If you're an Atlanta area (or even Macon / Augusta / Chattanooga area) developer and want to learn more about how a developer sees user experience design, make sure you come to the Atlanta Flex User Group meeting tomorrow. I will be giving my presentation:
It's guaranteed to make you laugh, cry, or angry. I'd like to say it's entertaining, but that's just a bit more shameless self-promotion than I'm willing to do (at this time). I think that this presentation is well suited to any type of developer (not just Flex) that wants to learn more about what exactly user experience design is. I've heard, even Sledge Hammer! might be making an appearance.
"We've become a culture of technicians. We're all into the how of it and nobody's stepping back and saying 'But Why?'." -- Joel Salatin, Farmer
Some of you may recognize this quote. It's from a farmer named Joel Salatin. He's featured prominently in the film, "Food, Inc.", which I had a chance to take in recently. While a high impact film unto itself, this quote really popped out and grabbed me. I realized that he wasn't just talking about industrialized food, but society as a whole. Being the developer I am, I internalized this and applied it to our field. We've been so consumed the last few years with the next great technology, essentially the "how", that we've really lost touch with, or just fail to ask, the "Why?" question.
We, as developers, get caught up in the race between the players in the RIA platform space. The truth is that the technology doesn't really matter. In most cases, a Flash Platform based application can tell the story just as well as a Silverlight based solution, or maybe even an AJAX solution. It doesn't matter. The technology is simply a tool that let's us answer the "How?" question. Without answering the "Why?" question though, the technology becomes irrelevant.
As developers, it's our livelihood to be able to quickly and easily answer the "How?" question. However, it's also our responsibility to also help answer the "Why?" question. If you can answer the "Why?" question, you can say that you truly understand your users and what they are trying to accomplish. If we don't listen to our users and their needs, then answering the "How?" question to the best of our abilities is a waste.
The design process is the phase where we ask the "Why?" question of our users. Developers are starting to pull their heads out of the sand and start getting involved in the design process. Developers are starting to gain access to the real motivations and needs of the users. When we start being able to answer the "Why?" questions, we add value to the answers we create for the "How?" questions.
Applying the answers to the "Why?" questions to every line of code you write is what will differentiate you from every other developer who is just as clever as you. Being able to empathize and connect with the user base is a skill that not all developers can cultivate. Cultivate it by engaging in the design process, ask your users why they want certain functionality and interactions. You may not always like the answers you get, but you will at least be engaged in the design process. An engaged developer is much more valuable to the process than someone who just churns code.
Ask "Why?", and bring those answers to your code. You'll have happier, more satisfied, users because they were engaged and their needs incorporated into design and development. Engaged users are users that come back, time and again, and validate the effort and value you bring to the process.
We're just over a week away from Flash Camp Phoenix and tickets are almost sold out. If you're interested in going, but have been on the fence, all the sessions are posted here.
In the past year, I've been witness to a dramatic shift in how we deliver solutions to our clients. I have to admit that the full impact of it has caught me a bit off-guard. It used to be that technology blazed the trail and design was something that was tacked on later in the process, almost an afterthought (pixie dust, if you will). The shift has been seen in that now design leads, and technology supports that design. It's the difference between night and day when you really stop and think about it. It's no less than a complete thought shift from how we, as a community have previously developed applications.
As we focus on the story that the client is trying to tell with their applications, this has to be this natural progression. The story at hand is best told by the right combination of art & science. It's not to say that technology becomes an afterthought. It's actually quite the opposite. If we are becoming addicted to sexy design and experiences, then technology is our enabler. Technology is the key player that empowers these nifty designs to be the engaging experiences that they are.
Innovation doesn't come purely from the technology being used. This statement is hard for a lot of developers to swallow, so let's think about it just a little bit and not just glaze over it. New interactions spur innovation. Cutting edge designs spur innovation. It's the place of the technology team to take up the challenge and make those interactions & design realities. What is needed is a design team that has an intimate relationship with the technology team. These teams have to know and trust each other so that they can continue to push the envelope of innovation together. Design and technology absolutely cannot and will not function in an "us vs. them" mentality. Together we innovate, divided, we imitate.
