king talk

Flat hierarchies become more and more popular recently, especially in the realms of design and software development. One particular consequence of this appears to be an increase in discussions and exchange of opinions in many situations. While this approach has its upsides, it can also cost valuable work time as well as create tensions within a multidisciplinary team.

As for pirates, they’re a little like these multidisciplinary teams of professionals we enjoy to work in: Differing skills, sharing the will to achieve something and united by the fact that they act outside of common rule sets and will all be equally persecuted for being part of the pirate crew.

Now imagine what would happen if every pirate insisted on their very own opinion where to sail to, or what booty to chase, or only how much rum to be given today. Not much except for long hours of discussion. And the same can be observed with project teams in loose hierarchies.

While the unity and self-determination of the team is one of the essential principles e.g. of Scrum, which we’ve read about here recently, it also creates a problem. Democracy is noble and valid by valuing every single member of a group. But it’s got a weak spot and that’s quick decision processes. When everybody has the possibility to give their opinion, everybody will do so. A set of confident personalities, set up as self dependent democracy will produce elaborate results, but only for a few problems. Eventually some egos will be hurt as well.

In my experience, flat hierarchies are very motivational but lack a moderator to force decisions. This leader must not necessarily be defined as superior boss. He may be part of the team only his profession not being a cannoneer, UI designer or back-end developer but a moderator and decider. Arrrr.

Es ist wieder soweit. Die neue Januar/Februar-Ausgabe des WEAVE Magazin ist erhältlich. Dabei widme ich mich auf Seite 94 einem wichtigen Bestandteil eines jeden User Interfaces. Dem Text.

Was muss ich bei der Beschriftung von UI Elementen beachten? Welche Arten von Meldungen gibt es und wie formuliere ich diese so benutzerfreundlich wie möglich? Dazu habe ich zu Beginn ein kleines Experiment aufgestellt und alle textuellen Inhalte des WordPress-Backend entfernt. Stellt sich nun die Frage, wer kann das noch bedienen? Wie kann ich z.B. den Blogpost an einem gewissen Datum veröffentlichen? Fast unmöglich, ohne die Hilfe des Textes. Nur Umrisse der UI-Elemente und Icons können noch einen groben Anhaltspunkt liefern, sofern der Benutzer mit WordPress bereits vertraut ist.

Mehr zum Thema gibt es wie bereits erwähnt in der neuen WEAVE. Zum Artikel gibt es noch eine Linkliste mit relevanten Seiten zum Thema Text im UI sowie eine kompakte Checkliste, die jeder bei der Umsetzung eines User Interface Textes einmal durchgehen sollte.

Nachdem die Wände unseres Büros immer noch ein wenig kahl waren, haben wir uns vor Weihnachten daran gemacht sie mit selbst gestalteten Postern zu schmücken. Dazu haben wir unseren decoded-Generator abgewandelt, in unsere envis-Farben gerückt und fertig waren 3 Visualisierungen der bekannten “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Rede von Steve Jobs (Stanford University 2005).

Jedes Jahr finden im Herbst über 400 Kreative ihren Weg zur decoded conference nach München. Im Rahmen der Munich Creative Business Week wird nun von 08. – 10. Februar die Fachkonferenz decoded@mcbw in der BMW Welt München veranstaltet.

Unter dem Motto »Discover Interactive Opportunities« richten sich die Organisatoren dieses mal an Manager und Unternehmer, die über drei Tage hinweg exklusive Einblicke in digitale Trends der interaktiven Branche erhalten. In 15 Vorträgen stellen 17 Experten aus den Bereichen Design, Entwicklung, User Experience und Marketing ihre Projekte und Arbeitsweisen vor. Einen Überblick über das Programm gibt es hier.

Unter den Sprechern finden sich unter anderem namhafte Vertreter von Branchenführern wie Google, Adobe Systems, BMW, DATEV oder BurdaYukom (Sprecherübersicht). Das Ambiente der BMW Welt München liefert dabei einen würdigen Rahmen. Dabei wurde die Teilnehmeranzahl exklusiv auf 110 Besucher limitiert. Seien Sie dabei, wenn wir einen Blick auf neue Strategien und Trends werfen.

Programming is an important part of what we do as interaction designers. Be it for prototyping, experimenting or just simplifying things – it’s pretty useful to know your way around coding. And we live in the right time for this kind of development because the tools available are more accessible and more diverse then ever. To give you a little guidance, here’s a summary of the tools/languages we use.

Processing (Java)

Great for general purpose programming. Unobtrusive, fast, and almost endlessly extensible. It is our first choice if we want to quickly sketch something using code. If you’re not into coding already, processing is a great place to start.

OpenFrameworks (C++)

We use OpenFrameworks whenever there’s a lot of computation involved (image manipulation or tracking for example). It’s great especially for installations, because of its speed and its I/O capabilities.

Flash (ActionScript)

Yeah, some people still use this. While we don’t use Flash for web development, it is great as a prototyping tool for both interfaces and installations. The fact that there is a graphical editor included makes it easy to mock up things like transitions or basic interaction. It is also platform independent, so we can develop on a Mac and use it on a Windows computer (the kind of which are often used in installations).

But there is one more aspect for which we love Flash, and that is its handling of text. Both Processing and OpenFrameworks depend on open source libraries to render text. Unfortunately, those libraries are neither fast nor very high quality (probably mostly due to patent restrictions, but that doesn’t matter to the result). Flash has a pretty good and versatile text engine, so it is ideal for the job.

Webkit (HTML/CSS/Javascript)

The glorified new kid. Also a good (and really easy) way to mock up interfaces. One advantage of HTML is that quite often you can transition from prototype to product without rewriting everything. That makes things faster.

We especially love the webkit engine because it can be used everywhere (it’s the rendering engine of Chrome and Safari and is also used in most mobile browsers), has a pretty good feature set (say it with me: 3D Transforms) and also because it has little weird compatibility issues. That makes it great not only for the web, but also for prototyping and – sometimes – installations.

So, while there are other languages we use occasionally (Objective-C, Silverlight…), these are the four most important ones for our everyday work. I’m sure there’s other ways to approach this, but it worked really well for us so far.