content management system, but not the one I've been recommending to most of my clients. That's been bugging me, and I'm glad to put an end to it.

The Need for Feed... back

This site is running on Drupal version six, the same software I use for most of my clients' sites. As I use it day-to-day, I'll be taking careful note of what works for me and what doesn't, and I'll be making corresponding changes in the way I deploy Drupal for clients. I keep a full working Drupal site on my own hard drive as a master, and when I'm building a new site I start by taking a copy. I'll be updating the master site based on what I learn here, and the changes I make will flow on to clients as I build new sites.1

But this isn't the only kind of feedback I'm looking for. I'll also be looking for insights into the social process of designing and running a website. And in fact, this site changed my thinking on web design long before it was actually built.

The Plan is the Product

There's a fashion at the moment for "agile" development methods, where you don't make fixed plans, and you figure out the design as you go through discussion and experience. This style of design is fine where everybody is involved on a reasonably equal basis, and has time to be intimately involved in the process2, but it carries a considerable risk. It doesn't matter how agile you are if you're not sure what you're trying to achieve. I went down several blind alleys designing this site, and it was only when I pulled back and addressed some fundamental decisions that I was able to proceed.

These decisions were all about branding: I needed to clarify what I was selling, what kinds of clients I wanted, how I'd be different from other web design firms — all the fundamentals that so often get overlooked. This insight, and several fine lunches with Sam Strati at RedK, led to the Web Plan. I'd previously been treating specifications as necessary preparation before the main work of building a website. Now it's the central product Metamorphic provides: a coherent plan first, and a website only after that. And of course, once I'd clarified my brand, the website's design flowed naturally.

I'm looking forward to seeing what further insights come from running this site. And I'll be applying what I learn back to the sites I design and build for clients.

1This will, of course, not apply to clients who already have finished sites from Metamorphic. This is an area I'll need to think about. On one hand, one of the principles I'm maintaining for Metamorphic is that there's no lock-in: clients can run their own sites, and don't need updates from me. On the other hand, updates are cool, and often make sites easier to use. I'm considering offering an annual update service as a separate fixed-price package, but it'll need some thinking about.

2And in fact I'm using aspects of the agile approach right now with one of my clients. It happens to be a good fit for them because the nature of the site really does require them to be closely involved.

11:58am, Saturday 26 December 2009

This app will certainly come in handy if you've left your iPhone at home, but you have brought another, different iPhone. Or something.

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