This is like any other relationship, it takes work. It takes communication that is open and honest. The technology team, absolutely, has to have some input into the design process. At the same time, however, the technology team has to have faith that the design team will deliver something that will challenge them to push their skills further. Open communication between the two teams throughout the design and development process will produce the most satisfying interpretation of the story that the client is trying to tell. It does take a team, a fully engaged, and communicating team to turn vision into reality.
A few months ago, I started a project to make a framework for ColdFusion to enable its functionality as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). I kept running into roadblocks in my mind as how to structure things, but I realized something. Everything I was trying to do to make ColdFusion an ESB was simply hindering tasks that were already easy to do. ColdFusion, out of the box, can function as an ESB.
It wasn't always this way, but over the years, with the addition of things like JMS gateways, .NET integration, HTTP, and FTP integration; it's easy to create workflows that receive data from an input, processes it, and sends it to another destination. ColdFusion 9 enables this even more so with the addition of Sharepoint integration.
Why worry about installing something like Mule? ColdFusion already does everything you need it to do out of the box. ESBs are the next generation in integration. ColdFusion just makes it easier and faster than traditional Java or .NET based solutions.
This past Friday, I gave a presentation, "UX For The Development-Minded" at RIA Unleashed. It went really well, but I have to admit, the audience got short-changed. I actually cut a lot of content out, about one third, because it was orginally written to be a longer form presnetation for 360|Flex. Well, I'm happy to say that you can see the entire presentation, unabridged, at 360|Flex San Jose in March of 2010 because I just got notice that I will be giving the full presentation. Let's call this version the "director's cut."
Brian put on a great event this past Friday at Bentley University. The attendance was more than most other conferences I've been to this year. I am wondering if these one-day events are the way that conferences should be trending. The content was great (amazing speaker lineup) and the location was great.
I gave an overview of some Experience Design concepts, from a developer's point-of-view. Here are the slides, but I really feel that without the rest of the preso experience, but here they are if you want them.
As many of you know, Universal Mind grew from the ashes of Macromedia Consulting. At the time, there was no talk of Web 2.0, Flex, or anything like that. We grew our business on ColdFusion. ColdFusion is in our DNA. It's always been a part of what we do, but lately I've heard rumblings from the community that Universal Mind has abandoned ColdFusion. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While people have been saying that Universal Mind has left ColdFusion behind, we have been quietly building up our ColdFusion talent with some of the strongest people in the community. Some are names you know, some are names you do not. Chris Scott, Dan Wilson, Laura Arguello, and Dan Skaggs are just a few of the great ColdFusion developers we have working with us.
Yes, we build RIAs. That includes Flex, AJAX, Silverlight, and the technologies that power them, including ColdFusion and Java. We've got some of the best Java talent around too, but that's a post for another day. This all means that we can build not only your RIA, but the complete solution from back to front. When it comes to building ColdFusion back-ends for your Flex application, nobody has more experience than Universal Mind.
So despite rumors to the contrary, our ColdFusion practice is very much alive and kicking. What do we build? Enterprise Class Rich Internet Applications, including those powered by ColdFusion. After all, ColdFusion is in our DNA.
We're just over a week away from Flash Camp Atlanta and tickets are almost sold out. If you're interested in going, but have been on the fence, all the sessions are posted here. There are cheap flights and hotels available still. Sign up today at www.flashcampatlanta.com and ensure your seat before they're all gone!
Time to digest another CFUnited. I didn't go last year because I was not too happy with the event after 2007. It had gotten too kitschy and too, for lack of a better term, silly. This year though, it seems things have turned around. I think we have to attribute that to the conference being under Stellr's guidance.
Overall, I'm very happy with how the flex tracks turned out. Great speakers, great content. The venue was good and it was a bit spread out, but that's how it is. The content in all the sessions was very strong. That's something that has been lacking in years past; the content was too rudimentary. This year, however, it's come back around. I think that competition from 360|Conferences and cf.Objective() has been taken to account and the content has been upped, in concequence.
The high point, for me, was the end of the demo mania when Doug McCune brought the house down. Now, note the irony here, one of the biggest names in the flex community brought the house down to close the show at CFUnited.
If you missed Doug's video (a mashup of the Adobe OSMF and FlexLingo), here it is:
Make Up Your Mind
Chemistry
Fire Escape
Threesome